The Mueller Report Fallout Plays into President Trump's 2020 Campaign

THE FALLOUT FROM THE MUELLER REPORT CONTINUES AS PRESIDENT TRUMP GATHERS STEAM AHEAD OF 2020. • • • DID THE OBAMA FBI TRY TO SPY ON MIKE PENCE? Vice President Mike Pence is the latest name to drop out of the ongoing investigations and release of heretofore withheld information about the illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign. Vice President Pence said Friday that allegations that FBI officials tried to infiltrate the Trump Administration should be investigated. This information comes from Newsmax, which was quoting Axios. Newsmax wrote that : "Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Ron Johnson, chair of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, sent a letter to Attorney General William Barr on Thursday quoting text messages between two former FBI officials, former Special Agent Peter Strzok and former FBI Attorney Lisa Page, to help him took into the 'genesis and conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016.' " The Vice President told Axios : "I was deeply offended to learn that two disgraced FBI agents considered infiltrating our transition team by sending a counter intelligence agent to one of my very first intelligence briefings only 9 days after the election. This is an outrage and only underscores why we need to get to the bottom of how this investigation started in the first place." Some media reports, says Newsmax "linked the former FBI officials to Pence’s former chief of staff, Josh Pitcock, who has denied having contact with either Page or Strzok." Pence said : "The American people have a right to what happened and if these two agents broke the law and ignored long-standing DOJ policies, they must be held accountable." • • • PRESIDENT TRUMP SAYS THE US DID NOT PAY NORTH KOREA FOR OTTO WARMBIER. Conservative Newsroom reported on Friday that : "President Trump is making it very clear that he does not operate like Obama when it comes to dealing with foreign powers. In an early morning tweet, President Trump clarified over the claims of the fake media that 'No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier.' He further shared that he does not operate in the interests of terrorists as his predecessor, former President Barrack Obama, was known to do." The President tweeted : "No money was paid to North Korea for Otto Warmbier, not two Million Dollars, not anything else. This is not the Obama Administration that paid 1.8 Billion Dollars for four hostages, or gave five terrorist hostages plus, who soon went back to battle, for traitor Sgt. Bergdahl! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 26, 2019." • Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old US citizen and college student, was arrested in 2016 in North Korea for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. He was first sentenced to 15 years hard labor, but after 17 months, the US government negotiated his release in 2017. However, by the time of his release, Warmbier had entered a fatal coma and died within six days of being returned to the United States. Conservative Newsroom says : "Now the Washington Post and CNN are reporting that the North Korean government demanded $2 million in compensation for the medical treatment of Warmbier received up to his release." CNN and other mainstream media have reported that US Special Representative Joseph Yun was allegedly given permission to sign an agreement that the sum would be paid. • A more complete explanation was provided by the New York Post on Friday. NY Post Reporter Yaron Steinbuch wrote : "North Korea slapped the US with a $2 million bill for the hospital care of Otto Warmbier -- forcing an American official [Joseph Yun] to sign a pledge to fork over the money before being allowed to fly the comatose student back home from Pyongyang in 2017, according to a new report. The US envoy sent to retrieve the University of Virginia student from the rogue regime signed an agreement to pay the bill on instructions passed down from President Trump, two people familiar with the situation told the Washington Post on condition of anonymity. The invoice ended up at the Treasury Department, where it remained unpaid throughout 2017, the sources said. It was unclear whether Team Trump ultimately paid the bill or whether it came up in the run-up to the President’s two summits with Kim Jong-un. The White House declined to comment to the newspaper about the bill, which was not previously disclosed by US or North Korean officials. 'We do not comment on hostage negotiations, which is why they have been so successful during this administration,' White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote in an email to the New York Post." The NY Post states : "In March 2016, the 21-year-old fell into a coma for unknown reasons after being sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. He was released after 17 months. The Trump administration arranged Warmbier’s transfer out of North Korea, but he died about a week later after falling into a vegetative state. Pyongyang claimed he had fallen into a coma after contracting botulism and being given a sleeping pill -- but he reportedly was subjected to a severe beating. Doctors in the US said he had suffered severe brain damage, but they weren’t sure what led to it. Warmbier’s father, Fred, said he had never been told about the hospital bill, adding that it sounded like a 'ransom' for his son...News about Otto’s condition in North Korea sparked a frantic effort led by Joseph Yun, then the State Department’s point man on North Korea, to get the young man home. Yun and a physician flew on a medical evacuation plane to Pyongyang, where they were taken to the Friendship Hospital, which only treats foreigners, and found Warmbier lying unresponsive and with a feeding tube in his nose. Dr. Michael Flueckiger examined Warmbier, asked two local doctors about his care and then began talks to free him, the Washington Post reported. 'I didn’t realize what a negotiation it was going to be to secure his release,' said Flueckiger, medical director of Phoenix Air Group, an aviation company based in Cartersville, Georgia. North Korean officials asked Flueckiger to write a report about his findings. 'It was my impression that if I did not give them a document that I could sign off on, that would cause problems,' he told the paper, adding that it was 'evident' that Warmbier had received 'really good care' in the hospital. The doctors had done 'state-of-the-art resuscitation' to revive him after he suffered a catastrophic cardiovascular collapse, Flueckiger said. 'Would I have lied to get him out of there? Maybe I would have,' he said. 'But I didn’t have to answer that question.' But, Yun was placed in a tricky spot when the officials handed him the hefty bill -- insisting he sign an agreement to pay it before they would allow him to take Warmbier home, the sources told [the Washington Post]. Yun informed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who then called Trump, according to the Washington Post. They directed their envoy to sign the slip of paper agreeing that he would pay the $2 million, the two sources said. A State Department spokesman and Yun, who retired last year, declined to comment to the paper. Tillerson, the Treasury Department and North Korea’s New York-based envoy responsible for US affairs did not respond to requests for comment. After signing the documentation, Yun and Flueckiger returned Warmbier to his parents in Cincinnati, where he died six days later. They requested that an autopsy not be performed. The Warmbiers sued Pyongyang over their son’s death and requested $1.05 billion in punitive damages and about $46 million for the family’s suffering. In December, Judge Beryl A. Howell of the US District Court in the District of Columbia awarded them $501 million in damages -- money that they will likely never see. Howell said it was 'appropriate to punish and deter North Korea' for the 'torture, hostage taking and extrajudicial killing of Otto Warmbier.' Trump has said he believes Kim did not know about the student’s treatment. 'I don’t believe he would have allowed that to happen,' Trump said in Vietnam in February after his second summit with Kim. The President said he spoke to Kim about Warmbier’s death and that Kim 'feels badly about it.' 'He tells me he didn’t know about it, and I take him at his word,' Trump said at the time." • • • MUELLER REPORT INACCURACIES. BizPac Review quoted Daily Caller's Chuck Ross Thursday posting that : "A Georgian-American businessman is calling for a retraction of a footnote in the special counsel’s report that refers to a text message exchange with Michael Cohen about a rumored Trump sex tape. Giorgi Rtskhiladze’s lawyer sent a letter to the attorney general claiming that the Mueller report has 'glaring inaccuracies.' The report quoted a text message in which Rtskhiladze told Cohen he was 'stopping the flow' of tapes of Trump. But in a text message left out of Mueller’s report, Rtskhiladze suggested he did not believe the rumor. A Georgian-American businessman is accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of publishing 'glaring inaccuracies and misrepresentations' about rumors of alleged sex tapes of President Donald Trump during a visit to Moscow in 2013. In a letter sent to Attorney General William Barr on Tuesday, a lawyer for...Giorgi Rtskhiladze, called on the Justice Department to retract a footnote in Mueller’s report mentioning an October 30, 2016 text message exchange he had with attorney Michael Cohen about a rumored Trump tape. Rtskhiladze claims that the special counsel’s report inaccurately quotes his text message with Cohen. He says that additional text messages not quoted in the report show that he was doubtful about a rumor he had heard from an associate in Moscow about the existence of a tape. 'We strongly demand that a full and immediate retraction of these falsehoods should be issued forthwith to restore his good name,' wrote A. Scott Bolden, a lawyer for Rtskhiladze. The letter was first reported by Bloomberg News and obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation....Rtskhiladze told prosecutors during interviews in 2018 that he was told that the tapes were fake but that he did not communicate that to Cohen, according to Mueller’s report. Cohen told Mueller’s team in a September 12, 2018, interview that he notified Trump about the message from Rtskhiladze. Rtskhiladze claims that his additional texts with Cohen show that he had no direct knowledge of the tapes and that he saw them as mere rumor, rather than fact. Bolden also says that Rtskhiladze did not hear the rumor first-hand....Bolden says in the letter that Rtskhiladze was not present at the event in Moscow where the claim about the tape was allegedly made. Melanie Bonvicino, a spokeswoman for Rtskhiladze, told the Daily Caller that he has not been in Russia in more than a decade. She said that Rtskhiladze does not know who made the comment at the Moscow party, but that he heard about it from another person. Rtskhiladze identified the intermediary during interviews with Mueller’s team." • The footnote in the special counsel’s report is important because it "reignited speculation about the most salacious allegation contained in the infamous Steele Dossier. In the unverified report, author Christopher Steele alleged that the Kremlin had video of Trump with a group of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room during his visit there in November 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant. Trump has vehemently denied taking part in the activities described in the Dossier, and such a tape has never been produced. Steele’s alleged source for the claim has also come under intense scrutiny. People who were with Trump during his visit to Moscow have doubted the claims about the tape, saying that he only stayed one night in the Russian capital and was only alone for a few hours." • • • AG BARR TELLS DEMOCRATS HE MAY NOT APPEAR FOR A HEARING. TheHill wrote on Sunday that : "Attorney General William Barr has warned House Democrats that he might not appear as scheduled this week in front of the Judiciary Committee....Barr has told Democrats they need to change the proposed format for the hearing, CNN first reported Sunday, citing an unidentified source. In addition to five minutes of questioning for each member of the committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the committee, has proposed an additional round that would allow for each side to question Barr for 30 minutes, a source said. That round of questioning also would allow the committee counsels for both parties to question Barr. Nadler also has proposed having the committee enter a closed session to discuss redacted sections of special counsel Robert Mueller's report, the source added." • No wonder Barr has said he may not appear on Thursday. The rejected additional rounds of questioning, with counsel being able to question the Attorney General, is highly unusual. And, because the House Judiciary Committee is expected to grill Barr on the Mueller report, there will certainly be perjury traps lying in wait for AG Barr at the hands of Committee counsel. • • • TRUMP SAYS HE DIDN'T ORDER McGAHN TO FIRE MUELLER. TheHill reports that : "President Trump on Friday insisted that he did not order former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, despite McGahn's testimony to the contrary, explaining that he was aware of the potential consequences. 'I’m a student of history. I see what you get when you fire people, and it’s not good,' Trump told reporters as he departed the White House for a National Rifle Association (NRA) conference in Indianapolis. The President maintained he had the legal right to fire Mueller, but that he chose not to. 'I never told Don McGahn to fire Mueller,' he said. 'If I wanted to fire Mueller I would’ve done it myself. It’s very simple. I had the right to. And frankly, whether I did or [McGahn] did, we had the absolute right to fire Mueller.' " • McGahn, the former White House counsel, gave hours of interviews and provided contemporaneous notes, which produced some of the most damaging aspects of the special counsel's report on the Russia investigation. McGahn testified under penalty of law that Trump called him at home in June 2017 and directed him to tell Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Mueller “had conflicts of interest and must be removed,” according to the Mueller Report. The White House lawyer refused to carry out the order. The Mueller Report also says that when news of the President’s order was reported last year in the New York Times, Trump met with McGahn in the Oval Office and pressured him to deny it but McGahn refused to do so. This was one of the "10 episodes" the special counsel's office said it reviewed for possible obstruction of justice by President Trump. TheHill says : "McGahn has been at the center of a political firestorm in the aftermath of Mueller's report, and House Democrats have subpoenaed him for testimony. Trump has signaled he will stonewall Democratic requests and assert executive privilege to block McGahn from testifying. He told reporters on Wednesday that the White House is 'fighting all the subpoenas,' setting up a prolonged legal battle with congressional Democrats. The President has argued that his administration was sufficiently cooperative with Mueller's nearly two-year investigation, and that subsequent Democratic probes into his actions are overreach. 'This is a pure political witch hunt,' Trump said Friday. 'We did nothing wrong, and the only thing I did is make our country stronger...If I’m guilty of anything, it’s that I’ve been a great President and the Democrats don’t like it, which is a shame.' " • • • SOME OF THE COLLUSION WAS BETWEEN THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE AND UKRAINE. On Sunday, BlabberBuzz reported an InfoWars article titled "Ukraine Tapped By Obama Admin To Hurt Trump, Help Clinton And Protect Bidens Featured." First rate investigative reporter John Solomon wrote for TheHill : "In January, 2016, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to discuss several ongoing matters under the guise of coordinating 'anti-corruption efforts.' The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine’s top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama’s National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and Department of Justice (DOJ). The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants said it didn’t take long -- during the meetings and afterward -- to realize the Americans’ objectives included two politically hot investigations : one that touched Vice President Joe Biden’s family and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to then-candidate Trump....The Obama officials -- likely knowing that lobbyist Paul Manafort was about to join President Trump’s campaign soon (he joined that March), were interested in reviving a closed investigation into payments to US figures from Ukraine’s pro-Russia Party of Regions -- which both Paul Manafort and Tony Podesta did unregistered work for, according to former Ukrainian Embassy political officer Andrii Telizhenko....The 2014 investigation focused heavily on Manafort, whose firm was tied to Trump through his longtime partner and Trump advisor, Roger Stone. Agents interviewed Manafort in 2014 about whether he received undeclared payments from the party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and whether he engaged in improper foreign lobbying. The FBI shut down the case without charging Manafort. Telizhenko and other attendees of the January, 2016, meeting recall DOJ employees asking Ukrainian investigators from their National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) if they could locate new evidence about the Party of Regions’ payments to Americans. 'It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to US media during the 2016 election,' said Telizhenko -- which makes the January 2016 gathering in DC one of the earliest documented efforts to compile a case against Trump and those in his orbit." • Solomon says: “Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn’t remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed. But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the US election. Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the US-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump’s campaign chairman. 'Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the US media. It was extremely suspicious,' said Kholodnytskyy -- who specifically instructed NABU not to share the 'black ledger' with the media. 'I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort...For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial.' ” • Solomon states : "Manafort joined Trump’s campaign on March 29, 2016, and became campaign manager on May 19, 2016. The ledger’s existence leaked on May 29, 2016, while Manafort would be fired from the Trump campaign that August. NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told US media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August, 2016. A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU’s release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the US election. And a member of Ukraine’s parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign." • Rudy Giuliani tweeted on Saturday : "If the media continues to ignore the possible Ukrainian-DNC conspiracy in 2016 to find and create damaging information about Trump, Manafort and the Trump campaign, it will amount to corruption. For those of us still open to change, help us and cover it. You know it’s NEWS! — Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) April 27, 2019." • Solomon says that : "Kostiantyn Kulyk -- deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general’s international affairs office, said that Ukraine also had evidence of other Western figures receiving money from Yanukovych’s party -- such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig -- but the Americans weren’t interested.'They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else,' said Kulyk." • BUT, Solomon states that another case was raised in the January, 2016, meeting, involving the Bidens -- "specifically Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company which was under investigation at the time for improper foreign transfers of money. Burisma allegedly paid then-Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter more than $3 million in 2014-15, as both a board member and a consultant, according to bank records. According to Telizhenko, US officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine’s chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January, 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions." • Last Wednesday on Fox and Friends,Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said, “I ask you to keep your eye on Ukraine,” referring to collusion to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. InfoWars says : "DOJ documents support Telizhenko’s claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort case as the 2016 election ramped up -- including communications between Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele, as Solomon writes. Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous Dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ through her husband during the election. DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the 'black ledger' documents that led to Manafort’s prosecution. 'Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions’ Black Cashbox,' Nellie Ohr wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors Lisa Holty and Joseph Wheatley, attaching a news article on the announcement of NABU’s release of the documents. Politico reported previously that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted the Hillary Clinton campaign through a DNC contractor, while the Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges that it got requests from a DNC staffer to find dirt on Manafort (though it denies providing any improper assistance. As Solomon concludes : 'what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed inthe Mueller report.' ” • • • DEAR READERS, TheHill reported on Sunday about the massive Trump rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Saturday evening. President Trump warned his huge audience that Democrats would “take your guns away,” while opening the borders, legalizing late-term abortions and overseeing a government takeover of the healthcare industry, if they take power in Washington. • President Trump told the rally : “The Democratic Party has never been more outside the mainstream. Oh, do I look forward to running against them.” • If half the rotten apples on the Mueller tree fall to the ground before November 2020, even more Americans will vote for President Trump. His brand of truth-speaking for the American public and his never-ending defense of their rights as citizens is already garnering votes from groups the Democrat Party used to consider as their "private property." That is changing rapidly and the President will continue to add to his American Majority as the depth and breadth and upper reach of the Democrat Deep State cabal against President Trump and constitutional America become obvious. The President says "Oh, do I look forward to running against them,” and Americans say "Oh, do we look forward to voting for him.”