As the week began, there was reporting about a “remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers being negotiated with Mexico. But the Trump Administration has not yet secured a formal agreement, and Mexico released a non-denial denial that the policy was in the works.
In Tijuana, Mexico is holding about 5,000 migrants, some from the caravan, in a tent city. On Sunday they rushed the border–some migrants said they were marching to the boarder to negotiate with US border agents. Mexican riot police pushed them back, and US agents fired tear gas canisters.
On Sunday Russian fighter jets fired on Ukrainian naval vessels.
Reporting this week tells us that the Trump Administration was too afraid of the political and legal blowback of suppressing or altering last week’s federal climate change report. Instead they released it on Black Friday to minimize public awareness. And they were not overly concerned with public awareness to begin with: “We don’t care. In our view, this is made-up hysteria anyway,” Said Steven J Milloy, a member of Trump’s EPA transition team.
Bolton said he has not listened to the audio of the Khashoggi murder.
Trump attended the G-20 Summit. He canceled his meeting with Putin. People speculate that he did so because of the Cohen plea deal and not for the stated reasons of Putin’s recent Ukraine aggression. At the G-20 Trump tried to declare a pause in the tariff war with China, and signed the new NAFTA deal, although Congress is suggesting they will not vote it into law.
Finally, George H.W. Bush died on Saturday.
In Russia News:
On Monday the Mueller team said that Manafort has lied repeatedly during his plea agreement, thus violating any obligations of leniency, and that he should be sentenced immediately.
The New York Times reports that Manfort’s lawyers shared information with Trump’s lawyers after Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller: “Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.” And this: “Though it was unclear how frequently [Kevin Downing ] spoke to Mr. Trump’s lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Mr. Trump’s legal team that Mr. Manafort had not implicated the president in any possible wrongdoing.” If this is true, it is very irregular, and likely means Manafort’s lawyers will have a hard time finding clients in the future because no one will trust their ability to negotiate a plea agreement.
Here is a good explainer of the implications of this: “It’s a blow to Mr. Mueller’s team, because their questions to Mr. Manafort — repeated to Mr. Trump’s lawyers — may be a road map to at least part of the special counsel investigation. … It’s a blow to Mr. Manafort, who will receive no sentencing credit for his brief cooperation. It’s a blow to Mr. Manafort’s lawyers; no federal prosecutor will ever trust them again. And it’s a blow to Mr. Trump, who has overplayed his hand, because Mr. Mueller may now be able to delve into the Trump lawyers’ conversations with Mr. Manafort’s lawyers.
They are consistent with only one conclusion: Mr. Manafort and his lawyers seek a presidential pardon, not a reduced sentence through sincere cooperation.”
NBC and CNN obtained documents from court filings about Jerome Corsi. There are emails between Corsi and Stone about the Wikileaks dumps of Clinton emails two months before those dumps began: “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote on Aug. 2, 2016, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, according to the draft court papers. “One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.” There was some talk even in conservative press about the fact that the Corsi/Assange/Stone nexus started the idea of talking about Clinton’s poor health, backed up by Wikileaks documents, and then Trump then started pushing that message on the stump.
In a surprise legal move, Cohen plead guilty to lies that Mueller accused him of on Thursday morning. He admitted to lying to Congress about pursuing the Trump Tower Moscow deal during the 2016 election with Kremlin agents (first reported in Buzzfeed in May 2018). He also admitted to lying about the fact that the Russians actually responded to him (when this aspect was earlier reported, there was media snark about how Cohen used a generic Russian government email he found on the internet, and that no one replied–the fact that Putin’s press secretary called Cohen back was not in the Buzzfeed article). He also admitted to lying about how much conversation there was in the Trump organization and campaign about Cohen and Trump traveling to Russia to discuss the deal.
Lawfare wants us to pause on the Cohen revelations and consider that “this is all utterly unacceptable. That a large swath of the public, and the legislative branch, has chosen to accept it does not make it more reasonable that a man seeking to be president of the United States would at the same time publicly cozy up to a foreign dictator and negotiate with his regime over a potential business opportunity—and then cover it all up.” But they also point out that “contemplating a significant real estate deal in the capital of a hostile foreign power, that in and of itself does not constitute criminal behavior.”
Also from Lawfare: “notwithstanding the omission of those few key details, the court documents released Thursday continue Mueller’s trend of using ‘speaking indictments.’ Although the document here is a criminal information, rather than an indictment, the filing is factually rich and tells a story in a fashion that seems designed to inform the public.”
This quote is the strongest condemnation Andrew McCarthy has bout the Cohen revelation: “Now, such a showing of collusion could be politically damaging. It might even be something on which the Democratic-controlled House could try to build an impeachment effort. But it is not a criminal conspiracy because it does not establish an agreement to commit a federal crime.” He is still arguing that Mueller will not find any actual crime on Trump’s part, and seems to be of a mind with Allan Dershowitz who says this week that Meuller is now “looking for political sin.”
On Friday morning Trump tweeted “Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail….Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!”
Later Friday morning a judge set a sentencing date for Manafort as March 5. Also the judge will “first be tasked with deciding whether Manafort did, in fact, breach his plea agreement with Mueller’s office. The government is due to submit papers about that allegation by Dec. 7, and Manafort’s lawyers will then propose a schedule for responding.” (Cohen’s sentencing is December 12, and Flynns is December 18.)
In Cohen’s sentencing memo his lawyers make the case to the judge for leniency. It makes the following point: “In the context of this raw, full-bore attack by the most powerful person in the United States, Michael, formerly a confidante and adviser to Mr. Trump, resolved to cooperate, and voluntarily
took the first steps toward doing so even before he was charged in this District.” It also makes a point of saying Cohen is fully cooperating “despite regular public reports referring to the President’s consideration of pardons and pre-pardons in the SCO’s investigation.”
While all of this is going on, there is no word about Whitaker’s role or whether he has recused himself yet. But on Friday The Washington Post reported that Whitaker was notified about the Cohen guilty plea beforehand.
The same Buzzfeed reporters who broke the Moscow Project story back in May report this week that Trump offered to gift Putin a $50 million penthouse in the top of the tower.
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Trump’s Job Approval: 42.4%