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Manafort pleads guilty, will co-operate with special counsel

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WASHINGTON — Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort agreed Friday to co-operate with the special counsel’s Russia investigation as he pleaded guilty to federal charges and avoided a second trial that could have exposed him to even greater punishment.

The deal gives special counsel Robert Mueller a key co-operator who led the Trump election effort for a crucial stretch during the 2016 presidential campaign. The result also ensures the investigation will extend far beyond the November congressional elections despite entreaties from the president’s lawyers that Mueller bring his probe to a close.

It is unclear what information Manafort is prepared to provide to investigators about President Donald Trump or that could aid Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. But the plea nonetheless makes Manafort the latest associate of Trump, a president known to place a premium on loyalty among subordinates, to admit guilt and co-operate with investigators in hopes of leniency.

In the past year, Mueller has secured pleas from a former national security adviser who lied to the FBI about discussing sanctions with a Russian ambassador, a campaign aide who broached the idea of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin; and another aide who was indicted alongside Manafort but ultimately turned on him. The president’s former personal lawyer has separately pleaded guilty in New York.

Friday’s deal, to charges tied to Ukrainian political consulting work but unrelated to the campaign, was struck just days before Manafort was to have stood trial for a second time.

He was convicted last month of eight financial crimes in a separate trial in Virginia and faces seven to 10 years in prison in that case. The two conspiracy counts he pleaded guilty to on Friday carry up to five years in prison, though Manafort’s sentence will ultimately depend on his co-operation.

He smiled broadly as he entered the courtroom Friday but gave terse and barely audible answers during questioning from the judge.

“He wanted to make sure that his family was able to remain safe and live a good life. He’s accepted responsibility. This is for conduct that dates back many years and everybody should remember that,” said attorney Kevin Downing.

The co-operation deal requires Manafort to provide whatever information the government asks of him, though it does not specify what if anything prosecutors hope to receive about Trump.

Given his direct involvement in the Trump campaign, including episodes being scrutinized by Mueller, Manafort could be positioned to provide key insight for investigators working to establish whether the campaign co-ordinated with Russia.

Manafort was among the participants, for instance, in a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians and the president’s oldest son and son-in-law that was arranged so the campaign could receive derogatory information about Democrat Hillary Clinton. A grand jury used by Mueller has heard testimony about the meeting.

He was also a close business associate of a man who U.S. intelligence believes has ties to Russian intelligence. And while he was working on the Trump campaign, emails show Manafort discussed providing private briefings for a wealthy Russian businessman close to Vladimir Putin.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders insisted that the Manafort case was unrelated to Trump.

“This had absolutely nothing to do with the president or his victorious 2016 presidential campaign. It is totally unrelated.”

Added Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani: “Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign.”

Under the terms of the deal, Manafort was allowed to plead guilty to just two conspiracy counts, though the crimes he admitted cover the same conduct alleged in an indictment last year. Manafort’s homes in New York City, in the Hamptons and in Virginia, as well as money from his bank accounts and life insurance policies may be seized by the government as part of the deal.

It’s unclear how the deal might affect any Manafort pursuit of a pardon from Trump. The president has signalled that he’s sympathetic to Manafort’s cause. In comments to Politico before the plea deal, Giuliani said a plea without a co-operation agreement wouldn’t foreclose the possibility of a pardon.

Manafort had aggressively fought the charges against him and taken shots at his co-defendant, Rick Gates, who cut a deal with prosecutors earlier this year that included a co-operation agreement.

At the time of Gates’ plea, Manafort issued a statement saying he “had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence.” And during his Virginia trial in August, Manafort’s lawyers spent considerable time painting Gates as a liar, embezzler, philanderer and turncoat who would say anything to get a lighter prison sentence.

Pleading guilty allows Manafort to avoid a trial that was expected to last at least three weeks and posed the potential of adding years to the time he is already facing under federal sentencing guidelines from his conviction in Virginia.

A jury in that earlier trial found Manafort guilty of eight counts of tax evasion, failing to report foreign bank accounts and bank fraud. Jurors deadlocked on 10 other counts.

In the current Washington case, prosecutors had been expected to lay out in detail Manafort’s political consulting and lobbying work on behalf of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-Russian Party of Regions.

Prosecutors say that Manafort directed a large scale lobbying operation in the U.S. for Ukrainian interests without registering with the Justice Department as required by the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act. Manafort was accused of concealing from the IRS tens of millions of dollars in proceeds from his Ukrainian patrons and conspiring to launder that money through offshore accounts in Cyprus and elsewhere.

Manafort had denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty. After his indictment last October, prosecutors say he continued to commit crimes by tampering with witnesses.

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Online: Read the charges against Manafort: http://apne.ws/M1oQRia

Eric Tucker, Chad Day And Michael Balsamo, The Associated Press








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Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis calls out Liberals for not supporting anti-church burning bill

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Speaking about the ‘hundreds of churches’ that have been ‘set on fire across Canada’ in the last number of years, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis questioned why the Liberals seem completely unconcerned.

One of Canada’s most prominent pro-life MPs has called out the Trudeau government for its apparent lack of support for an anti-arson bill which aims to curb the rash of church burnings plaguing Christians in the country.

In an X post Monday, Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis pointed out that under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, church burnings have shot up “100 percent,” and that the government does not seem to have expressed any “concern” at all.

“In the last several years, hundreds of churches and other places of worship have been set on fire across Canada. Under this Liberal government, these crimes have increased by over 100%,” wrote Lewis on X.  

“Where is the concern or action from the Liberals regarding these attacks on Christian churches?” 

Lewis’s post included a link to another X post from Conservative MP Marc Dalton, who posted a video on October 31 highlighting the recent rash of church burnings and how his bill, C-411, aims to stop this.  

“Thank you @MarcDalton for bringing forward Bill C-411, the Anti-Arson Act, an important bill to protect places of worship and increase penalties on those who would target them,” wrote Lewis. 

Bill C-411, or, An Act to amend the Criminal Code (arson — wildfires and places of worship),  was introduced by Dalton in June. 

The law, if passed, would create specific criminal offenses for setting fires to churches and for starting wildfires.

Dalton said in his video that there is a “serious problem in Canada that must be addressed” concerning Catholic and Christian churches being the target of arson. 

He highlighted how since 2010, 592 churches have been the target of arson in Canada, with a large portion of these being concentrated to the last few years.  

Dalton noted how Canada’s Criminal Code, as it stands, does not include specific protections against arson directed at religious institutions. C-411 aims to “change that,” said Dalton, noting that the bill would implement a minimum sentence of five years in jail for a first offense of this kind, and seven years for a repeat offense.

“This bill strengthens our criminal code and punishes these hateful arson attacks,” he said. 

“Commonsense Conservatives stand for strict punishments against criminals who target places of worship.” 

Since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, have beenburned to the ground, vandalized or defiled in Canada. 

The church burnings started in earnest after the mainstream media and the federal government ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the now-closed residential schools in Canada, particularly a school in Kamloops, British Columbia.

The anti-Catholic narrative that developed following these claims continues to this day, despite the fact that no bodies have actually been discovered.

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Firm tied to voter registration ‘scheme’ goes dark

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From left, Lancaster County Commissioner Alice Yoder, Lancaster County District Attorney Heather Adams, Commissioners Ray D’Agostino and Josh Parsons. The officials held a press conference on Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, to discuss voter registration fraud detected in the county.

From The Center Square

By 

Everybody Votes runs an office in Lancaster County, where election workers recently found suspicious registration forms among a batch of 2,500 applications delivered last week. Investigators there said at least 60% of those reviewed were fraudulent.

The media and consulting firm linked to fraudulent voter registration forms in Pennsylvania earlier this week has gone dark as of Saturday.

Field and Media Corps – the website and social media accounts of which are now defunct – is an Arizona-based company that contracts with Everybody Votes to run a canvassing operation in Pennsylvania and other states that target low-income minority residents unregistered to vote.

The Monroe County District Attorney’s Office confirmed Wednesday that 30 registration forms contained fraudulent information, including an application submitted on behalf of a dead resident.

Everybody Votes runs an office in Lancaster County, where election workers recently found suspicious registration forms among a batch of 2,500 applications delivered last week. Investigators there said at least 60% of those reviewed were fraudulent. So far, the campaign has not been tied directly to the investigation.

Not so in nearby York County, where law enforcement continues reviewing another delivery from the operation leading up to the Oct. 22 deadline to register.

On Wednesday, the America First Policy Institute, a conservative-leaning research nonprofit,  demanded a federal investigation into the company.

“Where there’s fire, there’s fire,” said Hogan Gidley, vice chairman of the institute’s Center for Election Integrity. “Thousands of instances of reported voter registration fraud have now been confirmed throughout Pennsylvania.”

He described Field and Media Corps, established in 2017, as a “high-powered left-wing organization” that may have launched similar “schemes” across the country that require state-level investigations.

“Submitting fraudulent registrations right at the voter deadline to overwhelm election officials is exactly the kind of scheme that the Department of Justice should be using their force and resources to stop,” he said.

Evidence also exists that Everybody Votes is linked to a left-wing super political action committee intent on expanding registration numbers for Democrats in battleground states.

According to public tax records shared with The Center Square, The Voter Registration Project, also known as Everybody Votes, describes itself as a public charity that helps low-income minority citizens register to vote and provides technical assistance to voter registration drives.

The organization reported $45.8 million in total revenues in 2022, a “substantial portion of which comes from a governmental unit or the general public.”

A 2023 report from Capital Research Center, a conservative nonprofit, says left-wing donors together raised $190 million for the campaign to register 5.1 million voters across the country – all in violation of federal law that bars 501(c)(3) from engaging in such activity.

The strategy, detailed in a 2019 leaked memo from Mind the Gap, the liberal super PAC in question, entices investors by promising a more cost-effective strategy to boost vote counts for Democrats – namely through voter registration drives.

The group pointed to its direct role in flipping the U.S. House blue in 2018 as “proof of concept.”

Detailed further in the report are signed tax forms from donors that link their grants to the Voter Registration Project in direct support of Mind the Gap. The Capital Research Center estimates President Joe Biden collected between 1 million and 2.7 million swing state votes in the 2020 election as a result.

Biden defeated then-incumbent President Donald Trump 306-232 in electoral college votes; the popular vote was Biden 81.2 million to 74.2 million.

Francisco Heredia, who runs Field and Media Corps, told Votebeat earlier this week he’d not heard from county officials in Pennsylvania, but would cooperate with the investigation. He said the company trains workers how to legally complete registration forms and has no tolerance for fraud.

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