Wednesday, Nov 19th
Last update09:25:02 AM GMT
Political Glance
Paul Manafort, the former chairman of President Donald Trump's campaign, was poised Friday to plead guilty to federal charges and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The deal enables Manafort, who was convicted of tax and bank fraud charges by a federal court jury in Virginia, to avoid a second trial in the District of Columbia.
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has reportedly reached a "tentative" plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller.
ABC News reported news of the tentative deal on Thursday, saying it is expected to be announced in court on Friday.
A pretrial conference is scheduled for Friday in federal court in Washington, D.C. On Thursday evening, Judge Amy Berman Jackson pushed the conference from 9:30 a.m. to 11 a.m. No explanation was given for the delay.
President Donald Trump on Monday attacked his Justice Department for indicting two Republican congressmen ahead of this fall's midterm elections, admonishing Attorney General Jeff Sessions for potentially robbing the GOP of "two easy wins" in November.
"Two long running, Obama era, investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions Justice Department," the president wrote on Twitter. "Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough time. Good job Jeff."
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team wants to review emails between Paul Manafort and one of his former lawyers — messages that would typically be protected by attorney-client privilege.
Manafort’s emails are a special case, Mueller’s team argued in a court motion Wednesday. Attorney-client privilege doesn’t apply when the client enlists a lawyer’s help to commit a crime — and that’s what Mueller’s team is arguing that Manafort did.
The first juror in Paul Manafort's trial to speak out says prosecutors almost got the 18 guilty verdicts they wanted. Paula Duncan told Fox News that one juror caused a mistrial on 10 of the charges against the president's former campaign chairman.
In her interview, Duncan said she voted to convict him because the evidence was "overwhelming." She described a taxing and emotional deliberation process and said the discussions brought some jurors to tears.
According to Duncan, she and her peers worked to convince the lone dissenting juror, but ultimately failed to prevent a split verdict Tuesday.
President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify competing congressional memos about the validity of the so-called Steele dossier means the FBI has lost its authority to rebuff Freedom of Information Act requests about the bureau’s efforts to verify the report’s intelligence linking Trump to Russia during the 2016 campaign, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta previously blessed the FBI’s decision to refuse such FOIA requests by declining to confirm whether any records exist about aspects of its handling of the hotly contested dossier, prepared by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The judge ruled in January that Trump’s tweets about the dossier did not require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to be more responsive to public records requests on the issue.
George said he never discussed the nude Polaroids, or the twisted, secret gifts he and the other kids had been given decades ago by the men who preyed on them. These weren’t the kinds of things you could share without feeling humiliated, especially if you grew up tough, like he did on the South Side of Pittsburgh.
But you can’t outrun your nightmares forever. So on Dec. 17 — a week before Roman Catholics around the world celebrated Christmas — George met with a Pennsylvania grand jury and told it about the Rev. George Zirwas, a friendly young priest who once took him to a rectory in Munhall, a borough about 25 minutes from downtown Pittsburgh, and introduced him to some friends: The Revs. Francis Pucci, Richard Zula, and Francis Luddy.
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