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| The Squeezer |
Robert Anderson, the assistant director of counterintelligence for Robert Mueller at the FBI from 2011 to 2013,
writes:
You’re going to see wire fraud. You’re going to see mail fraud. You’re going to see violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. You’re also going to see
other charges. Moving money around countries to avoid taxes and criminal prosecution are the kinds of violations we saw continuously while I was working counterintelligence and espionage investigations.
A lot of those crimes carry 20-year prison sentences or more for a single violation. Which is why so many people are going to flip and roll over and testify for Mueller. Hard-core criminals aren’t going to talk. You can tell them you’re going to put them in jail for 100 years, but they don’t care. Professional, hard-core spies are not going to talk, because the foreign country they work for is going to retaliate or potentially kill family members left behind in their country.
But when you talk about people who are used to spending nearly $1 million in three years on business suits out of a place in Cyprus, those guys are not going to do 25 years in jail. It doesn’t matter who they are going to roll over on, there’s no way Manafort is going to do 25 years in jail if he can avoid it. He can’t last.
I would be greatly surprised if Papadopoulos is the only person who’s been cooperating with Mueller. Knowing the way we worked all these other very sophisticated cases for him, he potentially has other informants. And when the people who may be cooperating with the investigation start consensually recording conversations, it’s all over.
That’s why Bob Mueller’s going about this in the way that he is. He knows these guys are not seasoned criminals. And he knows they’re going to roll over on each other. Mark my words, it will start becoming a race to the special counsel’s office.
-RW
Mueller better hurry up. Haman's gallows are calling his name.
ReplyDeleteNobody is going to get 20 years. The high end is always stated so as to scare people into ratting out others or to encourage a plea deal. But even those defendants who take their case to trial won't get anywhere near 20 years. The fact is, a federal sentence is determined by a series of points. The more points the defendant gets, the higher the sentence. There is no way that a first time offender in this situation is going to accumulate enough points to go away for 20 years.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like Mueller is just be coming his own FBI. What does any of this have to do with the supposed focus of the investigation: Trump collusion with the Russians before the election? Which we all know is a crock anyway.
ReplyDelete