Though it is a virtual given that Gates will sell out his business partner and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, less understood is the direct threat Gates could pose to President Donald Trump.
While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower.
“He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.
Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency.
Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.
“Let’s be honest, Don Jr. is not ratting out his dad. Gates is different,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who served as a senior counsel to Whitewater independent counsel Ken Starr.
Yeah, while we are all distracted by the Stormy Daniels' three ring circus, the truly damaging evidence to the Trump presidency might be filling the notebooks of Mueller's investigators as we speak.
As for Paul Manafort well he is still trying to get the case against him dismissed.
Courtesy of Axios:
Paul Manafort's legal team has filed a motion to dismiss the indictment, filed in Virginia, brought against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which includes three charges for tax fraud from 2010 to 2014, failing to file reports from his foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud related to various property loans in the U.S.
This follows a nearly identical motion to dismiss his team filed on March 14, which dealt with the charges brought against him in D.C.
Manafort's legal team argues that the charges do not “arise directly from” the Special Counsel’s investigation. His team argues that they cover things Manafort disclosed to the DOJ himself in 2014. They also write that Mueller's team acted outside of its authority, “without the discipline of limits on the public resources they consume," according to the document.
This will likely be just as unsuccessful as the last one, but it shows that Paul Manafort has a lot to hide and that he is desperate to keep it hidden from Mueller's team.
There is a lot of speculation as to what Manafort is guarding to aggressively, but there might have been a hint revealed just recently.
Well now, isn't THAT interesting?This new Mueller filing says Trump’s campaign chair *and* deputy campaign manager *knew* their associate was a former Russian intelligence officer. As they say in court, Um. https://t.co/oPyGU1Fnl7— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) March 28, 2018
Source https://ift.tt/2IeQHqG
