President Donald Trump’s name does not appear one time in his former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s indictment records released Monday.Manafort and his business associate, Rick Gates, were indicted in a federal court on 12 counts, including conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy against the United States, and making false and misleading statements.The indictment related to the core of Mueller’s Russia probe, which began in May when the former FBI director was appointed special counsel, does not mention Trump’s name once. Mueller was appointed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to investigate Russian interference in the U.S. election, as well as any related issues, including possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.Manafort turned himself in to the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., Monday morning.
FORT BRAGG, N.C. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s scathing criticism of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will not prevent the soldier from receiving a fair sentence for endangering comrades by walking off his post in Afghanistan in 2009, a judge ruled Monday.Also Monday, emotional testimony was expected from the wife of a seriously wounded soldier.Prosecutors said they intend to call Shannon Allen to the stand to discuss a traumatic brain injury suffered by her husband when he was shot during a search mission for Bergdahl.
Congressional Republicans on Sunday called for Democrats John Podesta and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz to provide further answers about their party paying for a dossier on President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, after telling Senate investigators last month that they had no knowledge of such payments.Wasserman Schultz is the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Podesta was the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Both groups purportedly paid millions for research that led to the dossier, The Washington Post reported last week.South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, suggested on “Fox News Sunday” that the DNC paying a law firm for so-called opposition research connected to the dossier was tantamount to money laundering.
During Friday’s episode of the ABC daytime talk show “The View,” a name was censored in a way that was far more offensive than if it had been allowed to be said.The hosts were discussing a British study that showed that many of the U.K.’s Christian citizens wanted to ignore four of The Ten Commandments, when co-host Paula Faris, a Christian, explained how things were in her house when she was a kid.“My parents were really strict about what we said in the home. We couldn’t say “Oh my God,” we couldn’t say “JC,” we couldn’t say “(Jesus),” she explained. But the show censored Jesus’s name from the broadcast.
A past campaign donor to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D.) testified Thursday that he and his businessmen friends were major players in political corruption.Jona Rechnitz testified he and his partners paid off the Mayor’s Office and New York City Police Department using pay-to-play tactics, the New York Post reported.Rechnitz and Borough Park businessman Jeremy Reichberg initially targeted the NYPD in their pay-to-play scheme, doling out gifts and cash to cops in return for favors, but soon turned their attention to City Hall.“We had the police going for us–now it was time to get into politics,” Rechnitz said.Rechnitz said he told a de Blasio’s fundraiser, Ross Offinger, that “we’re going to become significant contributors, but we want access,” after de Blasio clinched the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2013.
A Richland County man granted clemency by President Barack Obama’s initiative to commute drug sentences for non-violent offenders was arrested and charged once againDaron Benjamin Swygert, 43, was booked back on July 24, 2017 and charged with trafficking crack cocaine (3rd offense).
Swygert was arrested following a 6-month investigation based off a tip received from an anonymous source to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department.According to a sheriff’s department incident report, Swygert was spotted near Sunset Drive after several warrants were issued for his arrest.Swygert was pulled over, the report said, but deputies noticed his pants were unzipped. The report said at that point, the deputy checked Swygert’s pants and located a plastic bag containing several pieces of white rock believed to be crack cocaine.Swygert, the report said, eventually admitted to using and selling crack cocaine.For his previous sentence, Swygert was arrested for possessing with intent to distribute cocaine base and received 240 months in prison with 10 years of supervised release.
The first charges of the investigation spearheaded by special counsel Robert Muller were approved Friday by a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., according to a report Friday.The federal judge has ordered the charges to remain sealed. Sources told CNN that the plan is to have anyone charged be taken into custody as soon as Monday.Mueller is leading the federal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had any ties to the Kremlin. Over the summer it was reported, but not confirmed, that Mueller’s team was investigating President Trump for possible obstruction of justice too.
