Shock: The FBI Used Another "Dossier" It Did Not Verify and In Fact Was Specifically Warned Might be Fake, to Start an Investigation into Paul Manafort

Remember, it was critical to Hillary Clinton that the FBI have active investigations opened into the Trump campaign, because she had a high profile investigation into her own actions, and she desperately needed to be able to play the They Do It Too Card.

Our shining knights of fidelity, bravery, and integrity were all too eager to provide her with just that card.

The second document, known as the "black cash ledger," remarkably has escaped the [scrutiny the "Steele" "dossier" got, after-the-fact], even though its emergence in Ukraine in the summer of 2016 forced Paul Manafort to resign as Trump's campaign chairman and eventually face U.S. indictment.

In search warrant affidavits, the FBI portrayed the ledger as one reason it resurrected a criminal case against Manafort that was dropped in 2014 and needed search warrants in 2017 for bank records to prove he worked for the Russian-backed Party of Regions in Ukraine.

There's just one problem: The FBI's public reliance on the ledger came months after the feds were warned repeatedly that the document couldn’t be trusted and likely was a fake, according to documents and more than a dozen interviews with knowledgeable sources.

For example, Ukraine’' top anticorruption prosecutor, Nazar Kholodnytsky, told me he warned the U.S. State Department’s law enforcement liaison and multiple FBI agents in late summer 2016 that Ukrainian authorities who recovered the ledger believed it likely was a fraud.

"It was not to be considered a document of Manafort. It was not authenticated. And at that time it should not be used in any way to bring accusations against anybody," Kholodnytsky said, recalling what he told FBI agents.

Likewise, Manafort’s Ukrainian business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, a regular informer for the State Department, told the U.S. government almost immediately after The New York Times wrote about the ledger in August 2016 that the document probably was fake.

Manafort "could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash across three borders. It was always a different arrangement -- payments were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation," Kilimnik wrote in an email to a senior U.S. official on Aug. 22, 2016.

He added: "I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match anything related to payments made to Manafort. ...It does not match my records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash."

Special counsel Robert Mueller's team and the FBI were given copies of Kilimnik's warning, according to three sources familiar with the documents.

Now, you really should real the whole thing, but this is incredible:

It's illegal to submit, as part of an official record, evidence to a judge -- for example, in seeking a warrant against Paul Manafort-- which the person submitting knows to be fraudulent, or which may be fraudulent.

It can result in an actual criminal charge being filed.

So, what did Mueller and Weismann do?

They could not submit the "black cash ledger" as evidence in seeking probable cause warrants against Manafort -- that could expose their own corrupt asses to federal charges.

But they were determined to jam it in there anyway.

So they submitted media reports as evidence supporting the warrant, based on leaks about the likely fraudulent ledger, as part of their application.

They effectively submitted the contents of the "ledger," without submitting the ledger itself -- in order to avoid having to tell the judge, straight up, that they'd been warned by several informed sources that the thing was a forgery and a sham.

Bring charges against them anyway. This is a transparent dodge and still constitutes submitting fraudulent "evidence" to a tribunal.

Coming soon from David French, Jonah Goldberg, and "Popehat:"

The Conservative Case for Perpetrating Serial Frauds on Federal Courts

A question worth probing: Did someone on Mueller's own team leak the contents of the sham "ledger" to the media precisely so he could get a story written up and cite that -- which was an intentional product of his own illegal leaking -- as evidence rather than having to cite the phony ledger itself?

posted by Ace of Spades at 04:27 PM

| Access Comments