Dana's got yet another secret
by digby
I have no idea why Gates would lie about this particular thing but it looks really bad for poor Dana Rhorabacher.
Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates just admitted to lying to U.S. investigators about a March 19, 2013, meeting between his boss, Paul Manafort, and an unidentified U.S. congressman. Public filings show a meeting that day between Manafort and Dana Rohrabacher, a Russia-friendly Republican congressman from California.
Gates pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy against the U.S. and making false statements about a meeting that day. In a criminal information unsealed Friday, he admitted that he’d withheld that the meeting included a discussion of Ukraine, where he and Manafort had done political consulting work.
Gates and Manafort were charged in October with money laundering and failing to register foreign lobbying work with the U.S. government. Since then, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been pressing both men to cooperate, ratcheting up the pressure on Thursday with bank and tax fraud charges and again on Friday with conspiracy and false-statement counts.
Details of a March 19, 2013, meeting surfaced last year in supplemental filings from DMP International, Manafort’s firm, and Mercury Public Affairs, whose partner, Vin Weber, also participated in the 2013 meeting.
Weber and a representative for him didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lobbying that Gates and Manafort are accused of hiding included work on behalf of Ukraine’s then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by Russia.
I've been writing about Rhorabacher for a long time. He's had his hand in dirty dealings throughout his career. His Putinphilia is well-known.
This seems to indicate that Mueller is looking at a pretty wide conspiracy here to do with corruption by more than just Manafort and his gang regarding Yanukovych and Putin. This is getting real.
Today Trump led a rousing chorus of "lock her up!" at CPAC. Apparently the wingnuts are chanting it constantly at the meeting. Guess what this plea deal says Gates and Manafort were buying off all these politicians for: lobbying various entities to say publicly that there wasn't anything untoward or illegal about the autocratic kleptocrat Yanukovych locking up his rival Julia Tymoschenko after she came close to unseating him in an election.
Trump and Yanukovych have a lot more in common than Manafort.
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