Don't panic! Read about "Robert Mueller's legal masterpiece."

Last edited Thu Feb 21, 2019, 04:36 AM - Edit history (9)

What do Michael Cohen, Maria Butina, Paul Erickson, and Sam Patten have in common? They are all cooperating with Federal prosecutors, after their cases were spun off from the Mueller prosecution.

Butina and Erickson now have their own prosecutions, in D.C. and in S. Dakota, which will go on regardless of what happens to the Mueller investigation. Their cases involve the NRA and money laundering. And also potentially involve Donnie, Jr.

Sam Patten was implicated in inauguration shenanigans, pleaded guilty to failing to register, and he's being prosecuted by the federal prosecutor in D.C.

So it isn't just Michael Cohen, and adultery-payoffs, and campaign finance at the SDNY. There are at least three other prosecutions -- Butina, Erickson, and Patten -- that aren't going to end next week.

Those are just the ones we already know about.

https://newrepublic.com/article/152717/robert-muellers-legal-masterpiece

Robert Mueller’s Legal Masterpiece

The special counsel has spun a web of investigations that draw closer to Trump every day.

. . . . This mystery may be by design, or merely the result of Mueller’s sharpest tactical decisions: spinning off parts of his investigation to multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Indeed, it’s no longer accurate to sum up the president’s legal troubles under the banner of “the Russia investigation.” The bulk of the federal investigatory firepower aimed at his inner circle is now coming from outside Mueller’s control, widening the risk to the president himself.

“Investigations now entangle Donald Trump’s White House, campaign, transition, inauguration, charity and business,” the Associated Press reported on Sunday. Or, as the Post put it a day earlier, “nearly every organization he has led in the past decade is under investigation.”

There are plenty of advantages to Mueller’s approach. For starters, it keeps his investigation focused on its primary objective: Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign cooperated with it. The special counsel’s office is believed to employ 15 or so prosecutors—human beings who ultimately can only work so many hours per day. Every hour spent on Michael Cohen’s taxi-medallion foibles or Michael Flynn’s Turkish lobbying arrangements is an hour unspent on Paul Manafort’s ties to Kremlin-adjacent Russian oligarchs or the president’s efforts to obstruct justice.

SNIP

Cohen’s plea deal in August, followed by his three-year prison sentence earlier this month, shows how Mueller can still extract cooperation from witnesses in the satellite investigations. And with multiple U.S. attorney’s offices involved, Trump would face a much greater challenge in halting the Russia investigation or any of its spin-off inquiries. When former FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month, a lawmaker asked him what impact Mueller’s dismissal would have on the current investigations. “As an informed outsider, I think that [you’d] almost have to fire everyone in the FBI and the Justice Department to derail the relevant investigations,” he replied, “but I don’t know exactly what the effect would be.”