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Manafort Indictment No Silver Bullet for Trump Haters

Paul Manafort’s

November 1.2017

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has gone through the Manafort indictments with a fine-tooth comb. His take is that there’s a lot over of obvious over-charging, including splitting one infraction into two felony indictments, charging him with a felony for something that’s normally dismissed with a warning, and charging conspiracy against the US so that he can bring in alleged infractions that would ordinarily be far beyond the statute of limitations.

If you don’t know who Andrew C. McCarthy is ; now a columnist for National Review. He is however most notable for when he  served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. A Republican, he is most notable for leading the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others. The defendants were convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and planning a series of attacks against New York City landmarks. He also contributed to the prosecutions of terrorists who bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. He resigned from the Justice Department in 2003.

Andrew C. McCarthy said;

“Even from Paul Manafort’s perspective, there may be less to this indictment than meets the eye — it’s not so much a serious allegation of “conspiracy against the United States” as a dubious case of disclosure violations and money movement that would never have been brought had he not drawn attention to himself by temporarily joining the Trump campaign.

From President Trump’s perspective, the indictment is a boon from which he can claim that the special counsel has no actionable collusion case. It appears to reaffirm former FBI director James Comey’s multiple assurances that Trump is not a suspect. And, to the extent it looks like an attempt to play prosecutorial hardball with Manafort, the president can continue to portray himself as the victim of a witch hunt.”

Here’s the history of Manafort’s connection with the Trump campaign, by the way:He joined Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team in March 2016 and served as campaign manager from June to August 2016.