Robert Mueller’s witch hunt against President Trump has reached a critical stage.
The special counsel is running out of time to make his move against the President.
So he just played his ace in the hole, and it has Trump supporters worried.
Mueller extracted a guilty plea from Rick Gates, who was Paul Manafort’s campaign deputy.
In exchange for his guilty plea, Mueller dropped the 22 counts of criminal charges Gates was facing in Virginia as well as the batch of new charges Mueller had recently filed in Washington, D.C.
Fox News reports:
“Special Counsel Robert Mueller moved Tuesday to dismiss nearly two-dozen charges against former Trump campaign associate Rick Gates, in the wake of his guilty plea last week.
Mueller’s team filed a motion to drop 22 tax and bank fraud charges against Gates. The filing was tied to Gates’ agreement last week to plead guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United States and lying to the FBI.
That plea pertained to charges filed against him in October in Washington, D.C., for which he still faces up to 71 months in prison.
Under the terms of the deal, the government had agreed it would move to dismiss another set of charges brought against him more recently in a Virginia federal court. Those charges covered everything from alleged tax fraud to bank fraud.
The filing on Tuesday indicates Gates’ cooperation with the special counsel team could be yielding good information — as it pursues charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Gates has intimate knowledge of Manafort’s years of political consulting work in Ukraine, as well as other events that have sparked the interest of federal investigators.”
Gates and Manafort are facing charges for their foreign lobbying work from 2006 to 2014.
While the charges have nothing to do with the election or collusion, some experts believe Mueller’s real target is Trump.
By inducing Gates to testify against Manafort, the special counsel is hoping Manafort will see his situation as hopeless and agree to cut a deal in exchange for testifying against Trump.
Mueller is determined to remove Trump from office.
And he will leave no stone unturned.
And he may believe Manafort holds the smoking gun that will prove collusion once and for all.
But is this the case?
Manafort has denied any collusion with Russia for over one year.
And nothing has emerged that would disprove his denials.
Mueller turning his attention to Manafort may be more of a sign of the special counsel’s desperation, than the fact that the former Trump campaign chairman actually has any valuable information.
Every other collusion angle has run into a dead end.
Manafort could just be a Hail Mary attempt by the special counsel to find anything he can use to justify submitting a report to Congress recommending they move ahead with impeaching the President.
We will keep you up to date on any new developments in this story.
