RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT

Black Panther

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Brehs, I'm in here dying :russ:
I legitimately cannot look at Seal the same way again. :deadmanny:
Dude is a contract killer who sings his first hit single as his victim dies :dead:

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Omarosa about to get kicked to the curb :whoo:




No One Knows What Omarosa Is Doing in the White House—Even Omarosa
The ‘Apprentice’ star has a top salary and a high-ranking job. But when we spent time with her, it was her wedding she was planning.
171112-plott-omarosa-lede_ck6nxb



SAUL LOEB/Getty


It’s nearly 9 a.m. in the West Wing lobby. The room is quiet save for two staff assistants whispering about weekend plans, and me, waiting on an over-firm red sofa to meet with Omarosa Manigault.

When she glides in she is statuesque, wearing a sleeveless sheath, her legs long and bare. It’s St. Patrick’s Day and it’s 28 degrees outside. “You must be freezing,” I say. She lets out a sing-song laugh that cracks the silence.

“No,” she says. “I’m hot-blooded.”

We had arranged an hour-long interview. So it’s a surprise when Omarosa leads me into the Roosevelt Room, scans the space, points to a couch, and, with the reverence one might grant two open barstools at Starbucks, says, “Let’s just sit here.” Two maids dusting the large wooden table trade confused glances. A woman leans in the doorway. “Just so you know,” she says, “Bannon”—as in Steve, the then chief strategist—“could walk in at any minute with the Egyptians.” It’s no bother, Omarosa responds. “We’ll just be a few minutes.”

She turns back to me. “So,” she says. “What do you want to talk about?”

There’s been some confusion about Omarosa’s precise role in this White House. She is formally the communications director for the Office of Public Liaison, the same position once held by Kal Penn of Harold & Kumar fame. But I wanted Omarosa to help me understand what keeps her busy during the workday and how one of the biggest reality stars of the early aughts—apart from her own boss—was reshaping the administration.


Before Ivanka, before Jared, before even Melania, Omarosa was the most prolific one-named celebrity in Donald Trump’s orbit. Her role as a surrogate on his campaign was the reward for 13 years of unshakable devotion, beginning as America’s favorite villain on The Apprentice, where she curried favor with Trump for her bombast. She returned later as a contestant on the spin-off Celebrity Apprentice, where she dumped wine on Piers Morgan’s head.





Now a senior White House staffer banking the highest recorded salary allowable ($179,700 per year), Omarosa remains a mystery to many members of Washington’s political class and even her White House colleagues.

But on this particular Friday morning, Omarosa simply does not have the time to explain what, exactly, it is that she does. She can give me 15 minutes at most, she says, despite the hour-long appointment. It’s a very, very busy day, she tells me, and asks if I’d rather shadow her for the morning. “You can see me in action,” she says.

She tells me to hurriedly stuff my bag under her desk—a plain, shared space near the Oval Office that she uses apart from her office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. We’ve got to get a move-on, she says. There are menus to finalize and place settings to set. There’s a white floral number to change into, and three different shades of MAC foundation to blend.


Today isn’t just any ordinary day, it turns out. Yes, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is visiting, and the president has last-minute health care negotiations with Republican leadership. But much more crucially, it’s bridal luncheon day at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and Omarosa is getting married.

***

This is not Omarosa’s first tour of the White House. At age 23, before she became a reality TV star, the Howard University grad worked under Vice President Al Gore with the title of “special assistant of logistics.” Then she bounced around a bit, working for President Bill Clinton in the personnel office, and finally at the Commerce Department.
Writing in her 2008 book, The bytch Switch—her “step-by-step guide for locating your inner bytch, personalizing your switch, and knowing when to turn it on and when to turn it off”—she called her unnamed boss in personnel “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” someone who “constantly sabotaged her efforts.” There was no love lost. By the time she landed at Commerce, Cheryl Shavers, Clinton’s undersecretary for technology, told People magazine that Omarosa “was asked to leave as quickly as possible… One woman wanted to slug her.”

This go-around seems different, at least so far. Perhaps the venomous exchanges are a relic of her boardroom days. “She’s a lot softer now,” says Katrina Campins, Omarosa’s Apprentice roommate and bridesmaid. Indeed, if there’s any animosity between Omarosa and current White House staffers, it doesn’t show. She greets women with a “Hey, girl!” departs with a “later, gator.” She mingles with communications staff in the Navy mess hall, trading compliments on their dresses. “Mine’s not even fancy!” she says. “It’s Tahari!” She orders grits and sausage from the mess, which, for reasons that remain unclear, we do not pick up, but instead sashay along to the next task. Omarosa is in a smashing mood.

And why shouldn’t she be? In just a few hours, she’s hosting her eight bridesmaids, plus her mother, Theresa Manigault—AKA Momarosa—and fiancé, Rev. John Allen Newman, in the White House for a St. Patrick’s Day-themed bridal luncheon. There, waiters will serve appetizers, entrees, and desserts. Presaged by a shamrock-bordered invitation, the luncheon is the kickoff event of Omarosa’s bridal shower.

“It was a good way to spend time with her before the wedding got underway,” bridesmaid and former fellow Clinton staffer Aisha McClendon would tell me of the White House gathering.

But it’s not yet lunchtime, so morning duties still loom. Outside the mess hall, we stop at the lectern of a security guard—A.J.—who indulges a giddy Omarosa by showing her a photo of the themed invitation on his computer. Her iPhone starts ringing—her fiance’s name, followed by a unicorn emoji, flashes across the screen. “Hey, baby,” she says. “Can I call you on my secure line?”

It’s tough to sneak in a question to Omarosa—about her job, her life, her goals, about where exactly we are heading at this precise moment—because we are always walking, quickly and seemingly aimlessly across the West Wing, and in and out of rooms at the EEOB. At some point we are looking for a certain Josh, though we don’t ever locate him, and I never find out why he’s needed. As we knock on the door to one office, she finally muffles an answer as to what we’re doing: “… the faith communities, does anyone need to be blessed…”

Many of her answers go this way, with sentences accomplishing the syntactical feat of never seeming to begin or end. Or they begin and end at the same time: “Everything,” she says when I ask about the contents of her job portfolio right now.


But never mind that, because Omarosa has a luncheon to host. She even brought a new dress for today’s event. She shows it to me as we stop next in her EEOB office, a light-drenched space a little larger than the average American living room. Adorning the walls and tables are three long gowns, clusters of makeup, an array of hair tools, and a few pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage. Today’s outfit—a white shift dress printed with red and pink and purple flowers—is draped across a chair.

Omarosa’s White House life is a constant blend of the weighty business of the U.S. government and the never-ending personal demands of that very moment. We bump into National Trade Council chairman Peter Navarro, who is dressed in workout attire and carrying in one hand a copy of his own book, Death By China, and in the other a box of Mesa Sunrise cereal. “O-ma-ro-sa!” Navarro says, drawing out each syllable of her name. He asks if she’s planning to go on Dancing With the Stars. No, she tells him. Unfortunately her foot is still healing, the result of a fall while jumping into the motorcade in January. Navarro gives her tips on how to exercise it. But before he finishes we have to get going. Later, gator.

We walk to a door close to the White House side of EEOB. Suddenly, Omarosa turns to me.

“Well, I’ve enjoyed this first part,” she says. “When do you want to do the second part?”

***

Alas, that second interview would never happen. In a trend familiar to lovelorn folks nationwide, Omarosa ghosted me. Dozens of calls, emails, and texts over the course several months have gone unreturned.


After the abrupt end to our day in March, I called a Republican source in constant contact with the White House and asked what they thought Omarosa’s job entailed. “No clue,” the source said. I told the source about our whirlwind of a morning.

“Wait, Hope [Hicks] let you follow [Omarosa] around?” the source asked. No, I hadn’t spoken with Hope, who now serves formally as the White House communications director. “So Sean [Spicer] let you?” Ditto. “Christ,” the source said. “No one in the comms department knew a random reporter was walking around the West Wing. This is why people think we’re a shyt show.”:mjlol:

Ultimately, in my quest to better understand what, exactly, Omarosa does each day, I learned little more than the fact that she was getting married. I reached out to then deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders to find out more about the bridal luncheon—whether it was normal, in the middle of a workday, for a staffer to use the White House for a personal event? Did taxpayers, or Omarosa herself foot the bill?

“I have no idea… I will try to track her down,” Sanders responded. On Friday, a senior White House official emailed: “She did not have a bridal lunch but did invite her bridesmaids to have lunch with her in the navy mess which all commissioned officers are allowed to do.”


Since then, Omarosa got married. It was April 8, with a cherry-blossom-themed ceremony in none other than the Trump Hotel in D.C. (Her gown, a $6,500 YKA Makino piece, was part of her compensation for appearing on TLC’s Say Yes to the Dress.) Then there was her letter to the Congressional Black Caucus in June, in which she invited members to a meeting with President Trump, signing it, “The Honorable Omarosa Manigault.” As Politico reported, “Multiple CBC members said they were put off… saying she hasn’t earned that title nor has she helped raise the profile of CBC issues within the White House as promised.”

And while she does pop up in White House press briefings from time to time, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to which ones. During our morning together, for example, she toyed with whether or not to attend that day’s session. “I may go, I may not,” she said.

If Omarosa’s White House sounds less like a storied institution than a personal playground, well, that’s precisely because she intends it to be. As she writes in The bytch Switch, a woman in control—of her life, of her relationships, of her career—“determines her own rules of engagement for every situation.”

She may be perfect for this administration after all.
 

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What Mueller's org chart reveals about his Russia probe
Workload for the special counsel’s team — now 17 prosecutors — shows how he’s conducting probe and what may come next.
DARREN SAMUELSOHN11/13/2017 05:05 AM EST
Special counsel Robert Mueller has not publicly uttered a single word about the direction of his high-stakes Russia probe.

But the way he’s assigned the 17 federal prosecutors on his team — pieced together by POLITICO from court filings and interviews with lawyers familiar with the Russia cases — gives insight into how he’s conducting the investigation and what might be coming next.

His most experienced attorneys have discrete targets, such as former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and current White House aides. Mueller’s longtime chief of staff is coordinating all the lawyers, including some who cover multiple topics. Select FBI special agents have been tapped to question witnesses.

Spearheading the criminal case against Manafort and his longtime deputy Rick Gates are three prosecutors schooled in money laundering, fraud, foreign bribery and organized crime: Andrew Weissmann, Greg Andres and Kyle Freeny.

And at the center of the investigation into Flynn is Jeannie Rhee, a former Obama-era deputy assistant attorney general who most recently worked with Mueller at the WilmerHale law firm — and whose name has so far appeared only on publicly available court documents relating to the guilty plea of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Assisting Rhee on the Flynn case is Zainab Ahmad, an assistant U.S. attorney from New York with a specialty in prosecuting and collecting evidence in international criminal and terrorism cases — and whose name hasn’t yet appeared in Russia-related court filings at all.

Mueller’s org chart pulls back the curtain on how the special counsel’s relatively small team is handling an array of investigative targets ranging from campaign contacts with Russian operatives to possibly Trump himself.

“Division of labor is essential here,” said Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former assistant U.S. attorney who worked with Weissmann in the prosecution of Enron executives in the early 2000s. “There’s got to be some carving up of this thing into nests of facts.”

Mueller’s investigation began with a focus on Russia’s role in the 2016 election, but he’s free to pursue any crimes he finds. Former Justice officials said the special counsel’s team needs to be flexible as it scrutinizes Trump aides’ contacts with Russians, Manafort’s overseas lobbying, Flynn’s firing due to his failure to disclose conversations with Russian officials, and the president’s decision to oust FBI Director James Comey. They could cast a still wider net; Trump and his lawyers have warnedMueller to stay away from the president’s real estate deals.

One lawyer in Mueller’s office has indicated publicly that the different parts of the special counsel’s work are interconnected. During Papadopoulos’ plea agreement hearing in October, Mueller prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky urged the federal judge to restrict Freedom of Information Act access to the court files because “there’s a large-scale ongoing investigation of which this case is a small part.”

While Mueller has assigned prosecutors to some of his biggest targets — some of whom, like Flynn, have not yet been publicly charged with a crime — they are still pulled in many directions. Rhee, the lead lawyer assigned to Manafort, was listed as the top attorney in the criminal charges and plea deal unsealed last month in the Papadopoulos case. Brandon Van Grack, a DOJ national security prosecutor who handled the Flynn investigation before Mueller’s appointment, represented the special counsel at the Papadopoulos arraignment hearing in July in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, the day after the Trump campaign aide’s arrest at Dulles International Airport.

One former DOJ prosecutor familiar with Mueller’s efforts said the special counsel’s lawyers don’t appear to be arranged in any kind of “rigidly hierarchical” manner. “I don’t discount the fact there might be an org chart in a drawer somewhere,” the former prosecutor said. “But it’s far less relevant to these cases. … I’d fully expect everyone on this team is mature enough and skilled enough to take contributions as they come. It’s not a case of, ‘I’m in charge. You’re second in command.’”

Aaron Zebley, Mueller’s former FBI chief of staff, is helping coordinate the multiple lines of inquiry. Zebley has worked as an FBI special agent on counterterrorism cases, a top lawyer in Justice’s National Security Division and private practice work at WilmerHale on crisis management and cybersecurity issues.

Mueller’s liaison to the White House is James Quarles, a former Watergate prosecutor who has helped arrange an ongoing series of interviews with current and former Trump aides. Quarles was involved in the questioning of former press secretary Sean Spicer during a daylong interview last month, according to a person with knowledge of the interview, and he’s a primary point of contact for Trump’s personal attorney, John Dowd, as well as Ty Cobb, the lead White House lawyer handling the Russia investigation.

For all the complicated legal questions Mueller faces — from interpreting federal criminal statutes to the special counsel’s own boundaries for pursuing an obstruction of justice case against a sitting president — there’s Michael Dreeben, the deputy solicitor general and widely recognized criminal law expert who has argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court.

“Dreeben is everywhere,” said the former federal prosecutor familiar with Mueller's efforts. “Anything involving law will involve Dreeben.”

Mueller’s work isn’t just confined to his team of prosecutors, which special counsel spokesman Peter Carr said grew last week to 17 with the addition of an unnamed lawyer.

The FBI, which had opened an investigation into Russian election meddling in July 2016, continues to play a prominent behind-the-scenes role. FBI agents helped execute the no-knock, pre-dawn raid on Manafort’s home this summer, and they’ve taken the lead questioning some of the key witnesses. A pair of special agents interviewed Papadopoulos about his Russia contacts in January after the president’s inauguration, a session that last month prompted the filing of a guilty plea on a charge of lying to the FBI, according to an affidavit filed by Robert Gibbs, an FBI agent and veteran counterespionage investigator.

More recently, FBI special agents Walter Giardina and William Barnett conducted an interview with Hank Cox, a freelance editor from suburban Washington, D.C., who helped Flynn publish a pro-Turkey essay on Election Day 2016, Cox confirmed in an email.

Like a U.S. attorney’s office, Mueller has the power to reach across Justice, the FBI and other federal departments to solicit issue experts on everything from cybersecurity to counterintelligence. He’s getting help from financial record and tax specialists at the Treasury Department and IRS, as evidenced by the indictmentcharging Manafort and Gates with 12 criminal counts, including money laundering and failing to disclose overseas bank accounts.

Carr said earlier this year that Mueller could increase his staff depending on “the needs of the investigation,” and he may need to bulk up in preparation for a Manafort-Gates criminal trial. A federal judge has proposed a May 7 start date. While that schedule has not been formalized yet, it will eventually require full-time preparation from the attorneys assigned to the case, likely Weissmann, Andres and Freeny. Any indictments involving Flynn would also be an additional weight on the Mueller team if it had to handle a second trial.

Mueller’s team is already larger than that of its most immediate predecessor: Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney tasked during the George W. Bush administration to be a special counsel investigating who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Only a half-dozen Justice lawyers, plus FBI agents, worked on that case, which was far smaller in scope and led to only one criminal trial, involving I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President dikk Cheney.

The Russia special counsel’s office, however, is nowhere near the size of the multipronged Clinton-era investigation that started out as a probe of the president and first lady’s Whitewater real estate deals in Arkansas but then took several unexpected turns, ending with congressional impeachment proceedings over the president’s sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

That Clinton investigation — most famously led by independent counsel Kenneth Starr — ballooned over the course of eight years to include more than 225 employees from DOJ and other federal agencies, including at least 65 consultants and outside advisers, according to a final report released in 2002. Jay Apperson, a former deputy independent counsel under Starr, said he could envision Mueller’s probe growing significantly in size “depending on the scope of the investigation.”

Mueller’s Manafort indictment “certainly suggests a broadened scope involving conduct well before his role in the Trump campaign,” he said. But Apperson also cautioned that any kind of major expansion likely will “depend on whether the targets of the investigation are cooperative and forthcoming, and that remains to be seen."

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