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| And remember: Manafort manipulated Trump into picking Pence. Wonder why. |
An attorney working on the Justice Department’s highest-profile money laundering case recently transferred off that assignment in order to join the staff of the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia, POLITICO has learned.
Attorney Kyle Freeny was among the prosecutors on hand Friday as a spokesman for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jason Maloni, testified before a grand jury at federal court in Washington.
Freeny, whose assignment to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff has not been previously reported, is the 17th lawyer known to be working with the former FBI chief on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. She departed from the courthouse Friday with two other members of Mueller’s squad: former Criminal Division chief and Enron prosecutor Andrew Weissman and Civil Division appellate attorney Adam Jed, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.
Before being detailed to Mueller’s team, Freeny was shepherding the Justice Department’s headline-grabbing effort to seize the profits from the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” on grounds that the film was financed with assets looted from the Malaysian government.
Freeny withdrew from the “Wolf of Wall Street” case on June 26, court records show, shortly before many of Mueller’s attorneys joined his team in early July.
Lawyers for the production company behind the film, Red Granite Pictures, said in a court filing in Los Angeles Friday that they’ve reached a settlement with prosecutors. A Justice Department spokesperson said he was aware of the filing, but declined to comment.
Freeny’s work on the movie-related case and the Manafort aspect of the Trump-Russia probe appear to have some commonalities
The Justice Department billed the “Wolf of Wall Street” case as a product of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, an effort to pursue the proceeds of foreign corruption and return such monies to the public in the affected countries.
Justice Department officials including former Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the same kleptocracy project is probing the transfer of assets overseas by Ukrainian officials, including former President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort served as a consultant to Yanukovych and his Party of Regions — work that has triggered suspicions about the former Trump campaign chief because of Yanukovych’s warm relationship with Moscow.
A Manafort firm belatedly filed a report in June with U.S. authorities disclosing about $17 million in payments from the Party of Regions between 2012 and 2014.
Manafort has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime. However, in July, FBI agents executed an early-morning search warrant at his Alexandria, Va. condominium.
A spokesman for Mueller’s office confirmed Freeny is part of the staff, but he declined to elaborate on her role or what took place at the courthouse Friday.
It’s hard to know where all this leads, but Trump himself is up to his neck in money laundering. But obviously, Manafort is the low hanging fruit and they’re targeting him first.
I do think people need to be aware that this isn’t going to unravel quickly. I suspect they know some things but are leveraging what they know to get to what they don’t know. It’s a very big investigation including foreign governments and some elaborate schemes that go back many years. Its going to take a while before we know the scope of the crimes that were committed and whether or not Trump is going to be caught in the web.
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