On Monday, Robert Mueller fired his first salvo. He indicted Paul Manafort and his aide, Richard Gates, for Tax and Money Laundering conspiracies and reporting violations under both the Foreign Agents Registration Act and the Foreign Bank Account Reporting Act, false statements under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and false statements. All of the indictment counts involve the proceeds of Manafort's lobbying activities on behalf of the government of Ukraine which was overthrown by the British and the Obama Administration in a coup led by neo-Nazis in 2014. At the same time, in order to avoid the charge that the Manafort/Gates indictment has nothing to do with Mueller's mandate, to investigate alleged Russian collusion in the 2016 election, Mueller unsealed the plea agreement of George Papadopoulos, a short-time foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. Various leaked statements from Trump's associates indicate that that Papadopoulos was considered poison by the campaign. The Manafort indictment does not mention the campaign. Papadopoulos pled guilty on October 5, 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his efforts to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and Russia — meetings which never occurred. Papadopoulos bears a distinctly London pedigree, pointing once again at British meddling in the U.S. elections — specifically British and allied intelligence infiltrations of the Trump campaign — as a primary target for serious investigators.

Mueller's shot and the accompanying media frenzy occurred as the House Intelligence Committee secured the bank records of Fusion GPS, the firm which hired MI6's Orbis Intelligence and Christopher Steele to peddle trash for cash on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The dirty dossier, as Steele's work product is called, peddled the lie that Trump was a Manchurian candidate completely controlled by Putin as a result of sexual deviancies. At the same time, the FBI will turn over its Christopher Steele file this week to the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee which have been exploring the collusion of the British, the Clintons, the Obama Administration, and the FBI in attempting to first wreck Donald Trump's political campaign and then his Presidency. In short, the coup was beginning to implode on the eve of Trump's potentially world historic trip to China and action was needed. It came in the form of really old, corrupted news presented as new and shocking by both Robert Mueller and his band of media groupies.

The Ukraine money laundering charges against Manafort first surfaced back in July and August of 2016 and are believed to originate in opposition research conducted for Clinton's campaign involving Ukrainian intelligence agencies and other official NATO channels. The British began pushing for Donald Trump's head in 2015 based on his perceived desire for friendly relations with Russia. Manafort ended up on the wrong side of the 2014 British/American neo-Nazi coup against Viktor Yanukovych and has been a marked man ever since. Mueller picked up on an FBI investigation already underway against Manafort with a grand jury already hearing evidence in the Eastern District of Virginia. Since all of Manafort's lobbying activities were conducted with Tony Podesta, brother of then Democratic Party Chairman John Podesta, Mueller has also targeted Podesta to avoid an inevitable selective prosecution motion to dismiss. Tony Podesta resigned from this lobbying firm today to fight the charges.

Mueller assigned his protégé, Andrew Weissmann, to Manafort's case. Weissmann is known for multiple incidents of rabid prosecutorial misconduct during the Enron investigations and for using such tactics as fabricated indictments against family members to turn targets into willing prosecutorial witnesses. The indictment reads like a press release, leading with the charge of CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE UNITED STATES when what is at issue is whether Manafort illegally avoided taxes, laundered funds by investing them, and willfully violated the registration provisions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Typical of the effort to pressure Manafort to lie against the President, the prosecutors sought and the magistrate agreed to $10 million in bail for Manafort and house arrest in lieu of detention, and a $5 million bail for Gates with house arrest. This is unusually punitive in a white-collar case, particularly since Manafort has known he was going to be indicted and poses no risk of flight.

The Papadopoulos charges are steeped in London connections. They are based on interviews the FBI conducted with Papadopoulos in January and February of 2017; that is, before the firing of FBI Director Comey and before Robert Mueller was appointed Special Counsel. Papadopoulos has degrees from DePaul University in Chicago, the University of London and the London School of Economics. He interned at some point at the rabidly anti-Russian, anti-China and very intelligence community connected Jamestown Foundation here in the United States. Following his advanced degrees, he was a research associate at the neo-con Hudson Institute for four years. Following his sojourn at Hudson he moved to London to work for the British company Energy Stream for four months, followed by work from November 2015 to April of 2016 as the Director of the Centre for International Energy and Natural Resource Law and Security, a division of the London Center for International Law Practice. He served as a foreign policy advisor to Ben Carson, whose foreign policy team was overseen in part by former CIA rogue Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, of Iran/Contra fame and volunteered for Trump's foreign policy team as an advisor in March of 2016.

According to the wild tale told in Papadopoulos plea agreement, bought wholesale by the news media, at the same time as he began volunteering for Trump he met a London professor named Joseph Mifsud who he represents as having deep ties to the Kremlin. Mifsud assured him that the Russians had thousands of emails of Hillary Clinton and dirt on her at which point Papadopoulos started bombarding the Trump campaign with emails about setting up an official meeting with the Russians and writing Russian officials who he claimed were on board with this. No such meeting ever occurred. The account provided however, is perfectly consistent with a British-directed entrapment campaign to ensnare Donald Trump in some sort of Russian scandal. It is also consistent with the dirty British Christopher Steele dossier. According to the plea agreement, Papadopoulos conducted his highly sensitive Russian contacts over Facebook, and shutting down his Facebook account after he met with the FBI was an effort to obstruct the FBI's investigation. His second crime, alleged false statements, involve a few days difference between when he became an advisor for the Trump campaign and how he originally described Professor Mifsud to the FBI.