CrimsonHalo.com

We live in inter­est­ing times …

Today’s brief will not be about the ever-grow­ing list of fed­er­al indict­ments and crim­i­nal guilty pleas encoun­tered thus far in the Trump-Rus­sia spe­cial coun­sel pro­ceed­ings.

Instead, we find our­selves see­ing guilty ver­dicts and plea deals entered in rela­tion to a slew of seri­ous, tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed crim­i­nal com­plaints that have come as a byprod­uct of those inves­ti­ga­tions. Think of them, col­lec­tive­ly, as the ulti­mate exam­ple of “fol­low the mon­ey.”

In court today, Don­ald Trump’s for­mer cam­paign chair­man Paul Man­afort was found guilty on eight of the eigh­teen offens­es he had been charged with, the jury hav­ing been dead­locked on the remain­ing ten and a mis­tri­al declared, for which pros­e­cu­tors can poten­tial­ly look at con­duct­ing a retri­al of those lat­ter charges.

Addi­tion­al­ly, Man­afort is due to stand tri­al in Wash­ing­ton, DC on sev­en entire­ly dif­fer­ent crim­i­nal charges next month.

Mean­while, Don­ald Trump’s for­mer per­son­al lawyer Michael Cohen plead­ed guilty to eight crim­i­nal counts of his own in an effort to stave off the threat of a lengthy tri­al and poten­tial­ly far more severe con­se­quences for his wrong­do­ings.

In these pro­ceed­ings, Cohen intends on plead­ing guilty to five counts of tax eva­sion, one count of bank fraud, one count of mak­ing an unlaw­ful cor­po­rate con­tri­bu­tion, and one count of mak­ing an exces­sive cam­paign con­tri­bu­tion.

Cohen fur­ther admit­ted to hav­ing paid out hush mon­ey at Trump’s direc­tion (though not by name), an act that was appar­ent­ly intend­ed to influ­ence the out­come of the elec­tion.

Evi­dence uncov­ered dur­ing the course of the Man­afort and Cohen pro­ceed­ings also sug­gests pros­e­cu­tors might go after oth­er indi­vid­u­als whose names have come up in the course of these cor­rup­tion inves­ti­ga­tions, includ­ing Stephen Calk, the banker who pro­vid­ed the Man­afort loans and who alleged­ly attempt­ed to use his influ­ence in a failed bid to secure a posi­tion with the Army.

Fur­ther updates will be post­ed as these sto­ries con­tin­ue to devel­op.