Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s witch hunt about to come to an end?
In July, 2017, FBI agents picked the locks, and busted into the Manafort home, where they reportedly manhandled Paul Manfort’s wife, Kathleen, as she laid in bed.
Washington Times reported that the agents checked Mr. Manafort and wife Kathleen for guns as they broke into the Alexandria condo pre-dawn by picking the lock.
A source familiar with the case told The Washington Times the search was even more intrusive: An agent patted down Mrs. Manafort before she was allowed to get out of bed.
In all, 12 FBI agents entered the home, guns drawn, and stayed for hours.
The aggressive search of a prone sleepy woman is, the source said, a hallmark of Mr. Mueller’s top prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann. A former mob prosecutor in New York, he specializes in turning witnesses against bigger prey and is not afraid to make things rough for spouses, too.
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III told Mueller’s team. “You really care about what information Mr. Manafort can give you to lead you to Mr. Trump and an impeachment, or whatever.”
Further, Ellis demanded to see the unredacted “scope memo,” a document outlining the scope of the special counsel’s Russia probe that congressional Republicans have also sought.
The hearing, where Manafort’s team fought to dismiss an 18-count indictment on tax and bank fraud-related charges, took a confrontational turn as it was revealed that at least some of the information in the investigation derived from an earlier Justice Department probe – in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
