The dominoes are starting to fall, the house of cards is beginning to crumble, go ahead and pick any analogy you want for what is happening to Robert Mueller.
The truth is being discovered, and much of it by John Solomon, a reporter for The Hill, a website not known for being on President Donald Trump’s team.
The latest bombshell by Solomon could land former Special Prosecutor Mueller and his team in some serious jeopardy.
It is the case of Russian billionaire named Oleg Deripaska, who had worked with the FBI for a long time before the Mueller investigation.
Deripaska was a disaffected former business client of Donald Trump’s fallen campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He also was a legal research client of Trump-hating, Clinton-aiding British spy Christopher Steele.
In his spare time, he was an occasional friendly cooperator with the FBI and its fired deputy director, Andrew McCabe.
And, at the height of the Russia collusion hysteria, Deripaska was sanctioned by the Trump administration to financially punish Russian President Vladimir Putin for his meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
With the Russia case, in which he had so many connections, now completed, Deripaska is breaking his silence. And what he has to say could impact Mueller’s July 17 testimony before Congress.
In a wide-ranging interview with me, Deripaska confirmed a story told to me more than a year ago by law enforcement sources:
He was indeed interviewed by FBI agents in September 2016 during the early Russia probe, and he told them he strongly doubted the bureau’s theory that the Trump campaign, through Manafort, was colluding with Moscow to hijack the 2016 election.
“I told them straightforward, ‘Look, I am not a friend with him (Manafort). Apparently not, because I started a court case (against him) six or nine months before,” he said to Solomon.
“But since I’m Russian I would be very surprised that anyone from Russia would try to approach him for any reason, and wouldn’t come and ask me my opinion,’” Deripaska said.
I told them straightforward, I just don’t believe that he would represent any Russian interest. And knowing what he’s doing on Ukraine for the last, what, seven or eight years,” he said.
They important thing about Deripaska is that he was closely allied with Russian President Vladimir Putin who had been dealing with the FBI agents.
And more importantly, his testimony, which could prove his innocence, was not provided to Manafort’s defense team.
That is a violation of what is known as a Brady violation and it could be grounds for a possible appeal by Manafort’s team.
“Recent revelations by The Hill prove that the Office of Special Counsel’s (OSC) claim that they had a legitimate basis to include Paul Manafort in an investigation of potential collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government is false,” Manafort defense lawyer Kevin Downing said.
“The failure to disclose this information to Manafort, the courts, or the public reaffirms that the OSC did not have a legitimate basis to investigate Manafort, and may prove that the OSC had no legitimate basis to investigate potential collusion between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government,” he said.
He recently won a lawsuit and forced State to produce the so-called evidence it used to justify denying him a visa for years and imposing the sanctions. It was a thinly sourced file, he said, mostly of old newspaper articles with no real secret intelligence.
So I asked him about the most common allegation levied by his detractors at State — that, earlier in his life while consolidating power in the aluminum industry, he had ties to Russian mobsters and may have killed or encouraged killing critics.
He quickly responded, noting that the file released by the courts offered no such direct proof: “There is no evidence. What is there to dispute? Do you believe that I could kill someone 25 years ago and there will be no victims, no corpses, no names?”
Throughout the interview, it was clear Deripaska chose his words in English carefully. But there was one word he offered only twice — once in response to the Steele dossier’s allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, and the other time to respond to the allegations used to sanction him. “Balderdash,” he insisted.
Now it’s time for Team Mueller to answer the same questions.