Liberal state media pussbags, at least they announced it msm/Pravda nothing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/1...rrack-acquitted.html

Stems from Mueller investigation, waste of time and money.

Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a close friend and adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, was acquitted Friday on charges that he had worked as an agent of the United Arab Emirates and then lied to federal investigators about it.

Mr. Barrack’s acquittal on all counts, after a seven-week trial and two days of jury deliberation, deals a blow to the Justice Department, which has sought to root out foreign influence in U.S. politics.

As the verdict was read Friday, in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn, Mr. Barrack bowed his head and his family wept in the courtroom benches.

Minutes later, he expressed gratitude for the jury. “It is the common people who make it work,” Mr. Barrack said. “I am so moved by them, and by the system.”

Mr. Barrack, 75, was one of several associates of Mr. Trump to come under legal and ethical scrutiny for their dealings with foreign interests. Several of the cases have fallen apart or ended in acquittal, as federal prosecutors have struggled to convince juries and judges that the creep of influence peddling, off-the-books lobbying and profiting from government connections has given rise to crimes.

Prosecutors accused Mr. Barrack, a Los Angeles-based private equity investor, of using his sway with Mr. Trump to advance the interests of the Emirates in the White House and in the media, serving as a secret back channel for communications and passing sensitive information to Emirati officials.

Mr. Barrack faced nine counts, including acting as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the attorney general, as well as obstruction of justice and making false statements. The U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn brought the case, which grew out of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Barrack’s lawyers strongly contested the charges, challenging the government’s interpretation of the evidence — which included hundreds of text messages, emails and business records that were shown to the jury as proof of a sinister influence campaign. The defense argued that Mr. Barrack was acting as “his own man,” and not as an agent of a foreign power.

Mr. Barrack was on trial alongside his former assistant, Matthew Grimes, 29, who was also charged with acting as a foreign agent. He also was acquitted on both counts he faced.

“This is another example of prosecutors overreaching and overcharging,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Grimes, said Friday. “It’s good that some people have the ability to fight back and demonstrate that, but unfortunately, many people do not.”

In a risky move, Mr. Barrack took the witness stand in his own defense, testifying for several days about his efforts to improve U.S. relations with Gulf countries while also building business opportunities for his private equity firm, Colony Capital.

Mr. Barrack said his dealings with the Emirates were in keeping with his views on the region and his work as a businessman. He told the jury that he had gained a “cultural sixth sense” over years of working in the Middle East, and hoped, in a final chapter of his career, to weave “a web of tolerance.”

Prosecutors said those words masked “an ugly truth,” citing evidence that Mr. Barrack had doctored an email to Jared Kushner — the president’s son-in-law and adviser — to amplify his importance and sought hundreds of millions of dollars in investments from the Emiratis as he advanced their interests.

“The defendants unlocked the back door of the American political system — its campaigns, its media, its government — to the U.A.E.,” Ryan Harris, one of the prosecutors, said in his closing argument Tuesday.

A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office declined to comment after the verdict Friday.

The case centered on the run-up to the 2016 election and its immediate aftermath, as Mr. Barrack, an Arabic speaker of Lebanese descent who had known Mr. Trump and many Arab leaders for decades, assumed the roles of fund-raiser, public surrogate, party planner and informal adviser. He sought to guide Mr. Trump’s candidacy and fledgling administration.

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Between 2016 and 2018, Mr. Barrack and Mr. Grimes were in regular contact with Rashid al-Malik, an Emirati businessman who was an intermediary with the country’s officials. Mr. Grimes and Mr. Barrack shared drafts of editorials, position papers and speeches with Mr. al-Malik, soliciting feedback from Emirati officials.

They helped arrange meetings between Gulf leaders and Trump campaign and administration officials and drafted a “U.A.E. Strategy” document that laid out recommendations for increasing Emirati influence in the United States.

In 2019, prosecutors said, Mr. Barrack sat for a voluntary interview with the government and lied repeatedly about his activities.

For two years, Mr. Barrack’s lawyers have said, he heard nothing about any investigation into his work in the Middle East. Then, in July 2021, he and Mr. Grimes were arrested.

Mr. al-Malik was also charged, but he left the United States in 2018 after the government interviewed him, and his whereabouts remain unknown, prosecutors have said. Still, he loomed large in the trial — a repeated point of contention between the government and the defense was Mr. al-Malik’s use of the phrase “the big man,” which Mr. Barrack’s lawyers said referred to himself, and prosecutors said was a clear reference to a top Emirati security official.

Mr. Barrack and Mr. Grimes were charged with a violation of Section 951 of the U.S. criminal code, a statute that grew out of the Espionage Act in the early 20th century. The law has been used in recent years against Russian agents embedded in the United States, an airline employee who was smuggling military secrets for Chinese officials, and a woman accused of running a Russian propaganda campaign in America.

In Mr. Barrack’s case, prosecutors argued that he and Mr. Grimes were part of an “intelligence-gathering operation” directed by the Emiratis — that they had conspired, subtly and secretly, to undermine the integrity of the American political system and manipulate the media.

“This is not a game,” Sam Nitze, a prosecutor, said in his rebuttal summation Tuesday, noting the weighty international issues that emerged in the trial — the war in Yemen, the blockade of Qatar, the Republican Party’s platform. “This case is about a betrayal of the interests of the United States.”

The defense urged the jury to reject that reading of the facts.

“This whole prosecution has been an act of misdirection,” Randall Jackson, one of Mr. Barrack’s lawyers, said during his closing argument on Tuesday. “What exactly did Tom and Matthew influence? What exactly did they say that wasn’t true?”

Mr. Jackson castigated the government for suggesting — “with no real proof whatsoever” — that the relationship between Mr. Barrack and Mr. Grimes was some kind of sinister conspiracy and that they operated “subject to the direction and control of a foreign government.”

The trial’s outcome was forecast in some ways before the jury even started deliberating on Wednesday.

Toward the end of the trial, the jury sent an ominous message to the government. One morning, before the jury entered the courtroom, Judge Brian M. Cogan told the assembled parties that “a few of the jurors” had reported to his staff that they “feel the government is staring at them and they’re getting a little uncomfortable.”

And before the jury entered on Tuesday morning, Judge Cogan said that many of the government’s theories were “right on the line of impermissible inference.” It was a stark statement, suggesting his doubts about the case’s strength..

Foreign governments seeking favored status with U.S. presidential administrations is nothing new. Wealthier nations, including the Emirates, have tried to exert influence on American politics and culture through large donations to universities and think tanks, and by hiring armies of lobbyists to steer legislation in Washington.

But during the Trump administration, some Persian Gulf nations intensified their efforts to gain access to the president, his top aides and others in their orbit, many of whom had little foreign policy experience and were viewed as particularly susceptible to influence.

As the Justice Department ramped up its prosecution of foreign-influence cases, it has encountered mixed success.

In 2019, Bijan Rafiekian — the former business partner of Mr. Trump’s onetime national security adviser, Michael Flynn — was convicted of acting as an undisclosed agent of Turkey, and on lobbying-related charges. This year, Mr. Rafiekian was granted a new trial.

Mr. Flynn admitted in 2017 to having been an unregistered lobbyist for a Turkish businessman, and ultimately pleaded guilty to a count of lying to investigators, but was ultimately pardoned by Mr. Trump.

In October 2020, Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser for President Trump, pleaded guilty to conspiring to influence the administration for Chinese and Malaysian interests. Mr. Broidy was also pardoned by Mr. Trump in his final days in office.

Democrats have also been subject to similar investigations. In 2019, a federal jury acquitted Gregory Craig, a powerful Democratic lawyer, on charges that he lied to federal authorities about work he did for the Ukrainian government. Like Mr. Barrack, Mr. Craig took the stand in his own defense

It is so sad what the NY Times has become.

Ten years ago it was the best paper in the USA. Now it's just as partisan as the Wash. Post or the Boston Globe. These are the idiots who invented 1619.

The Opinion section is just a bunch of rabble rousing communist sympathizers pitching every crazy DEI theory they can hallucinate.

WSJ is all that's left of the successful and moderate papers.

Yep, standard MO with the media. They’ll carry a story front page for weeks or months, then have the correction, rebuttal, acquittal buried later. Of course this is all the more so with a member from the right.

I go back to the ‘John doe’ investigation in WI during the Gov Walker years. They had the story & headline for years, ‘investigation into the Walker administration’.

After years, nothing became of it, with the last of the critical elections, it quietly went away.

There is little hope for NY and the NYT’s if things continue to go this way. We have a chance to change NY on Tuesday, I feel there is no hope for the Times.