The Russian foreign ministry uncovered an error in the Muller indictment which they claim means that charges are “cooked up”.
Russia’s foreign ministry has cited a factual error in the indictment against Paul Manafort as proof the allegations are “cooked up” and not part of a “serious investigation.”
Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, and his business associate, Rick Gates, are accused of charges including conspiracy against the U.S., money laundering, being an unregistered foreign agent and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
But the spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, pointed out that the 31-page indictment wrongly describes Yulia Tymoshenko as a former president of Ukraine.
In fact, Tymoshenko twice served as the country’s prime minister, before being jailed in 2011 on embezzlement charges that the U.S. and others said were politically motivated.
“I liked a lot the bit that, it turns out, according to the recent findings of American enforcers, the Ukrainian president before [Viktor] Yanukovych was Yulia Tymoshenko,” Zakharova told the state-owned Russia 1 television station Monday. “We did not know that, but there you go.”
She suggested that the mistake undermined the rest of the indictment.
“This is a very important moment showing the way how, once again, this document had been made, cooked up,” Zakharova added. “You understand when you talk about serious investigation one cannot allow things like that.
I think we all can understand that you don’t need to find any small error in the writing to realize this was cooked up. The bottom line is that Muller could find no evidence of collusion so he hit Manafort with a variety of crimes that had nothing to do with the 2016 election or Russia’s meddling in it.
