Glenn Greenwald 'mystified' how Tony Podesta has 'just vanished'
Media coverage of longtime Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta has disappeared completely an astonished Glenn Greenwald remarked last week.
"I'm still somewhat mystified about how Tony Podesta - intimately involved in many of Paul Manafort's slimiest and most unscrupulous practices (because K Street sleaze is 100% bipartisan) - has just vanished from the news cycle and, apparently, legal jeopardy," the Intercept journalist said along with the hashtag "MissingTonyPodesta."
Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who broke the story of U.S. mass surveillance aided by former Central Intelligence Agency analyst Edward Snowden, has been highly critical of Russia investigation coverage and the Democrats' role in fueling it.
His Twitter observation about Podesta, the founder of the now-shuttered Podesta Group and brother to former Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, came ahead of the widely covered sentencing of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who got less than four years behind bars for eight financial crimes, including bank fraud, tax fraud, and failure to disclose a foreign bank account.
Indeed reporting on fresh developments in the Podesta case have been sparse in recent months while the media's focus on the Russia investigation and inquires into President Trump remains intensive and widespread.
Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Manafort led to the review of Podesta and his work for his former firm, the Podesta Group, and other lobbyists. Manafort's and Podesta's firms worked together in a public relations campaign for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine (ECMU) nonprofit, which is believed to be backed by the pro-Russian and oligarch-funded Ukrainian political group, Party of Regions.
Podesta resigned from his lobbying company in October 2017 in response to the investigation of the firm, which closed by the end of that year.
In July 2018, CNN reported the cases involving the work of Podesta, former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, and former Minnesota Republican Rep. Vin Weber were among those referred to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The inquiries involved whether lobbyists and operatives failed to register their work as foreign agents.
That followed an uncorroborated report from Fox News' Tucker Carlson earlier in July that Podesta had been offered immunity by Mueller to testify against Manafort.
T.S. Ellis III, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan and serves on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, sentenced Manafort on Thursday to less than four years in prison, defying a requested prison term of 19 to 24 years by Mueller. Manafort's light sentence could be extended next week in a Washington, D.C., federal court in an illegal lobbying case.
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