Robert Mueller obtains guilty plea in Trump-Russia election rigging plot

| 4:34 pm EST February 16, 2018
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It wasn’t enough of a victory for Special Counsel Robert Mueller today when he obtained grand jury indictments against thirteen Russian nationals who conspired to rig the election in Donald Trump’s favor. Mueller then took a victory lap by revealing that he recently obtained a guilty plea from a U.S. citizen who was involved in that same Trump-Russia election rigging plot.

There’s a guy named Richard Pinedo in California who’s about to become a household name, because he just cut a plea deal with Mueller. Pinedo is an online scammer who bought and sold bank account numbers in order to help criminals obscure their online transactions (link). So what the heck does this have to do with the Trump-Russia scandal? It’s not too difficult to decipher that the Russians were using this guy to try to cover their financial tracks as they were funding their election meddling. This guy cut a deal, and helped with today’s indictments against those Russians. So now what?

This is the first known instance of an American being charged with crimes related to Russia rigging the election in Trump’s favor. Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have been charged with serious crimes against the United States, but those mostly relate to their years of taking illegal Russian payouts in exchange for political hackery. George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn both cut deals which saw them pleading guilty to lying to federal investigators, so we don’t know the specific charges they would have faced if they hadn’t cooperated. But this time it’s different.

We’ve finally and officially reached the point at which Americans are being charged for crimes related to the Trump-Russia plot to rig the election. Richard Pinedo is the first; he won’t be the last. In fact, some of the next people to be charged in this plot are already household names.