What is the crime that has prompted the prosecutorial abuses of Manafort?

Melanie Phillips:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s squad inquiring into allegations of collusion between Team Trump and President Putin’s Russia broke into the home of Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort in the middle of the night, drew their guns on Manafort and his wife, carted out boxes of stuff and took out Manafort himself in handcuffs and pyjamas, telling him to expect an indictment.

For what, precisely?

If prosecuting authorities uncover evidence to support a prosecution, they charge someone. They don’t tell that individual to expect a charge about some unspecified offence at some unspecified future date unless they are putting the metaphorical screws on him. Nor do they physically strong-arm him as though he were a dangerous mobster especially if – as in the case of Manafort – he was already cooperating with Congressional investigators and had made 300 pages of documents available to them.

Manafort may have unsavoury business associations – as former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy puts it, he is “tight with Kremlin cronies, and his roster of lobbying clients includes a rogues’ gallery of human-rights abusers and corruptocrats”. But so far there has been no evidence at all to connect him to unconstitutional dealings with the Russians.

Manafort hasn’t been arrested. Nor has Mueller’s inquiry uncovered a shred of evidence to connect Donald Trump or anyone else in his team to such unconstitutional dealings. So why does Mueller need no fewer than 17 publicly-funded prosecutors – “five times the number of lawyers the Justice Department customarily assigns to crimes of the century” – on his squad?

This whole Mueller inquiry reeks of a gross abuse of process – and a rolling coup against a sitting president.
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It also looks like the FBI and some in the DOJ are engaged in a cover-up by their refusal to cooperate with Congressional investigations of their activities during the election that suggests an attempt by the Obama administration to use intelligence agencies to spy on political opponents.

The Gestapo tactics used in this investigation support the contention that this is a coup attempt.