Article snippet: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has shown his first cards – and they make statements by themselves. The next move belongs to President Donald Trump, setting up a clash that could reverberate through the rest of his presidency. On one level, the first action from Mueller’s team produced a narrow pair of indictments, plus a guilty plea by a peripheral Trump campaign player. Mueller this morning dropped charges on Presidential Inauguration Committee, regarding tax fraud, money laundering and legal violations related to their lobbying business. The indictment and the guilty plea don’t touch on Trump’s own actions. It doesn’t definitively answer questions of collusion with Russian operatives, though it does start to map out attempted collusion -- the purported purpose of Mueller’s probe in the first place. Taken as a whole, Mueller, it appears, could be making a series of tactical moves that put the president’s legal team and the president himself on notice that more heat is coming. It’s important to realize who Manafort and Gates were in the Trump orbit, and what was going on during the critical period during which they held leadership roles. Manafort took over the campaign to help navigate a convention that Trump had every reason to think would be contested – an insider’s insider meant to bring discipline and planning to a haphazard operation. He was at the helm at a time that – as has been established by Hillary Clinton they thought was being ped... Link to the full article to read more