Paul Manafort exchanged favors for loans, according to the federal government.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump held a press conference to announce that he would not be speaking to congressional Democrats until they put an end to the committee's ongoing investigations into his conduct. At the press conference, he posted a graph of Robert Mueller's special council investigation in which he indicated the number of search warrants, interviews, and so on. According to him, if the thorough investigation of Mueller had no reason to accuse him of conspiring with the Russian intelligence services, what would it be worth to investigate further?

As an ABC journalist pointed out, this graphic was originally created by its network. And there was a second part: the part regarding the number of Trump advisors and associates were indicted by the office of the special advocate for crimes, including fraud, perjury and tampering with witnesses.

Mueller further referred a number of cases related to other prosecutors from the Department of Justice. We do not yet know what all these cases are because information about them has been extracted from his report to Attorney General William Barr. But one of them was probably revealed today when the US Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York announced charges against Stephen Calk, CEO of the Federal Savings Bank. Calk is accused of easing loans to Trump campaign president Paul Manafort in 2016, for which Manafort may not have been eligible because he was about to go bankrupt. the economic advisory board of the Trump campaign and later recommending that Trump's transition team consider him for the position of Under-Secretary of the Army. (Update, 3:25 pm: A lawyer representing Calk claims that he "did nothing wrong and will be exonerated at the trial".)

At a press conference, Barr suggested at a press conference, before publishing the Mueller report, that Trump was justified in his efforts to stop Mueller's investigation because he was "frustrated" that this is unfair to him. The Attorney General then explained at a hearing before a Senate Judiciary Committee that the President had the right to suspend the DOJ's investigations into his conduct if they were "groundless" and based on "false allegations". an illegal project involving the Trump campaign. One can only imagine what an investigation on Trump that was not unfounded might look like.