By Martin Vassolo and Nicholas Nehamas
A military official formerly in charge of all White House communications (click here) for the U.S. Army at Mar-a-Lago was sentenced to three years of probation on Friday after he made false statements to a federal agent during a child pornography investigation.
Richard Ciccarella — a non-commissioned officer who told federal agents he was in charge of communications at President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort — became a target of an investigation after he uploaded photos of a young girl to a seedy Russian website between 2017 and 2018, according to court documents.
Ciccarella used the username RICH25N to upload suspicious photographs and folders to the website iMGSRC.RU between November 2017 and February 2018, according to court documents.
He posted one photo of the underage girl wearing only underwear and standing next to a Christmas tree. He titled it “dirty comments welcomed.” He uploaded a similar photo of the girl playing a board game.
Comments on the pictures included “can she be my present?” and “strip candy land!!! Why didn’t I think of that!”
Ciccarella accessed the website with an email address linked to his work phone, court records state.....
Moscow — Russia has voiced hope that the U.S. administration (click here) wouldn't publish private conversations between the two nations' presidents, like it did with Ukraine.
The rough transcript of Trump's call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy released by the White House Wednesday shows that Trump urged Ukraine to "look into" his Democratic political rival Joe Biden. The July 25 call is now the focus of a U.S. impeachment probe.
Asked Friday if Moscow is worried that the White House could similarly publish transcripts of Trump's calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that "we would like to hope that it wouldn't come to that in our relations, which are already troubled by a lot of problems."
He noted that the publication of the Trump-Zelenskiy call was "quite unusual....
