For months now, Donald Trump has been courting and wooing Paul Manafort, blatantly encouraging his former campaign manager not to “break,” not to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller.
In fact, the president of the United States sounded for all the world like a mob boss, encouraging an underling not to rat him out.
Trump lauded Manafort, calling him “a very good person” and expressing “such respect for a brave man.” Manafort’s trial in Virginia, the president said, represented “a very sad day for our country.”
When asked about a potential pardon, Trump would play coy, acting noncommittal yet always managing to mention how much sympathy he had for Manafort’s plight. He also condemned the FBI for an early morning raid of Manafort’s home, calling it “pretty tough stuff,” and Trump supporters such as Newt Gingrich quickly chimed in.
“It ain’t the rule of law when they kick in your door at 3 in the morning,” said Gingrich, ordinarily a great fan of aggressive law enforcement. “That’s Stalin. That’s the Gestapo in Germany.”
Well, it didn’t work. Appearing in federal court on Friday, Manafort pleaded guilty and agreed to “extensively cooperate” with special counsel Robert Mueller.
Immediately after the news broke, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders tried to minimize its impact, arguing that "this had absolutely nothing to do with the president or his victorious 2016 presidential campaign. It is totally unrelated.”
That statement is correct; it is also largely inconsequential. While none of the crimes to which Manafort confessed have anything to do with the Trump campaign or with a potential conspiracy to accept Russian help in that campaign, the cooperation agreement that he signed would certainly include those subjects.
For example, did Manafort, Trump and other campaign officials know of Russian hacking before leaked emails and other information were released publicly? Did Trump know beforehand about the Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton? Did Trump personally approve that meeting?
Manafort knows the answer. Manafort knows the answers to questions that the rest of us don’t know enough to even ask. And now, despite Trump’s begging and pleading, Manafort has agreed to talk.
Four final points:
1.) Whatever Manafort knows, Trump apparently fears it. This sustained, coordinated effort to convince Manafort to be a good soldier, keep his mouth shut and take his medicine did not happen accidentally. It risked undercutting Trump’s own protestations of innocence, but Trump nonetheless thought it necessary to try. As of Friday, that gamble had failed.
2.) With eight felony convictions already on the books against Manafort, and with additional convictions likely, Mueller has been negotiating from a position of considerable strength. So if he chose to cut a deal with Manafort, he did so not to ensure convictions but because he knows that Manafort possesses important information that he could not have obtained from other sources.
3.) Other potential Mueller targets are also on notice now, turning up the pressure to come clean while they can do so. For example, if I’m Donald Trump Jr. or Jared Kushner -- well, let’s just say I’m very glad I’m not.
4.) It might be hard to believe, but after reading through today’s court filings, I get the feeling that the Trump/Russia angle might be just a part of the corruption and fraud that Mueller is pursuing, and that the scale of his investigation may be about to expand significantly.
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