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I don’t know how good an idea this is for Manafort’s future-it seems like a terrible one.

https://twitter.com/benjaminwittes/status/1067206592708452353?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1067206592708452353&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fevilsax.pressbooks.com%2Fwp%2Fwp-admin%2Fpost.php%3Fpost%3D4746%26action%3Dedit

But it certainly is helpful for me, as the author of this book. After all, in the Watergate 2.0 scandal, I’d named Manafort Trump’s G. Gordon Liddy 2.0-in the sense that Manafort seemed willing to go to prison for many years as Liddy was willing to do for Nixon. So when the news of Manafort’s plea deal in early September it was quite a curve to my storyline-it looked as if G. Gordon Liddy 2.0 had reconsidered. There was news of the 55 hours of interviews he did with the Manafort team.

To be sure, there were always signs that something was amiss. Just a week after the news of Manafort’s plea deal Rudy Giuliani expressed great confidence that Manafort would not implicate Trump. From where did he derive this great confidence? From Manafort himself?

FN: In retrospect Manafort was sentenced to 7 and a half years-in what was arguably a lenient sentence though he does have have more potential prison time coming from the Manhattan DA. 

But to judge if he’s a rational actor you’d have know what he’s trying to achieve. As to what his actual endgame it’s arguable he’s looking for a pardon-if so then you could argue his actions were rational in persuading Trump to pardon him; though ultimately it comes down to wether or not seeking a pardon rather than cooperating with prosecutors is the best strategy for Manafort himself.

It’s clear however that it’s the best strategy for Trump as it obscured the full breadth and scope of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign-it’s clear from the Mueller Report that the dissemblings of both Manafort and Jerome Corsi did obscure it.

End of FN.

“President Trump’s lead lawyer said Monday that attorneys for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort have reiterated that the president has nothing to fear from Manafort’s cooperation with federal investigators.”

“Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said that Manafort’s legal team assured him as recently as Saturday — the day after Manafort struck a plea deal with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III — that he has no information that will incriminate the president or his family, including eldest son Donald Trump Jr.

“Giuliani said he also thinks that Manafort has no evidence to suggest the Trump campaign colluded with Russians.”

“We’ve talked to their side,” Giuliani said. “The statement is, there is nothing that is adverse to the president, the Trump family, the Trump campaign.”

“Giuliani declined to name who provided the assurances, but two people briefed on the discussions said Manafort attorney Kevin Downing has been in contact with Trump’s lawyers.”

UPDATE: As documented in Chapters A and B the House Dems need to find out Jr and Kusher got off. They will need to get to the bottom of these alleged reassurances Rudy got from the Mueller team. The Dems should ask Mueller directly about such conversations.

End of UPDATE.

While no one yet knows for sure what happened here, one plausible theory suggested by former Watergate prosecutor, Nick Ackerman, on Ari Melber last night is that Manafort thought he was smart enough to game Mueller-pretend to be cooperating but in fact still talking to team Treason Trump and still angling for a deal with Traitor Trump himself.

In retrospect, Mueller was onto Manafort and warned him the first week of November:

So now  Mueller says Manafort repeatedly lied to them, the plea deal is off and  Manafort should be sentenced immediately-a sentence that could put him in prison for close to the rest of his life.

“Prosecutors with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III said Monday that Paul Manafort breached his plea agreement, accusing President Trump’s former campaign chairman of lying repeatedly to them in their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“Manafort denied doing so intentionally, but both sides agreed in a court filing that U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District should set sentencing immediately.”

So Manafort’s team is acting pretty cavalier about what’s likely to put the 69 year old Manafort in prison for 15 years.

“The apparent collapse of Manafort’s cooperation agreement is the latest stunning turnaround in his case, exposing the longtime Republican consultant to at least a decade behind bars after he pleaded guilty in September to charges of cheating the Internal Revenue Service, violating foreign-lobbying laws and attempting to obstruct justice.

“The filing also indicated that Mueller’s team may have lost its potentially most valuable witness in Manafort, a top campaign official present at discussions at the heart of the special counsel’s mission to determine if any Americans conspired with Russia’s efforts to sway the U.S. election.”

“Still, prosecutors may know more about Manafort’s interactions than he realized, allowing them to catch him in alleged lies.”

Basically it seems plausible that Manafort thought he could feign cooperation while spinning Mueller and continuing to work with the Trump team because he didn’t know how much Mueller actually knows-a good lawyer never asks a question s/he doesn’t know the answer to, and Mueller is a great lawyer to say the least.

As for Manafort if you assume he’s a rational actor then you probably assume he’s angling for a pardon.

Seth Abramson has the same thought-that Manafort’s lies were about something really big:

FN: I should note that Abramson seems to throw a little-unnecessary!-snark at Emptywheel. On the other hand based on an exchange I had with Marcy Wheeler on Twitter she seems to be no fan of his either. I had mentioned something he said to her and she was like ‘Mike maybe you should find another guru.’

Unfortunately I’ve found a lot of those who have done good analysis on-what I call-Watergate 2.0, more popularly known as Trump-Russia-tend to be dismissive of each other’s work. Perhaps its competition. Which is too bad as they should all pool their work and cooperate to get to the truth of the biggest political crime in American history. Personally I tend to think of anyone doing great research or analysis as being on the same team-my team-but this doesn’t seem to be the attitude of many. While Abramson-and pretty much everyone-has thrown shade at Louise Mensch-for perhaps some legitimate but also illegitimate reasons-IMO both Abramson and Wheeler ought to listen to the imploring words of Rodney King: can’t we all just get along? 

For the good of the Republic? A Republic very much under threat-even if the Democrats win in 2020-assuming they fail to impeach him before that. And a Marcy Wheeler and a Seth Abramson both do legal analysis Trump-Russia but from slightly different lanes-there’s always room for another perspective of the same crime scene and investigation.

Personally I read both as I suspect many in the #Resistance do-yes I’m aware Abramson doesn’t like that term either.. I like it as it points to the breadth of the threat before us-one that winning in 2020 is a very necessary but not sufficient step. It’s possible for Trump to leave after he’s totally destroyed our institutions in a way that are irreparable-which is what will happen if Pelosi continues to do nothing but shrug at his abuses, obstruction, authoritarianism and rank illegitimacy-she even shrugged her shoulders at an accusation of rape.

End of FN.

As do other analysts:

Still it’s debatable that Team Mueller has lost it’s ‘most valuable witness.’ Certainly he was valuable:

 

But there are other similarly valuable witnesses-don’t forget Rick Gates who knows most everything Manafort knows:

FN: It’s true that there are other witnesses though Manafort clearly had a central role in the Trump campaign’s very clear collusion with the Russian government-he was campaign manager during the time of the DNC email dump and based on what we now know per the MR about what Gates told Mueller-he was totally involved and extremely enthusiastic about Russia.

Then there’s all the polling he sent to Konstantin Kilimnik. While Mueller says he wasn’t able to determine the purpose of sending the polling-because of Manafort’s lack of honesty-it’s hard to think there’s much reasonable doubt it was for a nefarious purpose. What possible innocent explanation could there have been? Yet another question the Dem House needs to ask Mueller when he testifies later this month.

Then there’s the Roger Stone-Jerome Corsi-Randy Credico-Julian Assange nexus…

UPDATE: As documented in Chapter A-after the MSM decided the Guardian story about meetings between Manafort and Assange both prior to-and the last one during the campaign-had cooties they further decided that any story linking Manafort and Assange has cooties on it-even the NYT story’s own reporting that Manafort had met with the Ecuadorean President regarding turning over Manafort to the US in 2017.

But Abramson’s hypothesis that it was Manafort who directed Roger Stone to find out what else Assange had on July 23, 2016 makes a great deal of sense-first of all he was the campaign manager at the time. We know that Bannon was Stone’s point person about the Podesta emails-at that point Bannon was campaign director so it stands to reason that Manafort as the reigning leader of the campaign in June-July-early August of 2016 had that same role before you even get to the fact that he and Stone had a 40 year business relationship and friendship and Stone brags of being who got Manafort in has Corey Lewandowski’s replacement.

But again this is simply ruled out by the ‘smart set’ who has decided the idea of any Manafort-Assange link is simply absurd on its face.

End of UPDATE

Manafort, then, apparently never gave up on his pardon angle-maybe trying to have the best of both worlds-but not giving 100% accurate information to Mueller.

But as Marcy Wheeler argues, the Manafort deal was always something of a win-win for Mueller.

FN: As noted in Chapter A, Bill Barr turned out to be what we feared Whittaker was-he is just as corruptly partisan as Whittaker-with just as many biased public statements on the record proving he couldn’t be trusted-but with knowledge and competence on how the machinery works. It turns out that there was plenty that could be done for Trump short of literally firing Mueller-it remains to be seen if Mueller wasn’t kind of ‘fired’ in March 2019-was he forced to close up early? Another question for the Congressional Democrats in a few weeks.

End of FN.

She also argues that this now guarantees Mueller the ability to offer up a public report

Back when Paul Manafort first entered a plea agreement, I argued the effects of it could not be pardoned away.

Here’s why this deal is pardon proof:

  1. Mueller spent the hour and a half delay in arraignment doing … something. It’s possible Manafort even presented the key parts of testimony Mueller needs from him to the grand jury this morning.
  2. The forfeiture in this plea is both criminal and civil, meaning DOJ will be able to get Manafort’s $46 million even with a pardon.
  3. Some of the dismissed charges are financial ones that can be charged in various states.

Since that time, Mueller has been busy finishing up the Roger Stone indictment, Trump has finally finished his open book test, and any owners of the property Manafort had to forfeit under the plea deal had their 30-day window to challenge the forfeiture (only the bank owning the loan on his Trump Tower condo is known to have contested the forfeiture, which means the government may already be irretrievably seizing $43 million of Manafort’s property).

So Manafort gets no get out of jail free card and he does not get to collect his $43 million dollars. Renato Mariotti notes the same thing, that Mueller has broad room to invalidate the agreement if Manafort didn’t cooperate 100%:

Which brings us to the status report that Mueller’s team delayed long enough to get that open book test.”

“As I noted back in September, the standard the government has to prove to claim Manafort has breached his agreement is just “good faith,” as compared to preponderance of the evidence with Rick Gates.

With Gates, the standard the government has to prove to argue he has breached his agreement is preponderance of the evidence or, in case of committing a crime, probable cause. With Manafort, the government only has to prove “good faith.”

Now, it is true that Trump can pardon Manafort (though that probably won’t happen right away). That’s the only sane explanation for Manafort doing what he did, that he is still hoping he’ll be pardoned. But many of these charges can still be charged in state court.

Just about the only explanation for Manafort’s actions are that — as I suggested — Trump was happy to have Manafort serve as a mole in Mueller’s investigation.

But it turns out Mueller was on to him all along-ie, while Manafort thought he was gaming them they were in fact gaming him. 

But Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.

So they basically gave Manafort misinformation that he gave Trump who would base the lies on his open book test on this misinformation. Yep-genius.

But the genius is even deeper than that as now this guarantees a Mueller report:

And that “detailed sentencing submission … sett[ing] forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” that Mueller mentions in the report?

True-at this point we know only that Mueller caught Manafort in many lies-the real fun will be when we discover what those lies were about-perhaps they were about something really big indeed the biggest-proof of Trump’s criminality and coordination in the conspiracy to rig an American election.

There’s your Mueller report, which will be provided in a form that Matt Whitaker won’t be able to suppress. (Reminder: Mueller included 38 pages of evidence along with Manafort’s plea agreement, which I argued showed how what Manafort and Trump did to Hillary was the same thing that Manafort had done to Yulia Tymoshenko.)”

UPDATE: This was during a time when many worried that there would be no meaningful Mueller Report-one fear that didn’t come to fruition thankfully. Still Barr was able to find other ways to help Trump politically-as noted in Chapter A-Giuliani and Friends long saw the real fight as a political fight. Barr surely has done much to protect Herr Trump politically.

It’s certainly arguable that Manafort would have been better to have sought a plea rather than apparently playing for a pardon. But certainly Manafort’s dissembling was highly beneficial for the fake ‘President.’

 

So Manafort’s status as Trump’s G. Gordon Liddy remains intact-unless he reconsiders again as the reality a 20 year sentence at age 69  begins to dawn on him. But for now apparently Trump has multiple Liddys. Yesterday was a big day for Trump’s Liddys:

Suggesting both Corsi, Manafort-and presumably at some point Stone-are playing for pardons.

FN: Of course, Corsi was able in fact to taint his indictment-leaking the draft, lies, etc.

Finally, some thoughts from Mariotti on the issue of Trump pardoning Manafort:

I certainly expect a President Kamala Harris or President Cory Booker to do just that and will be outraged if they don’t-as Obama did on the Bush WH criminals and Bill Clinton did on Reagan-Iran collusion (Chapter X).

UPDATE: Kamala has made comments that suggest she would as has Elizabeth Warren. And we need to watch both these women in the coming months as there’s a good chance 1 of them will be the nominee. 

Personally I agree with the futures market-Kamala’s the best bet after her beatdown of Biden.

End of UPDATE

Which brings us to another interesting subject-the investigations into Reagan-Iran collusion and how Bush Sr. did in fact pardon six witnesses in ‘the Iran Affair’ which prevented a trial of Casper Weinberger. 

FN: Of course, Coverup AG Barr executed that for Sr which is why while the institutionalists-Ben Wittes, Chuck Rosenberg, et al-are shocked by Barr’s treachery it shouldn’t have been remotely surprising.

So those who assume Trump can’t/won’t pardon anyone like Manafort-Corsi-Stone should note that it’s been done before. Indeed,  Alan Dershowitz has been citing Bush’s pardons-of witnesses who were material to a case effectively against both himself and Reagan-as  evidence that Trump can pardon whomever he wants.

This is a crucial overlooked point that we look at in more detail in (Chapter Y).

 

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