11/27-28/18: For the President of the United States these are terrible days, even if witness tampering has been fun.
Late Monday, news breaks that Mueller and his team will terminate a plea agreement with Paul Manafort. Manafort, prosecutors now claim, has continued to lie even after a deal was reached.
For some reason, this development infuriates the President of the United States. Trump is surely the first president ever to call a ten-time felon – Manafort – “brave” for refusing to cooperate with an ongoing investigation.
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| Roger Stone is already planning ahead. |
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“It was never discussed, but I wouldn’t take it off the table. Why would I take it off the table?”
President Trump, asked if he had considered a
pardon for Paul Manafort
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Tuesday morning he’s still steaming when he awakes, and the tweets start flying even before he rolls his roly-poly bod out of the sack. His id is loose and at 7:30 a.m. he’s worked himself into a rage:
The Phony Witch Hunt continues,
but Mueller and his gang of Angry Dems are only looking at one side, not the
other. Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating
people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie. Mueller is a conflicted prosecutor
gone rogue....
....The Fake News Media builds
Bob Mueller up as a Saint, when in actuality he is the exact opposite
[emphasis added]. He is doing TREMENDOUS damage to our Criminal Justice System…
The obvious question, if Trump is innocent, is why this legal
move incenses the president? Does he really care about poor Manafort, who has
been convicted by a jury on eight felony counts and agreed to plead guilty on
two more? Or is the president worried about his own tanner-tinted hide?
Trump’s funk does not dissipate when The New York Times adds fresh detail to the story. It turns out that a lawyer for Manafort has been visiting the White House regularly to keep Trump’s legal team abreast on what investigators have been asking and what they already know. Is it legal for lawyers of a convicted criminal and lawyers of a potential criminal suspect to confer? It is. Is it unusual? It is.
Is it especially unusual and possibly illegal when the potential criminal suspect (Trump) has the power to pardon the criminal (Manafort)?
It certainly is.
So, working quietly behind the scenes, Mueller and his team withdraw the plea agreement. And poor Mr. Manafort is headed back to solitary confinement in an Alexandria, Virginia jail.
Authorities say he’s in solitary confinement for his safety. Right-wing pundits are horrified by such treatment. Black guy gunned down under questionable circumstances by police? Probably deserved it. Children separated from parents along the border and locked in cages? Hey, they’re Hondurans!
Rich white guy parked in solitary – what an outrage!
(Anyway, you can read about the “terrible” conditions
Manafort is facing in an excellent article by Vox.
Perks for Paul include a separate bathroom, a laptop and phone use 12 hours daily.)
Pundits left and right spend the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday arguing about what this all means. On Fox News the consensus forms that Mueller is a dangerous man.
In reality, Trump is an existential threat to the rule of law. His behavior clearly shows the president is rattled by this point. He knows there are reports that Manafort secretly met with Julian Assange shortly before joining the 2016 campaign. Assange and WikiLeaks played a critical role in delivering stolen Clinton emails to the press, emails that were stolen by Russians, in an effort to help Trump. The president knows that Mueller has evidence that Roger Stone, a campaign adviser, was pushing Assange to release those emails at just the right time.
The question then, and it has to keep President Trump up late at night, is can Mueller put these separate arcs, and many more, together and form a circle, showing Trump and his pals “colluded” with Russians?
Legally, the operative term is “conspired,” not “colluded,”
and no matter how many times Trump tweets, “No Collusion” (81 tweets, so far) conspiracy is still going to be a crime.
I’m an evidence-based kind of blogger. So, I would argue it is still remotely possible that Mueller’s final report will clear Trump’s “good name.” However, Mueller and his team are assuredly not going to end up highlighting the president’s good judgment or sterling morals. It should be obvious to all that Mueller already has about half the goods on Donald J. Trump that he needs.
Hey…have we mentioned witness tampering, lately?
Three men – including one felon – who won’t flip.
The most likely explanation for the president’s fury is that he knows Mueller knows plenty and Mueller is building a stronger and stronger case against him – while keeping most of what he knows secret. Mueller knew, for example, two weeks ago that he was going to tear up the plea agreement with Manafort. He held fire and waited to make that known until after the president had submitted his written answers to a series of questions investigators presented to the White House back in April. In other words, Mueller may have waited to spring a “perjury trap.” That is: He waited for Trump to commit perjury, not because he set a trap, but because he knew the president might be happy to commit perjury to save his fat ass.
That Manafort is a sleazy crook is undeniable. He’s a tax cheat, a money-launderer, a liar, and (until recently) an expensively dressed crook. He spent his career serving the interests of an array of Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin, and under any other president, save, perhaps, Warren G. Harding, he’d be looking at life in prison by now.
Yet, for some bizarre reason, he continues to garner the sympathy of President Donald J. Trump.
In recent days, we have seen witness tampering in plain view. On Wednesday, Trump says in an interview with the New York Post that he hasn’t ruled out a pardon for Manafort. “It was never discussed,” he’s quick to point out (that would be patently illegal), “but I wouldn’t take it off the table. Why would I take it off the table?”
Um…because you sound like you’re engaged in a criminal
conspiracy? Other than that: no reason.
Trump complains that the Mueller investigation has gone on for far too long and may continue for the “rest of his life.” And it’s just terrible what prosecutors are doing to all the great criminal suspects.
The Post has this exchange:
“You know this flipping stuff
[cooperating with prosecutors] is terrible. You flip and you lie and you
get—the prosecutors will tell you 99 percent of the time they can get people to
flip. It’s rare that they can’t,” Trump said.
“But I had three people:
Manafort, Corsi – I don’t know Corsi, but he refuses to say what they demanded.
Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone.
“It’s actually very brave,” he
said of the trio. “And I’m telling you, this is McCarthyism. We are in the McCarthy
era. This is no better than McCarthy. And that was a bad situation for the
country. But this is where we are. And it’s a terrible thing.”
Manafort is a potential cooperating witness, or at least was,
in an investigation into Russian efforts to help Trump and his campaign. Trump
is saying, publicly, that he might
pardon Manafort, assuming he does right by his old boss. This is witness
tampering, of the most brazen kind, and if the president can pull it off,
goodbye rule of law.
*
WHAT WE KNOW today for sure is that the plea deal Mueller offered is off and poor Paul is headed back to jail and then court.
Did Candidate Trump know about the meeting?
Boiling it all down, what can we deduce? For Manafort there had seemed to be no way to win if he failed to cooperate. He already faces decades behind bars, and at 68, can hardly relish that fate. A sensible observer must ask: Was he angling for a pardon when he sent his lawyers to the White House for friendly chats? What has the president’s team promised behind closed doors if this “brave” felon stays the course? Have they made clear, if he clams up, he’s guaranteed a pardon in 2020, if Trump isn’t re-elected, or farther down the line, perhaps in 2021, if he is?
The concomitant question: What does Manafort know about Trump and any illegal activities he might have been engaged in during the campaign and what does Trump know Manafort knows?
The gravest implications are in view. Trump and his lawyers may be trying to keep Manafort from helping Mueller close the fated conspiracy circle. We already have numerous arcs proven beyond doubt. We know Manafort participated in the infamous Trump Tower meeting in the summer of 2016. We know the three participants from the Trump campaign knew full well the Russians coming to that meeting were offering dirt on Hillary Clinton to help swing the election. Don Jr. may have already perjured himself in that regard. But did Candidate Trump know about the meeting – before it occurred – or after it was held—and did he lie about knowing?
In plain English (Russian) did Trump conspire (сговариваться) to win the election with Putin’s help?
Has he, as President of the United States, tried to obstruct justice (препятствовать правосудию) in any way?
Manafort is likely in a position to answer
both questions. So, witness tampering (подделка свидетелей) could very well appear to the criminally-inclined in this case to
be worth the risk.
Even more frustrating, Trump’s best-laid plans to protect himself keep running afoul of the law. A number of Republicans in Congress seem concerned with his threats to fire Mueller. Sen. Ben Sasse says the president should quickly nominate a new Attorney General and bring that nomination forward so the Senate can perform its duty to “advise and consent,” to accept or reject his choice. And let’s be honest. We all know, if Trump could get away with it at this point, he’d put son Eric in charge at DOJ and shut the whole Russian investigation down.
Day in, day out, Mueller keeps chip, chip, chipping away and the incessant chipping noise is unnerving the suspect in the Oval Office. Last week George Papadopoulos lost a court skirmish and was sent packing to prison, meaning a presidential pardon will no longer do him good. Manafort might receive a federal pardon in the end; but he’s nearly broke, having agreed to forfeit millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains under his first plea deal. Unless Trump is totally nuts, his old campaign manager is likely going to sit in jail for at least two years, before the president risks a pardon. Roger Stone’s legal woes continue to mount and his protestations of innocence are not bolstered by his admission in June that he did meet with at least one Russian during the campaign. We also learn that Jerome Corsi is prepared to say in a new book that Stone asked him to press Assange to get the damaging emails on Clinton out at just the right moment and that he and Stone concocted a “cover story” to obscure their tracks. Stone, in turn, calls Corsi’s soon-to-be-released story “pure, unadulterated, unmitigated BS.”
“Most of the time he is lying when he’s talking.”
Former Trump campaign manager Cory Lewandowski doesn’t bolster the positions of either Stone or the President of the United States. On Wednesday he sits down for a talk on CNN. “I don’t know Mueller,” he tells John Berman, the host, “but he seems to be a man of character. And I hope he has a truthful and honest investigation.” “When that investigation comes out,” he adds, “I hope it’s made public.” (We should note, Lewandowski also says he hopes Mueller will be investigating the “other side” – Clinton, he means – but that’s a different story to cover.)
As for the veracity of what Stone says now, Lewandowski is blunt.
He said he met with Julian
Assange. This is what he wrote in emails. This is his own words only when
pressed on them, did he say, “Well, what I said and what I did were actually
two separate things, so I don’t know.” But if you take Roger at his own words,
which is difficult to do, because most
of the time he is lying when he’s talking, I don’t know what the truth
is.
So it is: that with each passing week, bits and pieces of arc are fitted in their rightful place. The circle comes closer to completion. Trump knows it. Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, and General Flynn have flipped; and the president can’t be sure what they’ve told investigators so far.
(For a look at behind-the-scenes
witness tampering, see the post for 6/22/19, involving Sean Hannity and
Manafort.)
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