Even justice doesn’t need braille on her elevator control panel.
Was Trump too smart enough to boast that Manafort was the (only) one who could implicate him in wrongdoing, because of a meeting on June 7, 2016 that has not gotten much attention. The Grand Jury could have even gotten that bit of the story.
But while Rudy was smiling and Trump was planning his pardon tweet, Manafort had already begun to cooperate with the special counsel’s office. As Marcy Wheeler pointed out: The revelations of Manafort’s cooperating agreement was an jaw-dropping moment in court, but the action is already over. Manafort has already given the most critical information to investigators.
Donald Trump could fire up the pardon machine right now … and it won’t matter. It won’t bring back the $46 million of property Manafort has agreed to forfeit. And it won’t save Trump from one moment of important testimony.
At this point, Robert Mueller has the cooperation of Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn. If that’s not enough, he has Michael Cohen begging to cooperate and Trump accountant Allen Weisselberg testifying to the US attorney under a grant of immunity.
www.dailykos.com/...
More interesting are the items that can be discussed under “cooperation”. "Count One...From 2006 and 2017...inclusive...Manafort ...conspired to defraud the United States."
Perhaps we can see the beginning of the end of the Trump era.
“….no one outside of the deal knew that the plea did include cooperation until Manafort was already pleading guilty.”
Here’s why this deal is pardon proof:
- 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.
- 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.
- Some of the dismissed charges are financial ones that can be charged in various states.
Remember, back in January, Trump told friends and aides that Manafort could incriminate him (the implication was that only Manafort could). I believe Mueller needed Manafort to describe what happened in a June 7, 2016 meeting between the men, in advance of the June 9 meeting. I have long suspected there was another meeting at which Manafort may be the only other Trump aide attendee.
And Manafort has probably already provided evidence on whatever Mueller needed.
So here’s what Robert Mueller just did: He sewed up the key witness to implicate the President, and he paid for the entire investigation.
Manafort knows from knowing Trump since the 1980s, despite the joint defense agreement, that Trump can screw him, but also that there are other criminal forces at work.
The document is also studded with new details—examples and anecdotes that Mueller’s prosecutors probably expected to display before the jury. One of these stories involve a Manafort effort in October 2012 to whip up “[O]bama jews.”
At the time, a top priority of Manafort was discrediting Yulia Tymoshenko, a political foe of Yanukovych. She had lost the 2010 presidential election to Yanukovych and the following year was arrested and imprisoned by his government. Much of Manafort’s clandestine campaign at this time focused on defending the Yanukovych regime’s handling of the Tymoshenko case, which drew international criticism. For instance, according to this filing, Manafort directed lobbyists “to write and disseminate within the United States news stories that alleged that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official.”
In addition, the information notes, Manafort “orchestrated a scheme to have, as he wrote in a contemporaneous communication, ‘[O]bama jews’ put pressure on the Administration to disavow Tymoshenko and support Yanukovych.”
www.motherjones.com/...
Trump has spent his daily tweets bombarding us with retweets of NC weather warnings, because a storm surge is coming.