It was reported yesterday that Paul Manafort’s lawyers appear to be fighting every hedgerow with prosecutors while Gates and his legal team might be on the cusp of a deal.
Little noticed in yesterday’s morass of sordid and sad happenings was the mistake that Manafort’s lawyers made in a routine court filing. The barely two-page filing concerned the court’s scheduling order and case deadlines, but attached to it was a third page that appears to be notes from Manafort’s lawyers in which they outlined contacts between the special counsel’s office and the Associated Press. Those contacts, apparently, resulted in an AP story last year about the payouts, noting that they appeared to confirm the booking of some of those illegal payments by Manafort’s firm.
The interesting part of this story isn’t the contact between the special counsel and the media. (Why this is relevant to Manafort’s defense strategy escapes me.) It’s also not that Manafort’s lawyers were sloppy and screwed up badly by mistakenly filing work product.
What’s interesting here is, who is CS-1?
“CS” is parlance for “confidential source,” and usually these sources (at least by uncreative agencies) are numbered sequentially. These notes state that an “employee of DMI” — this is the name of Manafort’s firm — “CS-1 permitted the reporter to view material on a hard drive copy of DMI’s electronic files.” What this means is that the special counsel had an informant inside Manafort’s firm. It wasn’t Manafort. And who else would have access to ledgers documenting illegal payments received for acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government other than the other guy involved in the money laundering scheme? That would be Gates, the guy who — shockingly! — seems to be in a much more cooperative posture with Mueller’s team.
All the news right now is about obstruction/firing Comey/firing Flynn and whether Trump is going to interview with Mueller (he’s not) or be subpoenaed (I doubt that, too). But remember that the “meat” of this investigation is the Russia conspiracy stuff; you know, people who knowingly acted to compromise the integrity of our democratic processes. The reports of a possible forthcoming deal with Gates, and the possibility of him being CS-1, might portend some real movement on this part of the investigation. Let’s hope so.
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Hat tip to hannah, who posted in the comments below that the filing is not a mistake. I think hannah is right. The “mistakenly” attached document bears a number indicating that it was filed separately from the original two-page pleading: it was filed as an exhibit or attachment to that original document, which requires several separate, independent steps to accomplish. It’s not a mistake: e.g., the lawyer didn’t pick up an extra document off the printer and then accidentally scan and file it.
That begs the question, of course, of why they’d do this. I think it’s a big “who cares?” that someone in Manafort’s firm, who also happened to be an informant, was also leaking information to the AP. None of that’s material to Manafort’s criminal liability and, at least to me, none of it impugns the credibility or integrity of the special counsel investigation.