Manafort: The Judas Goat
There has been a lot of speculation about what is going on in the Russia investigation, and what this means for the White House. It’s a huge, confusing story arc with a rogue’s gallery of players involved in all sorts of (clumsy) cloak and dagger intrigue. But there’s one piece that doesn’t seem to add up: why did Mueller’s team let Manafort coordinate with the White House legal team?
I’m going to lay out the facts from highly reputable sources in chronological order, and it starts to paint a picture: namely that Mueller’s team acted deliberately to ensure that if Manafort lied after his plea deal, he would take the White House down with him.
Originally, President Trump was supposed to provide testimony to Mueller’s team in late January 2018. However, his legal team backed out of it, denouncing the special counsel’s legal right to question a sitting President. According to Bob Woodward’s book, however, the cancellation happened after President Donald Trump couldn’t get through a mock interview with lead attorney John Dowd in preparation for a possible sit-down with the special counsel Robert Mueller without lying, contradicting himself, and eventually exploding in anger.
Trump was a difficult client at best, which resulted in large amounts of turnover in his legal team, and difficulty finding top-shelf replacements. Dowd left in March 2018. Ty Cobb left in May 2018. Don McGahn left in October 2018. The people replacing them represented a significant step down. Rudy Giuliani hasn’t practiced law in decades, and gave some disastrous TV interviews. Jay Sekulow attracted Trump’s attention as an ultra-conservative TV lawyer on Fox News who defended the President. Most of Sekulow’s legal experience at the Supreme Court has been in arguing religious freedom cases.
Through the past year, several people associated with Trump accepted plea deals with the special counsel. This included former campaign adviser Rick Gates (February), former Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen (August), and campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulous (August). Each subsequently offered to cooperate with the investigation.
One of the biggest concerns for the Trump legal team as late as August 2018, however, was that they had absolutely no idea what evidence Mueller had, especially after Don McGahn provided 30 hours of testimony to the special counsel. The plea deals with Cohen and Papadopoulous only exacerbated this problem.
Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager with close ties to Russia, actually went to trial and was convicted on 8 counts in August 2018. The sentencing guidelines would likely put him in prison for the rest of his life. A few weeks after the conviction, but before sentencing, on September 14, 2018 Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s team as part of a plea deal. As part of the plea deal, Manafort was allowed the very unusual arrangement of being allowed to coordinate with the White House legal team, despite also being on the hook for providing evidence to the special counsel. Similar agreements were not in the plea deals for Gates or Papadoupolous. Some observers speculated that this was done by Manafort in order to keep the door open to a pardon by the Presiddent.
What remained an open question is why the special counsel agreed to this arrangement.
Up through the summer of 2018, Trump’s team refused to agree to testify with Mueller’s team. Then, on September 4th (after the Manafort conviction), Mueller’s team shifted its position announced it would accept written answers from the President. On September 7th, Trump offered to testify “under certain conditions”. By early October, Trump’s legal team had agreed to provide written answers, but only about collusion.
Between the time of the plea deal, and late November, Manafort’s legal team provided a steady stream of information about what they observed in the Mueller investigation as Manafort was questioned as part of the plea deal. On October 22nd, 2018 Rudy Giuliani claimed that Paul Manafort’s answers to the special counsel contained “nothing damaging.” (Mueller is now alleging that he has proof that the answers offered by Manafort contained numerous lies).
In early November, Trump dropped hints that he believed he had special insights into the Mueller investigation, tweeting, “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want.”
Trump also seemed extremely confident in his answers. On November 16th, 2018, Trump claimed to reporters that, “My lawyers don’t write answers. I write answers. I was asked a series of questions. I’ve answered them very easily.” On November 20, 2018 (just before the Thanksgiving Holidays), Trump’s legal team submitted its answers to the special counsel.
On Monday November 26th, 2018, Mueller’s team announced that Manafort’s plea deal had been revoked for repeatedly lying to investigators, and that details into how they knew he was lying would be presented in court in a few weeks. On Thursday November 29th, 2018, former Trump personal lawyer and fixer Michael D. Cohen arrived unexpectedly in a NY Federal Court and plead guilty to lying to Congress about the President’s involvement in collusion with Russia. The plea indicated that Cohen had kept Trump directly informed of projects in Moscow, including giving a $50 million penthouse suite to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Making a leap from the known to speculative involves answering the question of why did Mueller let Manafort continue to work with the Trump team even after he agreed to cooperate with the investigation? Let’s look at it from what we know Mueller knows, and why he has acted the way he has in terms of Occam’s razor.
Trump’s legal team is in disarray, he’s a difficult client, and he’s surrounded himself with people who have a hard time saying “no”, after having chased off less pliable people. They knew that the WH legal team was operating in a vacuum as of mid-to-late August 2018, since they couldn’t interact with other people in plea deals, and the Mueller team had been exercising terrific control of leaks.
When Manafort was convicted, and while a plea deal was being hammered out, they saw an opportunity to finally get the White House to agree to testify under oath. If the White House felt confident enough that they could synchronize their answers with Manafort’s, and only testify about collusion, then Trump would finally come forward enough to expose himself to potentially perjuring himself. This is why they publicly offered to accept written answers, and why shortly thereafter they gave Manafort the deal they did.
It is also relatively safe to assume that even as of September 2018 they had additional, undisclosed (to Manafort, the White House, and the public) information which would confirm or deny the answers given by Manafort (and presumably the White House).
Manafort behaved as expected: he provided information to the White House and Trump legal teams, and described his interrogation sessions with the special counsel’s office. Manafort’s descriptions of what he thought he had learned from those lines of questioning led the White House to believe Mueller knew less than he actually did. This would explain Trump’s exceptional overconfidence in his answers. At the same time, Mueller’s office let Manafort get away with his lies in order to nurture this mistaken belief in how much he actually knew. It also served to keep the White House unalerted to the danger they were in submitting answers based on the information provided by Manafort.
The statements by Trump and Giuliani support this interpretation: namely that they saw no dangers, and believed that the Mueller investigation had no incriminating evidence. These beliefs are almost certainly based on the information being provided by Manafort, and Trump’s tweet supports this presumed connection.
In short, Manafort’s raw desire for a pardon, and the White House’s desperate need for information on the inner workings of the Mueller investigation, prevented them from seeing that Mueller was using Manafort as a Judas goat.
This is why Manafort’s plea deal wasn’t revoked until shortly after the President provided his answers; because doing so earlier would have tipped off the White House that their answers weren’t as “truthy” sounding as they thought. Michael Cohen’s sudden plea deal is Mueller tipping his hand a bit, and getting some of the supporting evidence that Manafort lied out ahead of Manafort’s hearing in December. This hearing will be tremendously important, since Mueller will be opening his kimono enough for the White House to see how it perjured itself by following Manafort’s lead.
Under this interpretation of the facts we can see, it is not hard to understand why former US Attorney Joyce Alene tweeted, “I took this picture this morning after I finished reading the Cohen information & plea agreement because I wanted to make sure I could always remember the moment when it became clear Mueller was preparing to lay down a royal flush.”
