That Manafort Thing

I was thinking about this last night as the analysis and speculation grew rather frantic on MSNBC.

There's always the very real probability that 45* will do something enormously dickish as he tries to elude the headsman (duh), so Mueller has to make moves that ensure his investigation continues, and/or that his findings make their way out to us (also duh).

Anyway, the big uh-oh yesterday was the possibility that Manafort was playing the double agent, and that meant his "cooperation" was intended to get him inside the investigation so he could feed intel to Cult45, but he'd gotten a little too cute and now he's fucked cuz he's going straight to prison and what if that was part of his plan all along cuz if Mueller is hanging his whole hat on Manafort, what better way to blow it all up than showing that the star witness is so full of shit that he can't be trusted so the investigation starts to look like it really is a witch hunt and blah blah fucking blah.

emptywheel:

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 certain 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 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.

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

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.)

BTW - Manafort has always reminded me of those old Soviet guys in the 80s who were trying a little too hard not to look like those old Soviet guys in the 80s.