Paul Waldman asks a straightforward question:
From the beginning, there has been a question hanging over Manafort’s case: Why won’t he flip? After all, other Trump aides have when faced with possible jail time, and Manafort is facing more than anyone. There’s a real possibility he’ll never see another day as a free man. One popular explanation is that he’s afraid that if he tells everything he knows, some people in Russia would become displeased enough to kill him.
So Manafort may have decided that it’s better to take his chances with a jury than to find a strange substance smeared on his door handle one day.
If I were in Paul Manafort’s shoes, I’d have a reasonable amount of confidence that the government could successfully place me (and my wife) in a witness protection program, but I’d have no confidence that this would protect my extended family. Are his adult daughters and their families going to also disappear off the grid? How about other family members, mistresses, or other people I care about? The truth is, as long as a nation state that is indistinguishable from a violent organized crime family is bent on punishing me, I’m not going to feel like the people I care about are safe.
This may be the real reason Manafort won’t talk. He still owes Oleg Derispaska somewhere around twenty million dollars and he has no prospect of repaying that debt in cash. All he can do is keep his mouth shut and hope that’s enough to get some forgiveness on the debt.
Waldman thinks Trump will ultimately pardon Manafort, but only after the second trial which will cover his dealings with Ukrainians and Russians. The problem with this prediction is that Manafort needs charges hanging over him in order to invoke his right against self-incrimination. If he’s pardoned for most of what he could conceivably be charged with, he could be compelled to tell the special counsel what he knows or face fresh charges of contempt and obstruction of justice. Is he really going to count on Mueller to give up or Trump to counter every new charge with a fresh pardon?
Maybe things really will get this weird and broken, but I think the reason Manafort hasn’t already been preemptively pardoned is that it would not solve Trump’s problems and probably would exacerbate them. Even for congressional Republicans, there’s a limit to how nakedly Trump can obstruct the investigation and get away with it. He has not fired Jeff Sessions or Rod Rosenstein, for example, and he’d run into similar problems if he started pardoning Manafort for refusing to cooperate with investigators when he faces no prospect of self-incrimination.
Add to this that Manafort can still face state charges, particularly in New York State, and I don’t see the pardon card as much of an option for Trump. If he’s desperate enough, maybe he uses it and maybe Manafort can avoid spending his life in prison. But it would not solve Trump’s problems or make all Manafort’s problems go away.
Yes, a pardon of Manafort doesn’t achieve anything close to what Trump needs and would probably make things worse for Trump.
And I’m in the camp that says that Manafort hasn’t flipped because Mueller hasn’t offered him a deal. The trial of Manafort is a good stage for Mueller to begin his narrative.
Agreed.
“He still owes Oleg Derispaska somewhere around twenty million dollars and he has no prospect of repaying that debt in cash. All he can do is keep his mouth shut and hope that’s enough to get some forgiveness on the debt.”
My personal guess is that this is it. Better in jail than expose his friends family to the Russian mob.
. . .
Nixon famously decided to resigned when confronted by congresscritters (GOPers, iirc) telling him, basically, that he was going down, i.e., the articles of impeachment would pass and conviction in the Senate would most likely follow.
I wonder if any current Banana Republican congresscritters may have communicated to Trump lines in the sand that, if he crossed them, would cost him their protection. And that these lines may include firing Sessions and/or Rosenstein and/or pardoning Manafort.
If there were, as soon as he crossed them, they would erase them.
Josh Marshall has argued that the fifth amendment/testimony argument against pardoning Manafort is overblown. His point is that once you cross the Rubicon to pardon Manafort in the first place for current charges, you might as well pardon him for perjury and/or obstruction of justice if/when he refuses to testify against you later.
That seems plausible to me, with the unknown being how much will a quorum of GOP senators tolerate. The magic number remains 67 senators to convict in an impeachment trial, and no matter what that requires more than 10 Republicans, likely closer to 20.
I agree there are lines Trump is afraid to cross, but as he gets more threatened and desperate, he’s more likely to try something he has yet to do (e.g. firing Rosenstein, pardoning people, etc.). And then we’ll find out how meaningful those lines he’s so far dared not cross are.
These charges don’t connect to Mr Trump directly yet, do they?
Why wouldn’t Mr Trump just let it ride – perhaps eventually commuting his sentence, as Mr Bush did with the recently-Trump-pardoned Scooter Libby?
No the current charges don’t connect to Ronald T. Dump, but Manafort knows plenty that does. I think that one problem is that if he starts singing, he’ll have to admit to crimes that are more serious than what he’s about to be convicted of, including more tax evasion (he got debt forgiveness for taking on the campaign manger job), conspiracy to commit various election law violations, and quite likely espionage.
And then Putin kills him and his family.
Assuming convictions, the lead strategy now appears to be taking the constitutionality of Mueller’s special counsel investigation quickly up to Roberts’ Repubs, soon to be reinforced after the Kavanaugh Cram-down in September. That will give Roberts’ 5 Nixonian/Cheneyite “justices”.
A pardon is the very last resort. Assuming Manafort was ever given a chance to talk, he’ll never do it now.
Is it even likely that he knows something that someone else in that Campaign of Scums doesn’t also know? Something that only Manafort and Der Trumper discussed?
Republicans ability to disregard norms, precedent, and laws to get to this point makes this a political, not legal, question.
So to what extent would the 2018 midterm results effect this strategic calculus?
My impression is if Republicans either maintain their majorities or facing negligible loses (ex. lose the House; hold or gain seats in Senate; and a wash in state races) it would open the door on a direct assault on the Mueller investigation.
Because the likely incoming Republicans will be even more fascistic loyal Trumpshirts and the media would sell it as: “Well, if The American People ™ didn’t want this, they would have said so with their votes last November.”
Think the GOP might give up the donald for Pence. Omarosa will drip bad news for the rest of August. September will bring the 2nd Manafort trial. The tariff stuff pain will come into focus by the end of September. Avenatti will bring something to poke the bear at any time. Finally, Mueller could bring more indictments. Come October what do the GOP run on?
You ask:
They run on money.
Just like the Democrats.
Until corporate campaign financing is either outlawed or at the very least seriously controlled, there will remain only one real political party in the United States.
The UniParty.
A development of that sort would need the passing of laws against corporate political domination plus the rigorous enforcement of those laws. If the people who (supposedly) make laws are essentially controlled by corporate interests, what do you think are the chances of such an action actually happening?
Catch 22, over and out.
AG
Manafort’s witness protection program is jail.
If he’s convicted, Mueller might offer him a deal before the second trial. But not likely to matter.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eUjjzwIrebQ&feature=youtu.be
Why would Meuller care about Manafort flipping?
I think Manafort is considered far enough up the food chain to not rate a deal. I doubt that Manafort could add too much to the CURRENT case against Trump, and would be a distinct liability if and when he got on the stand to testify … and that assumes he would testify.
Nah, Manafort is swinging in the wind and the damage caused by any blowback from the trials will be incidental. It won’t matter to the people who despise Trump and Trumpeteers won’t hear any of it from Fox so it will have happened in a complete vacuum.
Boomann writes:
Yeah.
Toxic to all Trump allies.
And most other big-time pols as well.
Sigh…
AG
People constantly under-estimate how un-sophisticated Trump is. He genuinely thinks he did nothing wrong. Nothing in the Manafort trial implicates him directly so far, it’s all speculation about what ELSE he might know.
So, he probably hasn’t pardoned Manafort because he doesn’t feel he needs to.
But, why hasn’t Mueller offered immunity? Probably because he knows everything Manafort knows by now or at least most of it. I’d say Mueller is angling for convictions at this point. The GOP talking point, pounded out on Fox News every day is that “this is a fishing expedition! He has no evidence! It’s political! He never did anything! There’s no evidence against him!”
A stunning series of convictions is exactly what is needed to explode this particular line of defense.
If he can’t get that, then Trump might very well try and shut down the Special Prosecutor’s office after the election. That is probably exactly what Trump is planning. But, it will be a lot harder if Mueller has obtained convictions between now and then.
So, convictions are the keys, not careful accumulating more and more of a case against Trump. It has to be step by step. Let Manafort rot in jail as a warning to others.
. . . via guilty pleas (half-dozen or so at last count iirc), including Flynn.
True, but they can be spun as Mueller using dirty pressure to force the pleas, plus they didn’t make nearly as much media splash as Manafort’s trial, wherein a conviction by a jury would be harder to dismiss as a nothingburger.
. . . is certainly my fervent hope.