Jeffrey A. Rosen, was sworn in as the deputy attorney general of the United States on May 16, 2019. The next day, Paul Manafort’s attorneys petitioned the Bureau of Prisons to keep their client out of Rikers Island prison in New York City while he awaits trial on sixteen state felonies. It seemed like a long shot at the time, since the policy is pretty clear. When states want to prosecute someone in federal custody, the feds comply. If New York wanted to house Manafort at Rikers, that was hardly unusual. That’s where they customarily house people who are transferred from federal custody.

But Rosen has intervened. He ordered Manafort to be transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, which is a federal lockup in Lower Manhattan. Then he informed the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., that he can accept this situation or consent to Manafort staying in the federal prison in Pennsylvania where he was being held and having him travel back and forth for the legal proceedings.

Not only is this unprecedented in terms of the arrangement, but it’s completely out of the ordinary for the second most senior member of the Justice Department to take an interest in where inmates are housed. The fact that he did this as almost his first order of business in the job is absolutely extraordinary.

Of course, no one will say if someone higher up than Rosen was behind this intervention, but it’s a safe bet that Rosen didn’t do this on his own initiative or authority. He was clearly responding to marching orders he was given by either attorney general William Barr or by the president.

Why do these gentleman want to do Manafort favors after all the heartburn he caused Trump.

Remember, Manafort took the job for no pay and immediately began trying to monetize his position in order to pay off nearly $20 million in debt he owed to a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. That seems like a fairly large betrayal, if you ask me. He even offered to give Deripaska private briefings on the campaign in exchange for debt relief. That’s definitely a betrayal.  He actually did send out internal polling numbers to both Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs through his former assistant who is believed to be a member of Russia’s GRU, or military intelligence. That kind of behavior caused no end of headaches for the president.

And let’s not forget that Trump felt he needed to fire Manafort in the critical month of August because he was too connected to Russia-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs. Even during the campaign, he was a huge unemployable embarrassment.

The obvious thing for Trump to do once people started asking questions about Manafort and his connections to Russia was to say that he fired he ass as soon as he became aware of the extent of Manafort’s corruption.  But he did the opposite. He said Manafort was a great guy. He dangled pardons in front of him and said he’d never become a rat. He didn’t abandon Manafort even after it became clear that he was obstructing justice while out on bail and was sent to prison. He didn’t criticize him when his trials revealed that he was basically trying to use Trump to get himself out of a deep financial jam.  He stuck with Manafort even after he acted so dishonestly that his cooperation agreement with the government was rescinded.

And now he appears to have intervened in order to spare Manafort the indignity and discomfort of being held on Rikers Island.

There’s really no innocent explanation for this. If Trump were innocent of any conspiracy with Russia, he would hate Manafort more than any man alive, but he’s protective of him instead.

I wrote What Did Thomas Barrack Know, and When Did He Know It? a year and a half ago, and it still makes good reading today. Barrack helped land Manafort a job with Trump. We still don’t know why this was done and why Trump isn’t fuming mad that he ever had Manafort recommended to him. Anyone wanting to get to the bottom of the 2016 conspiracy will have to find the answer to that question.