A Memo to Manafort and Trump: Mueller Already Knows the Truth
Surely you aren't surprised that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort now stands accused of attempted witness tampering and may forfeit his freedom pending his federal money laundering and tax fraud trial. Hustlers gotta hustle, right? There is little Manafort has done alongside our hustler president that suggests he's a man willing to observe basic legal rules and norms. Nor is there anything Robert Mueller has done in his capacity as special counsel to think he'd not be on the lookout for such tampering.
Even the notion that Manafort evidently thought he could get away with secretly trying to coax witnesses against him to provide false testimony isn't a surprise given what we know about Manafort's history. His audacity is matched only by his recklessness. And what he's accused of doing here – using an encrypted messaging program to try to turn federal witnesses – is really only a sneaky way of doing what the president himself is doing with all of his recent pardon chatter. The idea behind both tactics is to affect either the substance or the timing of testimony.
When I heard the news of Manafort's new trouble, I thought first of Reality Winner, who has been sitting in pretrial detention for months despite facing less serious charges than Manafort. She leaked documents to The Intercept to expose Russian deception; Manafort allegedly worked on behalf of the Russians. If she can't make bail he shouldn't have made it, either, and now U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson has ample justification to conclude that Manafort cannot be trusted to continue to live under house arrest. Sure, sending him to prison will make him a martyr on Fox News. But anyone who wants to die on the Manafort hill is welcome to do so.
The witness-tampering bombshell is going to suck up much of the oxygen over the next couple days, but it was far from the most significant long-term news Monday on the Russia investigation front. That distinction belongs to unidentified sources in the White House who tell The Washington Post that, despite all the Twitter bluster coming from Trump, the White House, rightfully, is fretting about the coming legal showdown with Mueller. "Both sides are taking a big risk with a subpoena fight," Rudy Giuliani wants you to believe. But like everything else that comes out of Rudy's mouth these days, that's nonsense.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/manafort-trump-mueller-w521097?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=060518_11
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