These days, it seems President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort gets in the news only when his legal troubles get even worse—and unfortunately for Manafort, this happens a lot. Already under indictment on a battery of charges ranging from wire fraud to conspiracy against the United States, Manafort made headlines Monday when special counsel Robert Mueller further accused him of attempting to tamper with witnesses in his case. Prosecutors told the court that Manafort had tried to contact key witnesses by phone and through an encrypted messaging app, ostensibly to persuade them to perjure themselves.
Apparently the witnesses, who are unnamed in the filing, ratted him out: Court records show they turned over text records to Mueller’s team, who quoted them at length in his Monday filing. As a result, Manafort faces more than just additional criminal charges: Prosecutors asked the court to reconsider the terms of Manafort’s house arrest, or even to send him to jail pending his first trial, which begins July 10. A spokesman for Manafort said that “nothing about this latest allegation changes our defense” and that “we will do our talking in court.”
If nothing else, attempts to tamper with witnesses would demonstrate that Manafort feels his back is against the wall. The alleged communications took place in February, when Manafort was already under house arrest—it beggars belief to think that such a seasoned political operative would not consider the fact that his communications were likely being monitored. In other words, a decision to attempt to tamper with witnesses would not be without serious potential downsides. It bears the marks of a man who thinks he has little left to lose. In fact, Manafort faces the real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison if he is convicted on all charges.
Whether Manafort can beat the rap—a task which, again, appears more Sisyphean by the day—makes for interesting legal speculation. The more interesting question, however, remains how Manafort’s problems factor into the bigger picture of Mueller’s investigative work.
Reporters covering the latest filings against Manafort have repeatedly asserted that the development rachets up the pressure yet further for Manafort to turn state’s evidence against President Trump in Mueller’s ongoing investigation. A typical New York Magazine piece, titled “If Mueller Is Ever Going to Flip Manafort, Now Seems Like the Time,” puts the case thus:
But there’s one more theory that apparently hasn’t occurred to New York: Who says Manafort actually has information on Trump damaging enough to convince Mueller to let him off easy? As I’ve reported before, “flipping” isn’t simply a matter of Manafort telling the special counsel he’s ready to cooperate. To get the FBI off his back, he’d need to do what his former associate Richard Gates did back in February: help investigators land a bigger prize than himself. That he’d hold back from doing so based on personal loyalty alone seems vanishingly unlikely, considering Trump has signaled he’s uninterested in extending his recent pardon bonanza to Manafort: He has distanced himself from his campaign manager in a number of recent tweets.
So perhaps the more relevant question is this: If Manafort could help Robert Mueller prove that Russians attempted to get Donald Trump elected in 2016 and that the future president was in on the fix, wouldn’t you think he’d have done so by now?
