Special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s indictments of Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and George Papadopoulos turned the news cycle on its head Monday, with some trumpeting the news as the latest smoking gun for Russian collusion and others dismissing the story as the latest media nothing-burger. As the dust settles, we can begin to piece together how this move will affect the investigation going forward.
The biggest fish hooked Monday was Manafort, the longtime Republican operative and former Trump campaign manager whom Mueller hit with a battery of charges ranging from conspiracy against the United States to serving as unregistered agents of the Ukrainian government to money laundering. Both Manafort and his associate Gates have pleaded “not guilty” to the charges, and face severe sentences if convicted.
The most meaningful takeaway from Monday’s news is that it is a personal catastrophe for Manafort. It is perhaps ironic that a man who has lobbied for some of the world’s most controversial leaders, including Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, would ultimately be undone by his association with President Donald Trump. But Manafort’s decision to join the Trump campaign has ultimately proven as inadvisable as Trump’s decision to hire Manafort.
“In order to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities, from approximately 2006 through at least 2016, Manafort and Gates laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts,” Mueller’s grand jury charges. Manafort pleaded not guilty to the charges Monday.
“These are very serious charges, and they’re very disturbing,” the Heritage Foundation’s John Malcolm, a former federal prosecutor himself, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “And they certainly paint a picture of somebody who was in bed with the Russian government in a position of influence in the Trump campaign.”
But while the charges against Manafort are stringent, they do not necessarily pose a danger to the Trump administration in Mueller’s probe—after all, the former advisor’s alleged conduct long predated his involvement with Trump’s campaign, and there’s little evidence the campaign knew about it at all. Oddly, this was the point Manafort’s own lawyer was keen to make in a press statement Monday afternoon.
“President Donald Trump was correct. There is no evidence the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government,” attorney Kevin Downing said Monday. “These activities ended in 2014, two years before Mr. Manafort served in the Trump campaign.”
“It’s quite possible that if Paul Manafort was lying about the extent of his contact, and that he was secretly working for the Russian government,” Malcolm said. “It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump was a victim of that.”
The bigger headache for the Trump administration is the day’s smaller fish: former foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who has pleaded guilty to misleading investigators about his efforts to facilitate meetings between Trump campaign officials and Russian government agents in the hope that the Russians would provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Court documents argue Papadopoulos repeatedly attempted to help a Kremlin-linked “professor” set up such a meeting in April 2016.
“The professor only took interest in defendant Papadopoulos because of his status with the Campaign,” court documents assert.
To hear the White House tell it, Papadopoulos was a bit player in the Trump campaign; a volunteer whose advice was never heeded by pertinent staffers.
“It was extremely limited; it was a volunteer position,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders repeatedly insisted on Monday. “He reached out and nothing happened beyond that—which, I think, shows, one, his level of importance in the campaign, and two, shows what little role he had within coordinating anything officially with the campaign.”
Sanders is apparently correct to assert that nothing came of Papadopoulos’s efforts.
“This is a guy who has now pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the independent counsel,” Malcolm said. “So it would seem to me to be perfectly natural to either downplay this guy’s role or to distance the campaign from him.”
But it also seems clear that some campaign officials were intrigued by Papadopoulos’s suggestion: court documents record one Trump campaign official forwarding his request to another staffer with a note that “We need someone to communicate that [Donald Trump] is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
When it comes to the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russian officials, Monday’s revelations prove little we didn’t know already: that several campaign staffers were unscrupulous workers who were perfectly willing to collude with Russian agents.
But we do know one new thing: Robert Mueller is going into 2018 holding every card in the investigation. They have brought serious charges against one apparently intransigent campaign operative. They have convinced another to cooperate in their ongoing probe. President Trump’s allies continue to insist that investigations into the president are unlikely to bear fruit. What we learned this weekend is this: if there is anything to uncover, Mueller is increasingly likely to uncover it.
