The Possibilities for Paul Manafort

“I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence,” Manafort said in a statement last week. “For reasons yet to surface, he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled-up charges contained in the indictments against me.”

There is no question Gates’s decision to cooperate was a stunning blow to President Trump’s former campaign manager. Court documents reveal that Gates is working closely and frequently with the special counsel. On Wednesday, with Mueller’s support, the court agreed to lift Gates’s house arrest and GPS monitoring, citing Gates’s obligations to “coordinate certain activities” with Mueller that “require frequent consultation.” Mueller’s indictments against Manafort and Gates contain an enormous pile of concrete evidence in the form of correspondence and bank and financial records, and Gates is at hand to corroborate the illicit nature of every single one.

Yet Manafort still is determined to fight. There are a few reasons for this.

First and foremost, there are few positive incentives for Manafort to throw in the towel. Gates’s plea deal was extremely generous: Mueller moved Thursday to drop last week’s 32-count superseding indictment against Gates, meaning Gates now faces 57 to 71 months in prison (or possibly less), per federal sentencing guidelines, rather than decades. But that deal was contingent on Gates providing valuable information against his boss; Manafort won’t be able to strike nearly so good a deal just to hand over the same information to Mueller again.

“Manafort won’t have leverage to substantially reduce his own sentence through a plea deal unless he can point the prosecutors further up the chain,” Sol Wisenberg, who served as deputy independent counsel during the Clinton Whitewater investigation, told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “A Manafort guilty plea that only admits to the charges against him would not substantially help Manafort under the Sentencing Guidelines; he would still spend substantial time in prison. Unless Manafort can give Mueller information about Trump or others in the Trump orbit, he’s unlikely to get anywhere near as good of a deal as Gates is getting.”

Paul Manafort is 68 years old; a conviction on all counts would likely amount to a life sentence. According to Wisenberg, it’s unlikely Manafort could change that just by agreeing not to contest the charges in court. Realistically, then, Manafort has only two options if he hopes to live out his remaining days at home with his family: secure a presidential pardon, or go to trial and win against all odds.

Manafort is currently pursuing both. In their public statements, he and his lawyers have repeatedly mentioned that the charges “have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion.” It’s an odd thing to point out, as it doesn’t do anything to dispute the charges. But it is a helpful way of signaling to the White House, Wisenberg said, that Manafort is on the “political team.” Such statements “could mean Manafort is signaling to the Trump camp that he can be trusted and that he is holding out for an ultimate pardon,” Wisenberg said.

John Malcolm, a former federal prosecutor now at the Heritage Foundation, agreed that Manafort is “playing for two audiences.”

“One, he’s playing to a court of law, to be able to say that this was, in essence, ultra vires—that it went beyond the mandate that Mueller was given,” Malcolm told TWS. “And two, to try to paint a picture that this is all a witch hunt designed to get people who had any connection to the Trump campaign, as evidenced by the fact that this is supposed to be all about Russian interference, and this guy’s busy looking into business deals that have nothing to do with the election at all.”

Although Wisenberg says the charge that Mueller overstepped his mandate by pressing charges unrelated to Russia is “not frivolous,” it remains a hard sell for Manafort: the order appointing the special counsel authorizes Mueller not only to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” but also “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

But the “witch hunt” strategy shows that Manafort is trying to make his trial about something bigger than his own alleged criminal behavior—and that actually pardoning Manafort isn’t the only thing President Trump can do to help his former campaign manager’s chances. President Trump has grown increasingly frustrated with the various Russia investigations that continue to entangle his presidency, lashing out frequently against them on Twitter. Every time Trump attacks the special counsel’s investigation as an illegal and unscrupulous witch hunt, it gets easier for Manafort to argue the same thing to a jury.

This may explain why Judge Amy Berman Jackson has been so unamused by Manafort’s public statements. Jackson implemented a gag order on trial proceedings last November, telling prosecutors and defendants that “this is a criminal trial, and it’s not a public relations campaign.” On Wednesday, Jackson reprimanded Manafort for violating that gag order, threatening to hold him in contempt if he continued to make statements in the press.

“I think Paul Manafort clearly views Bob Mueller as his adversary, because he is in fact his adversary,” Malcolm said. “I’m sure that Paul Manafort is anxious to have anything occur which damages the reputation of his adversary and make it seem that he is proceeding for partisan reasons. So I’m sure he’s hoping that Donald Trump assists him in that effort.”