It’s never a good idea to tamper with witnesses. But it’s an especially bad idea if you are the defendant in a highly public prosecution.
Persuaded that Paul Manafort did indeed engage in witness tampering, a federal judge sent the former Trump presidential campaign chairman to jail on Friday. Manafort will remain incarcerated until trial. But facing more than 20 separate charges and the possibility of a decadeslong sentence in prison, Manafort’s relocation to the less than lovely surroundings of federal jailhouse may incline him to cut a deal with prosecutors.
That will have President Trump concerned.
After all, as a key participant in a meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and a Russian intelligence cutout, and as a senior member of the Trump campaign team, Manafort can provide cooperating witness testimony to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Considering Manafort’s connections to Oleg Deripaska (a top intermediary of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Deripaska’s possibly intimate connection to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election) it seems highly likely that Manafort’s cooperation would be productive for Mueller’s investigation.
Trump must now ask himself whether Manafort’s incarceration will induce his more cooperative attitude towards Mueller. Of course, Trump has pardons up his sleeve and has been energetic in reminding Manafort of that power. But if nothing else, Friday’s events take us one step closer to the inevitability of a Trump-Mueller showdown.
