A little more than a year after his arrest, this may be the end of the line for Paul Manafort. The former campaign manager to President Donald Trump pleaded guilty in September to conspiracy and witness tampering, a little less than a year after special counsel Robert Mueller indicted him for crimes related to his work lobbying for the pro-Russian Ukrainian government a decade before. Then, Monday night, Mueller struck again in a new court filing, asserting that Manafort had told further lies “on a variety of subject matters” to the special counsel while ostensibly a cooperating witness.
“The plea agreement provides that if the defendant fails to fulfill completely ‘each and every one’ of his obligations under this agreement, or ‘engages in any criminal activity prior to sentencing,’ the defendant will be in breach of the agreement,” the filing argues. “A breach relieves the government of any obligations it has under the agreement… but leaves intact all the obligations of the defendant as well as his guilty pleas.”
If this holds up in court, it’s the nightmare scenario for Manafort. It’s too late for him to try to eke out an improbable win at trial—he’s already pleaded guilty. He will have given away his very last card, and gotten nothing for it at all. His odds of dying in prison will have risen dramatically.
Why? What could possibly have motivated Manafort, fresh off the best deal he could have reasonably hoped to get from Mueller’s team, fall right back onto the dubious strategy of trying to pull one over on the guy holding all the information?
For some Russiagate true believers, the answer seems obvious: Manafort has continued to be untruthful with prosecutors because the alternative would be even worse. “Everybody who lies to Mueller gets called on it, so he had to know that Mueller would catch him,” University of Alabama law professor Joyce Vance told the New York Times Monday. “So the question is, what was he hiding that is worse than going to jail for the rest of your life?”
These theories took on new life Tuesday with the publication of another piece of Manafort news: a report in the Guardian alleging that Manafort had several times met secretly with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London between 2013 and 2016, including once after he was working for Trump, just months before WikiLeaks changed the course of the 2016 election by releasing a cache of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Given that one of the biggest questions of the Russia investigation has been whether the Trump campaign was an accessory to the email heist, many were quick to proclaim the story a “smoking gun.”
If you were waiting for “the smoking gun,” this could be it. https://t.co/uZZZS58RL0
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) November 27, 2018
There are serious problems with this reading, however. They begin with the Guardian story itself, which is based entirely on anonymous sources and not corroborated by evidence such as the Ecuadorian embassy’s guest logs.
Furthermore, it is hard to reconcile with Manafort’s own behavior over the course of his trial: If he really was the point man for a vast Trump-Russia conspiracy, he was sitting all along on a prosecutorial motherlode, which he certainly could have used to negotiate a far sweeter deal for himself—much as his longtime business partner Richard Gates did when he flipped on Manafort in February. “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 at the time.
And there are other, simpler explanations for Manafort’s behavior. One is that he’s still shilling for a presidential pardon—one which Trump has repeatedly dangled in front of him every time Manafort’s popped back into the news.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani tells @DanaBashCNN the President has “been upset for weeks about what he considers the un-American, horrible treatment of Manafort.”
— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) November 27, 2018
Or you could make the argument that Manafort’s just pathologically hooked on the hustle. If he did lie to prosecutors and violate his plea deal, it wouldn’t even be the first time he’s bucked the orders of the court for pretty much no reason at all: As early as last December, he was flouting his court-ordered gag rule by ghostwriting an op-ed with a Russian colleague to airbrush his former work in Ukraine.
We will no doubt get a fuller picture of Manafort’s role in Mueller’s investigation once that investigation has run its course. In the meantime, it remains, as always, best not to get out over our skis.
