White House Watch: The Trump Administration Reacts to the Manafort Indictment

That’s narrowly correct if Sanders is referring to the indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates on 12 counts, including conspiracy, money laundering, failure to file financial disclosures, failure to register as foreign agents, and false statements therein. None of the charges against Manafort and Gates appear to have anything to do directly with the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russians to interfere with the election—something President Trump noted in his Monday morning tweets shortly after the indictments were unsealed.

At National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy makes a case that the Manafort and Gates indictments are a “stretch” and part of an effort to “play prosecutorial hardball”—to get him to flip or place pressure on others who may be under Mueller’s gaze. “From President Trump’s perspective, the indictment is a boon from which he can claim that the special counsel has no actionable collusion case,” McCarthy writes.

But Manafort and Gates weren’t all Robert Mueller had in store on Monday. Mueller’s office also unsealed a guilty plea from George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser. In agreeing to the plea, Papadopoulos conceded he lied to the FBI about the timeline of his association with the campaign and an ongoing discussion with a London-based professor who claimed to have “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The plea details his conversations with campaign officials in trying to set up a meeting between Russian nationals with someone in the Trump campaign—though it’s not clear Papadopoulos was ever successful or even taken very seriously by his superiors.

Sanders was defiant about the Papadopoulos guilty plea on Monday. “It has nothing to do with the activities of the campaign,” she said. “It has to do with his failure to tell the truth. That doesn’t have anything to do with the campaign or the campaign’s activities.” She also downplayed Papadopoulos’s role in the campaign: “It was extremely limited,” Sanders said. “It was a volunteer position. And again, no activity was ever done in an official capacity on behalf of the campaign in that regard.”

Sanders insisted that Papadopoulos’s attempts to connect the campaign with these Russians were rebuffed by campaign officials. “He reached out and nothing happened beyond that,” she said. But his plea agreement, which is worth reading in full, doesn’t depict an entirely passive response from campaign officials. After Papadopoulos spent “several weeks” in the summer of 2016 trying to coordinate an “off the record” meeting between a campaign representative and the Russian ministry of foreign affairs, the plea claims a supervisor told Papadopoulos that “I would encourage you” and another campaign adviser to “make the trip, if it is feasible.” (Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News says a campaign source identified the supervisor as Sam Clovis, a co-chairman of the Trump campaign.)

And there is a hint that Papadopoulos may be the beginning of Mueller’s effort to bring charges against Trump campaign officials. According to the plea statement, following his July 27, 2017 arrest, Papadopoulos “met with the Government on numerous occasions to provide information and answer questions.” And as BuzzFeed’s Chris Geidner notes, a comment one of Mueller’s lawyers made to a federal judge during a hearing earlier this month on Papadopoulos’s guilty plea back this up. The lawyer, Aaron Zelinsky, told the judge “there’s a large-scale ongoing investigation of which this case is a small part.”

Mark It Down—“We still expect this to conclude soon.” —Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on the Mueller investigation, October 30, 2017

It’s Not Just Team Trump—From Politico’s Playbook: “Democratic power lobbyist Tony Podesta, founder of the Podesta Group, is stepping down from the lobbying shop that bears his name after coming under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. Podesta announced his decision during a firm-wide meeting Monday morning and is alerting clients of his impending departure.”

As Republicans struggle to balance the books on their tax reform package, House tax writers are considering a plan that would cut corporate taxes to 20 percent over a period of 5 years, rather than immediately. The White House, however, tried to dismiss that plan on Monday, reaffirming President Trump’s commitment to immediate cuts.

“The president laid out his principles and it doesn’t include the phasing in, so we’re still committed to that moving forward,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “I’m not drawing a red line. I’m just saying these are the principles that we’ve laid out, and we haven’t adjusted or changed our principles since this process started.”

Sanders said that the White House isn’t expecting such differences of vision to delay the tax package, which Congress will begin considering in earnest this week.

“The initial House tax reform bill will be introduced on Wednesday by the Ways & Means committee,” Sanders said. “The House is likely to consider the bill week of November 13th. In order to stay on pace, we want to see a House bill passed by Thanksgiving. This is a very aggressive timeline, but one that will help us get tax cuts this year so families and businesses can plan for 2018.”

Photo of the Day

A federal judge in Washington issued a partial stay on President Trump’s ban on transgender military members Monday, halting the rollout of a change the White House has spent little time defending since the president issued it in August.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, ruling that the ban would likely be found unconstitutional, issued a primary injunction halting Trump’s ban on transgender service members and recruits. The provision preventing government-funded sex reassignment surgery will remain in place as the order moves through the courts.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders declined to comment on the ruling, which was announced shortly before her daily press conference.

“This is something just announced,” she said. “The Department of Justice has it, they’re reviewing, and I’d refer you to them to any specific questions.”

For their part, the Department of Justice did not respond to inquiries on the subject Monday afternoon.

Eyeroll of the Day

Song of the Day—“Frankenstein” by the Edgar Winter Group