Manafort lied to the prosecutors. What’s up with that?
Paul Waldman puts recent events together:
First, it’s unlikely that Mueller would be withdrawing Manafort’s plea agreement unless he had specific evidence demonstrating that Manafort lied. He’s going to lay that evidence out for the court as the judge considers what sentence to give Manafort, in what amounts to another indictment.
Second, Trump’s lawyers and Manafort’s lawyers have a joint defense agreement that allows them to share information. And third, Trump recently completed a set of written answers to Mueller’s questions.
Hmmm … so Trump’s answers probably were predicated on what he knew Manfort had told the Mueller team. And only after Trump submitted his answers did Mueller reveal that he knew Manafort had lied. Hmmmm…
Mueller’s team appears to have no doubt that Manafort was lying to them. That means they didn’t really need his testimony, at all. It also means they had no need to keep secrets — they could keep giving Manafort the impression that he was pulling a fast one over the prosecutors, all while reporting misleading information to Trump that he could use to fill out his open book test. Which increases the likelihood that Trump just submitted sworn answers to those questions full of lies.
And that “detailed sentencing submission … sett[ing] forth the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies†that Mueller mentions in the report?
There’s your Mueller report, which will be provided in a form that Matt Whitaker won’t be able to suppress.
Heh. Trump may be the single most thoroughly screwed man on the planet right now. This may be why he’s throwing nuclear tantrums on the Internets.
Trump definitely is not having a good week. Yesterday GM announced factory closings and layoffs, which of course made Trump look really, really bad. So today he is issuing threats against General Motors, although exactly what he thinks he can do without congressional approval isn’t clear.
There are also reports that Manafort met with Julian Assange several times in the Ecuadorian Embassy. The last meeting was in March 2016, which was about the same time Manafort became Trump’s campaign manager.
Note that Jerome Corsi has bravely rejected a plea deal and says he’d rather rot in jail than take a plea. Works for me.
