Possibly the key to Manafort's continued lying and law-breaking

(As well as to others in the Trump circle.)





Bingo.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Manafort plea - Part 9

Where do they go from here regarding what Paul Manafort knows?

[M]uch of the substantive cooperation that Mueller’s investigators were seeking from Manafort may already have been obtained just in the last week. The plea agreement discloses that Manafort began talking to investigators on September 10, 2018, and signed a proffer agreement the following day. (A proffer agreement is a formal agreement that facilitates prosecutors and a defendant discussing the substance of a guilty plea.) In other words, the plea agreement strongly implies that Manafort sat down with FBI agents and prosecutors for several “proffer sessions” over the four days that preceded his appearance in court on Friday. A defendant has no incentive to hide the truth in proffer sessions because prosecutors cannot use truthful statements during the sessions to bring new charges, while — as Manafort’s erstwhile partner Rick Gates experienced firsthand — lying to prosecutors in a proffer session may lead to new felony charges. While much more testimony and interrogation lies ahead for Manafort, both to the special counsel and other U.S. attorney offices, there is a good chance that Mueller’s investigators have already learned much of what they needed from him.

[...]

[T]he revelation that Manafort has been talking to investigators for days would make a politically explosive pardon less attractive to the White House.

[...]

The charges Manafort has faced thus far have generally avoided addressing his work on the Trump campaign, and the statement of the offense reflects that same approach.

  Yahoo

But his plea deal does include the requirement that he testify truthfully in any other cases the prosecution may ask him to, including Grand Jury testimony, and cooperate fully in all aspects of the investigation, including providing documentation. Trump is not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination.

[T]here are two good reasons to believe that the campaign and election meddling are very important aspects of Manafort’s anticipated cooperation.

First, an important moment from Manafort’s trial in Virginia suggests that an ongoing investigation of the Trump campaign is very much underway. During the trial, a defense attorney cross-examining Gates, Manafort’s partner, asked whether Mueller’s investigators had posed questions to him about his time on Trump’s campaign. That cross-examination question prompted an immediate objection from Greg Andres, the lead prosecutor in the Virginia trial, which brought lawyers into a confidential sidebar conference with the judge. The government later filed a motion to seal that sidebar conference on the grounds that “substantive evidence pertaining to an ongoing investigation was revealed,” and the judge agreed.

[...]

Second, Mueller’s office has by now established a track record of referring cases that do not clearly relate to his central investigative mission to other jurisdictions, even when they involve Trump and his campaign.

So why did the Special Counsel’s Office keep the prosecution of Manafort (and Gates) for itself? The best answer is because Manafort (and Gates) have important but not yet public roles in Mueller’s Russia investigation as it will play out in coming weeks and months.

The story of Paul Manfort

We've had this information before, in bits and pieces, an article here, an article there, letting us know that Paul Manafort into the Trump campaign is very likely his way of paying his debts to Russians he owes. (Remember the email where it appears Manafort asked how they could use his position with the Trump campaign "to get whole" with the Russians?) Anyway, here it is laid out in a  Max Bergmann Twitter thread. Excerpts:














The thread seems to be based on this Atlantic article extensively reporting Manafort's fantastic history and his entry into the Trump cabal, the key bits on that being:

When Manafort offered Trump his services, he resisted his tendency to slap a big price tag on them; he would provide his counsel, he said, free of charge. To his family, Manafort described this decision as a matter of strategy: If Trump viewed him as wealthy, then he would treat him as a near-equal, not as a campaign parasite.

But Manafort must have also believed that money would eventually come, just as it always had, from the influence he would wield in the campaign, and exponentially more so if Trump won. So might other favors and dispensations. These notions were very likely what led him to reach out to Oleg Deripaska almost immediately upon securing a post within the campaign, after having evaded him for years. Through one of his old deputies, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, he sent along press clippings that highlighted his new job. “How do we use to get whole,” Manafort emailed Kilimnik. “Has OVD operation seen?” Manafort’s spokesman has acknowledged that the initials refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska. In the course of the exchanges, Kilimnik expressed optimism that “we will get back to the original relationship” with the oligarch.

All of Manafort’s hopes, of course, proved to be pure fantasy. Instead of becoming the biggest player in Donald Trump’s Washington, he has emerged as a central villain in its central scandal. An ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence suggests that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian efforts to turn the 2016 presidential election in its favor. Given Manafort’s long relationship with close Kremlin allies including Yanukovych and Deripaska, and in particular his indebtedness to the latter, it is hard to imagine him as either a naive or passive actor in such a scheme—although Deripaska denies knowledge of any plan by Manafort to get back into his good graces.

[...]

Last year, a group of Manafort’s longtime friends, led by an old Republican hand named Bill Greener, tried to organize a cadre of surrogates to defend Manafort from the allegations against him, including the worst one: that he collaborated with a hostile foreign power to subvert the American democratic process. Manafort’s old partner Charlie Black even showed up for a meeting, though the two had largely fallen out of touch. A few of the wheel men from the old firm wanted to help too. Yet, when volunteers were needed to go on TV as character witnesses, nobody raised his hand. “There wasn’t a lot to work with,” one person contacted by this group told me. “And nobody could be sure that Paul didn’t do it.” In fact, everything about the man and the life he chose suggests that he did.

  The Atlantic

Double down on Mueller's Russian Mob connections

The Daily Beast has a couple more names to add to the Manafort-Mob charges: Ivan Fursin, "businessman and Ukrainian parliamentarian [...] who is closely linked to one of Russia’s most notorious criminals: Semion Mogilevich, described as “the most dangerous mobster in the world.” "; and Lucicle Consultants Limited, a company Manafort and Gates set up in Cyprus to launder money from Fursin.

A little trip down memory lane with the Trump campaign

By March 2016, Trump’s campaign [...] was eagerly searching for foreign policy expertise. As Trump rose in the polls and won Republican primaries, the former reality TV host was under pressure to announce a group of advisers with whom he was consulting on foreign policy issues.

The scrutiny intensified early that month after 70 conservative national security experts signed an open letter opposing Trump’s candidacy. In mid-March, Trump was asked on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe” to name people with whom he spoke about foreign affairs.

“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain,” Trump responded, prompting more calls for a list of formal advisers.

  WaPo

That was a good one.

To come up with names, the campaign turned to Sam Clovis, a former Iowa radio host who served as national campaign co-chairman, an attorney for Clovis confirmed Tuesday in a statement.

Yes, the 400-lb elephant in the room, Sam Clovis. (Hey! Maybe he's the 400-lb guy sitting on his bed Trump said might have been hacking the DNC. OK, I don't know how much Clovis weighs, but it's got to be somewhere in that area.)

Let me ask you this: why would a former Iowa radio host make a good foreign policy advisor? Take as much time as you need. He's been nominated for Secretary of Agriculture as well. Perhaps because he's from Iowa? Oh, wait. Perhaps because he was involved in the Russian collusion fiasco that is currently under investigation and he needs to be paid.

But the statement did not address how Papadopoulos ended up on the list. Bennett said he was not consulted and would not have recommended his former employee if he had been asked because he found him unimpressive.

What else is Bennett going to say at this point?

On March 21, Trump included Papadopoulos among five men he announced were advising him on matters of national security in a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board. “An energy and oil consultant. Excellent guy,” Trump said.

Wait. We're ust going to jump from "the statement did not address how Papadopoulos ended up on the list" to "he's on the list"?

If Trump or his team had undertaken even a cursory vetting of Papadopoulos, they would have found that much of his already-slim résumé was either exaggerated or false.

I would be willing to be that is also the case with anyone on the Trump team. (And pretty much any resumé in circulation for any job anywhere these days.) Heck, it's true of Trump himself!

At any rate, apparently, they didn't care.

Though Papadopoulos’s exaggerated résumé issues quickly became public, he remained a part of the Trump advisory panel and soon began urging campaign aides to let him set up a meeting between Trump and Russian officials.

Court documents show he raised the idea at a March 31 meeting of the group attended by both Trump and Sessions, who had endorsed Trump’s campaign, telling the group that “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President [Vladimir] Putin.”

As far as I've seen, nobody's addressing this question: why would he offer up something like that out of the blue? Somehow he knew - or believed - that would be something worth offering.

“I was surprised to learn what George Papadopoulos was up to during the campaign,” [J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon spokesman and Trump national security adviser] said Tuesday in a text message. “He obviously went to great lengths to go around me and Sen. Sessions.”

JD better hope Papadopoulos doesn't have any contradictory information to give Mueller.

And yet, Papadopoulos continued to be invited to campaign events. In late June or early July, he attended a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club along with several other national security advisers for the Trump campaign.

[...]

Papadopoulos was seated to Sessions’s left.

[...]

Media appearances by Papadopoulos continued.

[...]

British sources said it was around that time that he approached British government officials to say he was traveling to London and asked to be given a meeting with senior government ministers. Instead, he was offered a session with a mid-level official at the Foreign Office in London.

During the meeting, Papadopoulos made a comment indicating he had contacts at the senior level of the Russian government, British sources said. British officials quickly concluded he was not a major or knowledgeable player in the Trump orbit and did not pursue the issue or continue contact.

Or did they quickly conclude that was not a net they wanted to get caught up in? The Greeks thought he might be a major player.

Spokesman Efthymios Aravantinos said [a] conversation [between Papadopoulus and the Greek foreign minister in New York] was conducted as part of a routine effort that the embassy makes to reach out to Greek Americans “hoping they have a sentimental attachment to Greece and that we can connect.”

Especially when they are part of a presidential campaign team.

In September, Papadopoulos emailed another Trump aide, Boris Epshteyn, and told him he planned to be in New York and hoped to set up meetings around the U.N. General Assembly meeting.

[...]

Papadopoulos wrote that he wanted to connect Epshteyn with a friend, Sergei Millian of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, the emails said.

Millian would later be identified as a major source for the author of a dossier that included unsubstantiated salacious allegations about Trump’s activities in Russia, a claim Millian has denied.

[...]

Asked in August to describe his relationship with Papadopoulos, Millian responded by email, “I can meet and talk to any person. . . . It’s none of your business.”

God, I both pity and admire Mueller's team if they can wade through all this shit. Could Papadopoulos himself have been a Russian plant to get kompromat on Trump? There are times when I think Manafort was working with the Russians for similar reasons.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.