I thought CFSG barely even knew Manafort — he was just this guy who hung around the campaign and sometimes delivered coffee (or covfefe)?
I saw someone in the Slate comments arguing— apparently without irony— that we still shouldn’t assume that Michael Cohen actually broke any laws, because sometimes people plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit.
You know there’s not much ice floe left to stand on by the time you get to that one.
I think Manafort is clearly expecting a pardon, while Cohen who is also facing state charges is cooperating.
Some of the comments from the QAnon folks were hilarious. It’s hard to argue that Mueller is working with Trump once people start getting convicted, or taking a plea deal.
He’s totally working for Trump. His job is to make a show of getting very high-profile convictions of people around Trump, so it looks like he’s serious and above the party. Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t things like lying to the FBI and tax evasion federal crimes, pardonable by the POTUS? So what of consequence is actually being done apart from theater?
I don’t know how much of that I actually believe, but my inner conspiratard won’t shut up about it.
Tomorrow Fox and Friends is airing an interview with Trump. Among other highlights, he discusses Cohen. In this clip, he seems to be trying to make the argument that it wasn’t campaign fraud because it was Trump’s personal money and anyway Obama was worse. Put another way, he admits it and Fox puts it up on twitter. I feel like we should all get the week off to watch this unfold.
You may want to read this article. A pardon admits guilt and removed fifth amendment protections, meaning you can no longer use your own involvement as a reason not to testify.
Also, not even Nixon tried to go this far, apparently, because the political backlash of pardoning people who implicate you is so bad.
A pardon is not necessarily an admission of guilt.
And while it may remove fifth amendment protection, you might still refuse to testify. If they convict you for that, the President could pardon you for that too.
And since when did Trump care about political backlash?
Up until 2016 Nixon was a pretty good touchstone for gauging slime factor. But Nixon was comparatively nuanced, and at least deft enough to resign when the shadow of impeachment darkened his door. I think Trump is willing and able to reset the standard of what is acceptable.
I think Trump would demolish every federal building in D.C. if he saw that it would financially benefit him. No exaggeration. I don’t think Nixon was even that craven and vile.
Trump has reset the standard of what is acceptable. I think this is the tipping point. We’ll see what else happens between now and the mid-terms.
Cripes, Nixon looks like FDR next to Trump.
Paula Duncan, one of the jurors in the Manafort trial, has appeared on Fox News:
Manafort should pay heed, in advance of his DC trial in September.
Here’s the Fox News article, with some other details… Seems Duncan is a full-on, MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporter.
Wow.
Juries are nuts.
There is some good information in there for the prosecutors, though. Jurors really do pay attention to every single thing they are doing.
Thanks for sharing the links, galen ubal.
From the article, I don’t get the impression that Duncan was the holdout. If she was a complete partisan whore, she could have held out on all 18 counts. It sounds to me like she voted guilty on all 18 despite being a die hard Trump supporter.
My earlier point still stands. If you want to be in public service, not just be President or Governor, but be an integral part of those campaigns, your background had better be as squeaky clean as a monk raised from birth in one of those Buddhist temples shown in movies high upon a mountain.
If you don’t want your wife to find out about that prostitute you banged in 1991, you had better just keep your higher paid job in the private sector, or if you shuffled funds here and there twenty years ago and have gotten away with it, maybe you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in prison just so you can take a vast pay cut to work for a candidate. This applies to both left and right.
I’m not trying to excuse Manafort, however, I think it is pretty clear that if he declined to be Trump’s campaign manager, this stuff would have never seen the light of day. Lesson for future would be public servants.
I agree - Duncan wasn’t the holdout; I hope I didn’t give that impression.
What’s heartening to me is that this full-on Trump supporter can be convinced by facts, even when she went into the trial hoping that Manafort was innocent. Still a long way from convincing her that Trump, himself, is corrupt…but maybe…
You didn’t.
I felt the same, although the depth of the “sickness” is always staggering to me. It appears to never have occurred to Duncan to wonder why Trump would hire such a crook in the first place. Of course she probably believes Trump when he declares he hardly knew the guy, never devotes any time to learning if what Trump says is true (it’s not).
Still, props to her for taking her job seriously and doing it as best she could. She clearly struggled to keep her politics out of her deliberations, but she did manage it.
As a long-term former public servant, my observation is that public servants can be forgiven quite a lot, especially if their “crimes” are minor, reasonably rare and are genuinely regretted. I watched more than one attorney, deputy sheriff, department head and other public servant sorts come before the judges I worked for in orange, arrested for a deuce or sometimes even worse. They mostly managed to redeem themselves and their careers.
You can have skeletons. You can’t have a closet full with bones pushing open the door.
The thing with Manafort is that he made a career of helping out vicious dictators. His crimes are no big shock given that. If Trump had enough morals to fill a thimble, he would never have brought him on as campaign chair.
However since Trump thinks dictators are great guys, it isn’t surprising.