Collect Call from the Alexandria Jail
This week the lawyers for Paul Manafort, convicted felon and former Chairman of the Trump Presidential Campaign, made a big mistake. In a filing with the Federal District Court in Washington, DC, that was trying to counter Special Counsel Mueller’s assessment that Manafort broke his plea agreement and should be sentenced accordingly. The Defense filed an electronic brief with several paragraphs redacted by the famous “black lines.”
The “boo-boo” was that in blacking out the details, they covered the information but didn’t delete it. When the media copied the brief, they discovered that the black lines could be removed, revealing the classified information.
The revealed information explained why Special Counsel believed Manafort reneged on his plea deal. Manafort lied to them about his contacts with Russian political operative and former Manafort employee Konstantine Kiliminik, who himself was indicted by the Special Counsel’s Grand Jury for obstruction of justice. Mueller’s team noted that when Manafort was running the Trump Campaign, he gave detailed polling information to Kiliminik; information that would have been extremely helpful in targeting the Russian social media dis-information campaign against Hillary Clinton and for Trump.
The Manafort team was attempting to excuse the gift of the information as “one politician showing off to another,” but the significance of the information, and the lying by Manafort, was not lost on the Special Counsel, and resulted in the withdrawal of the plea agreement. Manafort faces a ten-year Federal prison term, and could face additional time if he is tried for more offenses. With the Mueller deal cancelled, there is only one other way he could avoid a long stretch in incarceration.
President Trump has never taken a Manafort pardon “off the table,” keeping the option dangling. He has also praised Manafort for his courage in not telling-all, as opposed to the Presidential Twitter storm of criticism about his cooperating former lawyer, Michael Cohen.
But it’s not just the prospect of a Trump pardon that keeps Manafort from coming clean with prosecutors. He also is deeply in debt to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, to the tune of $10 million. Like all Russian oligarchs, Deripaska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin. From the beginning of his involvement with the Trump Campaign, Manafort was consistently looking for ways to re-pay his debt.
Deripaska was interested in getting repaid, but also represents the interests of the Russian Government. If Manafort really was cooperating with Russian Intelligence by getting them the granular polling data from the campaign; telling the Mueller team might put Manafort in grave physical danger. He might not be lying out of loyalty to Trump, but out of the fear that he could end up a victim of Russian assassination.
So Manafort might be stuck – unable to cut a truthful deal, and unwilling as a sixty-nine year old man to serve a decade or more in jail. His only chance: a Presidential pardon. Maybe the “clerical” error in redaction was really more of a message to the President: “…look at what we know, and what we can tell, get me out of here!!!!”
And maybe the Manafort legal team isn’t really quite as incompetent as they appear. They have from the first Federal hearing, emphasized that their client was going to stick with the President, and with his story. Now that a ten or more years sentence stretches before him, they may have needed to remind the President of what the former Chairman knows.
They did it in the way most likely to reach Mr. Trump; through media reports about the “boo-boo.” They were saying: “…Paul Manafort calling collect from the Alexandria Jail for Donald Trump, do you accept the charges?” We all await the answer.
