Russia campaign comes full circle
US President Donald Trump’s critics have long argued that he was corruptly trying to thwart the Russia investigation by dangling his broad pardon power. One of Trump’s many controversial pardons this week, in particular, raises that question anew.
Throughout the nearly two-year investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, there was perhaps one person (aside from the president himself) whom investigators really wanted to talk to, and who ended up not cooperating and getting a lengthier jail sentence instead: former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
We don’t know whether there was an explicit deal between Trump and Manafort to reward the latter for his silence. But reports that Trump, through emissaries, floated the idea of a pardon to Manafort as he was talking to special counsel Robert Mueller III sound even more plausible now that it’s actually happened.
Trump wasn’t necessarily quiet about his desire for Manafort to stay quiet. During the Mueller investigation, he publicly praised Manafort for refusing ‘‘to break’’.
Manafort originally fought criminal charges – and then, facing 10 years in prison, pleaded guilty in the hope of a lesser sentence for cooperating with Mueller. But the plea deal almost immediately collapsed as Mueller accused Manafort of lying to him and his team – about his contacts with a potential Russian agent.
Trump has also pardoned or commuted the sentences of four other people caught up in the Russia investigation, not even hiding the fact in statements that he wants to try to undo the work of an investigation that dominated much of his presidency.
But Manafort’s pardon rises above the rest for its ability to hide any Russia ties with the Trump campaign from investigators.
Some of the others Trump helped with legal troubles – former national security adviser Michael T Flynn and former campaign aide George Papadopoulos – ended up cooperating in some form with investigators. They were convicted or received lesser jail lesser sentences for their cooperation. Flynn got his conviction overturned with the help of former Trump attorney-general William Barr.
Trump ally and operative Roger Stone, like Manafort, notably did not cooperate with Mueller. Trump pardoned him this week, too, after commuting his sentence for, in part, lying to Congress about conversations he had with Trump campaign officials.
Manafort had perhaps the most connections to Russia of anyone. He had worked for pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign. His brief tenure as head of Trump’s campaign overlapped with concerns about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. He was at the Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. He has high-level connections to Russia in his own right.
Someone Manafort worked closely with, Konstantin Kilimnik, was described by Mueller as having ‘‘ties to Russian intelligence’’. A Senate Republican report went further and called Kilimnik a ‘‘ Russian intelligence officer’’, and said he was the ‘‘ single most direct tie’’ between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence, so much so that he was ‘‘ at the centre of the committee’s investigation’’. Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik. His plea deal fell apart when investigators accused him of lying about his contacts with Kilimnik.
According to the FBI, in 2018, as Manafort was fighting charges, he told his deputy, Rick Gates, that they would ‘‘get through it’’ and ‘‘we’ll be taken care of’’, as Buzzfeed’s Jason Leopold reported.
In his confirmation hearing to be attorneygeneral, Barr testified that he thought that it would be corrupt, even criminal, for a president to issue a pardon in exchange for someone not to give incriminating evidence.
Mueller had a job to do to understand how Russians tried to infiltrate and shape an American presidential election, and whether anyone in the US helped with that. He never got to probe all of this as much as he wanted. Instead, arguably the central figure in all this stayed quiet. And he just got rewarded for that with a get-out-of-jail-free card from the president of the United States.