The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Plea deal may affect Trump
Manafort’s cooperation agreement with Mueller could have repercussions for president
New Britain native Paul Manafort’s decision to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller and plead guilty in a federal courtroom here Friday may be bad news for President Donald Trump and a boost for Mueller.
Just how much of a boost remains unclear after a somber Manafort, 69, admitted guilt to two conspiracy counts related to his lobbying on behalf of the former pro-Russia ruler of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his Party of Regions.
“He wanted to make sure that his family was able to remain safe and live a good life,” said Manafort’s lawyer, Kevin Downing, after Manafort admitted guilt before U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, with his wife, Kathleen, nearby. “He’s accepted responsibility. This is for conduct that dates back many years, and everybody should remember that.”
After a jury trial in Alexandria, Va., Manafort was convicted last month of tax evasion and bank fraud. The charges could have netted him up to 12 years in prison.
The charges he faced in the Washington case, scheduled for trial next week, could have added up to 17 years.
Manafort remains in prison at least until his November sentencing in the case in Alexandria, where he has a condominium. The
amount of time he ultimately serves behind bars is likely to depend on his level of cooperation with the Mueller probe.
Mueller investigation
Before Friday, Manafort had maintained his innocence and refused to cooperate with Mueller. A spokesman had stated Manafort would be exonerated in court.
But the 76-page superseding indictment filed by Mueller’s team on Friday pledges Manafort will assist Mueller in the probe, which is focused on allegations of links between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
Manafort, a veteran Republican operative and son of New Britain’s Republican leader and mayor from 1965 to 1971, Paul Manafort Sr., served as Trump’s campaign chairman from March to August 2016.
He was in the room at Trump Tower in New York during a critical June 2016 meeting between the Trump team — including Donald Trump Jr. and Trump sonin-law Jared Kushner — and a lawyer said to be a Russian-government emissary, Natalia Veselnitskaya.
An intermediary had told Trump Jr. the Russian lawyer would share negative information about thenDemocratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. If that were to be the case, “I love it,” Trump Jr. said in an email.
But he later said he believed the temptation of “dirt” on Clinton was nothing more than a pretext for the lawyer to get inside the Trump camp and lobby for the loosening of sanctions ordered under the Magnitsky Act of 2012.
Trump denials
Manafort may offer Mueller a different account of the circumstances surrounding the meeting and what President Trump knew about it.
Trump shrugged off allegations that Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee and Clinton’s campaign.
Trump said at a news conference in July 2016, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing” from Clinton’s private server, which itself had been the subject of an unfruitful FBI investigation.
“Paul Manafort’s cooperation with the special counsel is very, very bad news for his former boss,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, DConn., said in a statement. “This guilty plea is another victory for (Mueller) and may provide an additional wave of information.”
In an interview, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., said that at a minimum, Manafort’s plea deal was vindication for Mueller in the face of Trump’s Twitter dismissals of the probe as a “hoax,” and the president’s insistence there was “no collusion.”
The Manafort plea agreement is “indicative of the quality of Mueller’s work,” said Himes, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which conducted a probe that its Republican leaders aborted with a conclusion there had been no cooperation between Russia and the Trump campaign.
“By winning guilty plea after guilty plea, Mueller is proving that he’s everything the president says he’s not,” Himes said.
Mueller has gotten guilty pleas from three former aides, including Manafort’s close deputy, Rick Gates. In addition, former Trump lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen has pleaded guilty in a case brought by the Manhattanbased U.S. Attorney’s Office.
At Trump’s direction prior to the 2016 election, Cohen said, he paid off women who had claimed to have had sexual relationships with Trump.
At the White House, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement the Manafort deal “had absolutely nothing to do with the president or his victorious 2016 campaign. It is totally unrelated.”
Trump’s lawyer in the probe, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said in a statement: “Once again, an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign. The reason: The president did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell the truth.”