Manafort milestone unleashes a frenzied carnival of fast guessing
Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, leaves the District of Columbia federal courthouse on April 19. Credit: EPA-EFE / REX / Shutterstock / Jim Lo Scalzo
The court filing was short and simple.
It consisted of a barely two-page report submitted Monday on the federal sentencing-to-come of Paul Manafort, the convicted former Donald Trump campaign chairman.
Special counsel Robert Mueller's office says Manafort broke the agreement he signed when he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts and promised to answer questions truthfully.
"After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement," the Mueller teams says in the status report.
"The nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies" will come in a future submission, prosecutors added. But Manafort's team, with its response also represented in the report, denies he broke the agreement.
From there, throughout Tuesday, sprang all manner of speculations, theories, spin, confusion, presumption and interpretation, including these airy, vague and mutually exclusive scenarios from legal experts and other observers:
- Manafort's a winner because he stopped short of telling tales and President Donald Trump can reward him with a presidential pardon;
- Manafort's a loser because he blew a sentencing deal and faces harsh penalties he had tried to avoid.
- Mueller's a winner because he has so much of what he needs for his investigation that he can afford to kick Manafort to the curb for lying.
- Mueller's a loser because he found Manafort's statements so useless that he cannot use them to make a case against higher-ups.
Trump's latest Twitter rant attacking Mueller early Tuesday suggested he's feeling some kind of heat, but it shed no factual light about what the president was trying to suggest or to whom.
His grab bag of tweeted phrases included some cant about "witch hunts," "heroes," "ruined lives," "fake news," "angry Democrats" — and the relatively new "conflicted prosecutor gone rogue."
Sorry, folks, but the direction of all this remains unclear.
And it gets muddier.
The Guardian newspaper stirred a tempest Tuesday by reporting that between 2013 and 2016, Manafort visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange where he's holed up in the Ecuarorian embassy in London. This allegedly included a meeting in March 2016 — months before first WikiLeaks first published hacked Democratic Party documents. But both Manafort and WikiLeaks heatedly denounced the report as totally false — and the sources cited by The Guardian remain unidentified.
"I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him," Manafort said in a statement.
George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley called the frenzy "Kremlinology" in an opinion piece for USA Today. This recalls how observers speculated on who was "in" and who was "out" at the top of Soviet government based on photos of who stood where during the latest military parade.
"The most that can be said is that Manafort did not give Mueller what he wanted — or at least all that he wanted," Turley wrote.
"Indeed, what Mueller wanted from Manafort is the far more interesting question than what he got."
For the public, it is still only a question.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
