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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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Harry Litman teaches constitutional law at the University of California at San Diego. He has served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania and deputy assistant attorney general.
Following the implosion of Paul Manafort’s cooperation agreement with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III , a lawyer for President Trump casually announced that Manafort’s lawyers had been briefing Trump’s lawyers about his sessions with the Mueller team all along.
This revelation, far from routine, in fact is jaw-dropping — and it has significant legal and political implications.
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Finally, the open pipeline between cooperator Manafort and suspect Trump may have been not only extraordinary but also criminal. On Manafort and Downing’s end, there is a circumstantial case for obstruction of justice. What purpose other than an attempt to “influence, obstruct, or impede” the investigation of the president can be discerned from Manafort’s service as a double agent? And on the Trump side, the communications emit a strong scent of illegal witness tampering (and possibly obstruction as well).
Proving those charges would require a fight. The lawyers would be expected to assert privilege, and cries of overreach would sound from the White House and pro-Trump journalists. Whitaker could impede or countermand the effort.
But it’s critical to understand the stakes of the battle. Even more than the president’s potential criminal liability, there is a set of burning questions about exactly what happened in 2016, the extent to which https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/senate-intelligence-committee-leaders-russia-did-interfere-in-2016-elections/2017/10/04/1459291c-a91f-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?utm_term=.091c515ff684 (Russian efforts to influence the presidential election) found purchase in the United States, and what part was played by high-level Trump campaign officials or the president himself. It is intolerable to consider that the truth of these consequential matters would be smothered and kept from the American people indefinitely. But that’s exactly what the president’s overall strategy aims to do, and with the support, at least tacitly, of a complicit still-Republican-majority — for now — Congress. Is there no one in the GOP with the guts to stand up to the president and the resolve to see that the truth will out?
The idea that Mueller’s extraordinary team was clueless about the sincerity of Manafort’s conduct after he claimed to have flipped to the prosecution’s side seems preposterous.
More likely the prosecutors quickly figured out that Manafort was insincere and exploited the hubris of two con artists, Manafort and Trump, letting them walk down their own primrose path [See Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3].
If Trump and his lawyer relied on what Downing passed on from meetings with Team Mueller, using it to shape the written answers to Mueller’s questions, this double-agent legal game may blow up in Trump’s face.
Police and prosecutors are allowed to lie to suspects. They do it all the time, planting fake facts to draw out criminal conduct and establish conspiracies. If they had indeed figured out that Manafort was not being straight with them they could easily frame questions to mislead, offer fake facts, withhold real facts and imply ignorance to flush out Trump.
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The Associate Press reports that on Thursday morning, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in the Southern District of New York to making false statements to Congress related to his involvement in real estate deals in Russia on behalf of Donald Trump. At the hearing, Cohen's lawyer told the judge that his client was entering a plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The criminal information describing Cohen's conduct is below. Lawfare will post additional documents as they become available.
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