Thoughts on the New Manafort Hearing Transcript by Josh Marshall

Thoughts on the New Manafort Hearing Transcript

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 7min

Earlier this week we learned that a judge in Washington DC had found that Paul Manafort had lied to prosecutors from the Special Counsel’s Office, thus voiding his plea agreement and incurring other consequences under federal sentencing guidelines. Tonight the court released a redacted transcript of that hearing running 68 pages. I wanted to give you a brief run-down on what’s there.

Let me run through some key points in order.

The prosecution had a very low bar to meet to cancel the plea agreement – just a good faith belief that Manafort was lying, not cooperating. They easily met that standard. The defense didn’t even challenge that. In most of the cases Judge Jackson further found that by a preponderance of the evidence Manafort was in fact intentionally lying as the prosecution claimed.

Judge Jackson’s argument, reasoning is notable. The false claims were not cases where Manafort forget something, or couldn’t remember or misremembered something. They weren’t even cases where he simply denied something. In most cases he made a concerted effort to create an alternative factual narrative which was not consistent with the evidence. Often he concocted multiple ones. As Jackson noted, this pattern (creating an alternative and detailed factual narratives) is almost certainly evidence of intentional deception rather than poor memory or confusion. As she puts it on page 10: “My concern isn’t with non-answers or simply denials, but times he affirmatively advanced a detailed alternative story that was inconsistent with the facts.”

One caveat. There’s a key passage on page 27 when Judge Jackson says that Manafort’s continued efforts to protect Kilimnik “gives rise to legitimate questions about where [Manafort’s] loyalties lie.” Some are interpreting this as Judge Jackson saying that Manafort’s national loyalties may be with Russia rather than the United States. I don’t think that’s the only plausible way to read it. I think it more plausibly means these actions suggest that rather than going all in and working to help the prosecution (which is what the plea deal requires) he was still trying to protect his coconspirator, Kilimnik. One isn’t exclusive of the other. It can be both. Or that other interpretation might be right. But don’t over-read it. I think people are over-interpreting what Judge Jackson meant.

I haven’t had a chance to go over this with our Russia team of Sneed, Kovensky and Kirkland. So there are some points where I need to do a bit more research on what is likely to be under certain redactions. There’s clearly talk about the ‘peace plan’, seemingly also about polling data. But the heart of the discussion is about Manafort’s repeated lies about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, his longtime deputy for his work in Ukraine.

On that front what comes through is the sheer persistence of Manafort’s deceptions. He lies a lot. His charged crimes were largely about lying. Bank frauds, misleading filings. He lied in his interviews with prosecutors, both before and after he began his nominal cooperation. In some cases he would concede a key factual point and then start lying about it again in a subsequent interview. This pattern is difficult to fully explain in either strategic or characterological terms. But as Judge Jackson notes, Manafort’s relationship and dealings with Kilimnik seemed to be at the core of the deception.

She presses this point in a passage I will quote at length from page 40 …

Manafort’s lawyers argued that these lies were not necessarily material since the government hadn’t actually proven that Kilimnik was a spy or formally working for the Russian government. Jackson, I think rightly, said this didn’t matter. Mueller’s brief was to determine what contacts there might have been between members of the Trump campaign and people tied to the Russian government. Good evidence that Kilimnik had at least some tie to the Russian intelligence services made the whole relationship highly relevant and Manafort repeatedly lied about it. End of story in terms of his plea deal surviving.

I don’t know how much seeing under the redactions would resolve it. We’re still seeing what’s happening here murkily and out of focus. What is clear, though, is that Manafort was still working his business machinations with Russia and Ukraine while he was running the campaign of a candidate who was trying to curry favor with Russia and being actively assisted by Russia.

Manafort could not stop lying about his dealings with Kilimnik, even though his deputy, Rick Gates, had apparently already spilled all the beans (see pages 32 and particularly the first sentence at the top of page 33). The jig was up; he kept lying. Manafort had repeated chances to come clean and did not and now faces a sentence of between 20 and 25 years in prison only weeks shy of his 70th birthday. Keeping this secret has left Manafort facing what is all but certain to be a life sentence in prison.

No mundane criminality could possible explain his actions. He’s at the center of the conspiracy.

One explanation is simply that Manafort wants and believes he’s going to get a pardon. So he is not going to inculpate President Trump or provide evidence that his campaign was part of a conspiracy with the Russian government, whether or not Trump himself was involved.

I’m sure Manafort hopes for a pardon. It probably played into his actions, as the prosecutors appear to believe. But it’s simply not a sufficient explanation.

If the goal is to spend as little time as possible in prison, Manafort had a clear route to that goal: cooperate. Rick Gates did that. He appears set to get a very short period in prison. Some kind of deal like that was certainly on offer for Manafort, albeit perhaps not quite that generous. Manafort has already spent more than six months in jail and even the most generous outlook imagines Trump pardoning him after the Mueller probe ends. Perhaps in 2020. But remember that Mueller structured Manafort’s plea deal in such a way as to facilitate a state prosecution if Manafort is pardoned.

More importantly, is there anything we know about Donald Trump that would give anyone confidence that he could be relied upon to issue such a pardon? Even if he did, Manafort would likely have served as much or more time than Gates will end up serving with his plea agreement.

It simply does not add up. There are things here that Manafort cannot admit to, even though full cooperation with the US criminal justice system could probably give him most of a pass on almost any kind of wrongdoing. Notwithstanding all that, he apparently cannot come clean.

Why?

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