Pierce: How Much Further Can Mueller Push Manafort?

[babylonsister]

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19621815/paul-manafort-rick-gates-russia-trump/

How Much Further Can Mueller Push Manafort?
Apparently, Manafort is betting on a get-out-of-jail-free card.
By Charles P. Pierce
Mar 28, 2018


If Robert Mueller puts any more pressure on Paul Manafort, he’s liable to turn Manafort into a tiny diamond. First of all, Mueller apparently has Rick Gates, Manafort’s old running buddy, singing the entire Ring cycle as regards to the relationship he and Manafort—and the Trump campaign—had with a whole host of the Volga Bagmen. From CNN:

That Gates and the unnamed person, who had lived in Kiev and Moscow and worked for one of Paul Manafort's companies, were in touch in September and October 2016 was "pertinent to the investigation," a court filing from prosecutors said Tuesday night. The acknowledgment that Gates knew the person had Russian intelligence ties is alleged in a report prosecutors filed about the coming sentencing of a Dutch attorney. That attorney, Alex van der Zwaan, who worked with Gates and Manafort previously, pleaded guilty last month to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigators about his interactions with Gates and the unnamed person.

Manafort has to know that Gates is the golden key that will open the door to Manafort’s own cell. Certainly, as Politico points out, the folks at Camp Runamuck know it.

While Gates now wears a GPS monitor around his ankle, in 2016 he wore a Secret Service lapel pin that gave him easy access to Trump on the campaign trail and at Trump Tower. “He saw everything,” said a Republican consultant who worked with Gates during the campaign. The consultant called Gates one of the “top five” insiders whom Mueller could have tapped as a cooperative government witness. One defense attorney in the case said Gates’ plea has triggered palpable alarm in Trump world.

Manafort may have struck a larger public profile, but Gates spent more time in Trump’s orbit. Manafort left the Trump campaign under a cloud of scandal in mid-August 2016. Gates, his right-hand man, stayed on through the election before assisting the Trump inauguration and Trump’s early presidency. Worst of all for the White House, Gates lacks hard-wired loyalty. He is not family, like Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr., or his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nor is he among true Trump believers like Corey Lewandowski and Brad Parscale.

Through Gates, Mueller gets Manafort, and Manafort is the whole ballgame, at least on the issue of the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 election. (As far as money-laundering, real estate scams, and the rest of the bag of White House horrors, there will be other songbirds singing other songs, I reckon.)

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https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a19621815/paul-manafort-rick-gates-russia-trump/

[SonofDonald]

1. We have all waited so long to see this end

And for awhile there were even some here who doubted Mr Mueller would get dumpf in the end and the whitewash would come out.

I never doubted Mueller would get him, now I'm certain he will, in the biggest criminal prosecution in American History.

And the dumpf family will have every last building, possession and penny seized except for some new orange colored clothes.

And then Mueller goes after the rest of the traitors from the gang that thought they would get away with it.

Not just a dream anymore.

[SoCalMusicLover]

2. It's Still A Dream

Until it happens, it's all a dream.

I'm old enough to unfortunately realize that some guilty people get away with their crimes. It won't surprise me if Drumpf never pays for his crimes.