Timothy L. O’Brien, Columnist/ Bloomberg
Three sentencing memos paint unflattering
portraits of the president’s former campaign
chairman and
personal lawyer.
On Friday evening, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Justice Department team and federal prosecutors in Manhattan offered a few reasons, perhaps, for why President Donald Trump went on the Twitter warpath Friday morning – including their apparent belief that the president himself is a primary architect of some of the troubling events they have been examining.
Our day began with the president populating his social feed with accusations that Mueller (and a host of other people and nefarious forces) had “big time conflicts of interest” and was “lying and leaking” in service of drafting a “final Witch Hunt Report” about the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with the Kremlin to sabotage the 2016 presidential campaign.
Near the end of the day, Mueller and prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York filed three sentencing memorandums involving two prominent members of the president’s troubled advisory board — Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, and Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and self-described “fixer.” (Mueller’s team filed a memo for Manafort and one for Cohen; federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed one for Cohen.)
Let’s turn first to Mueller’s ten-page, partially redacted Manafort filing, which outlines why he and his team believe that Manafort lied to them even after he decided to cooperate with their investigation in September.
They accuse Manafort of breaching the plea agreement in two ways. First, he allegedly dissembled about contacts he had with members of the Trump administration. He’s also said to have conspired with Konstantin Kilimnik — a Russian linked to his country’s intelligence network — between February and April to obstruct justice by shaping the testimony of two of Mueller’s witnesses. (Pro tip: It’s not a good idea to be in touch with a suspected Russian intelligence asset when you’re being prosecuted by seasoned federal law enforcement officials probing your role in Russian efforts to sabotage a presidential election.)
The Mueller team’s Manafort memo is embroidered with hard-earned confidence: “We are prepared to prove the basis for the defendant’s breach at a hearing that will establish each false statement through independent documentary and testimonial evidence, including Manafort’s subsequent admissions.”
Trump’s name isn’t in any of the unredacted portions of the Manafort sentencing memo but his presence looms large in all of the court filings since both Manafort and Cohen worked for him. In a taste of what might still be coming, CNN reported earlier on Friday that one of the president’s ersatz lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said Mueller’s team told Manafort that Trump was lying when he said he didn’t know about a 2016 Trump Tower meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with a Russian attorney offering compromising information about Hillary Clinton. Manafort was present at that meeting, along with the president’s son-in-law and current White House adviser, Jared Kushner.
Another thing to consider: Manafort breached his plea agreement with Mueller after being indicted for money laundering, bank fraud, tax fraud and failing to register as an agent of the Ukraine government. He was found guilty of bank and tax fraud, witness tampering, and conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. The money laundering and registration charges were never heard in a courtroom because he pleaded guilty to the other charges.
That is a lot of illegal and disreputable stuff, and Manafort’s plea deal likely would have spared him a meaningful chunk of prison time. Yet he lied to Mueller’s team and now faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. Why? I’ll venture to guess: He may be expecting a pardon from the president or he has been trying to protect third parties — perhaps from his roster of rough-and-tumble Russian and Ukrainian clients — who might represent a threat to his family.
In case any of this isn’t enough to remind you of the quality of some of the advice and people who have circulated around the Trump Organization, the Trump presidential campaign, and the White House, consider Michael Cohen.
The sentencing memorandum federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed on Friday outlined in fresh detail previously reported acts of tax and bank fraud that Cohen committed during and after his service to the president (the memo also takes Cohen to task for trying to blame his accountant for elements of the tax fraud). It noted that Cohen lied to Congress about some of his actions, including the pursuit of a Trump project in Moscow that went on much longer than was previously known – and until well after it was clear that Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. “If the project was completed, the Company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues,” prosecutors said.
It also offered a detailed description of Cohen’s orchestration of hush-money payments to two alleged Trump paramours — Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal — to prevent them from publicly revealing details about their past encounters with Trump during the 2016 campaign. Prosecutors noted that Cohen “acted in coordination and at the direction of” a person they don’t identify to arrange the payments, but that individual is clearly Trump (whom Cohen has recorded discussing the payments).
In addition to noting Cohen’s willingness to sacrifice his accountant to save himself, the Manhattan prosecutors also take issue with the idea that Cohen’s cooperation emerged from some a newfound sense of duty, “personal resolve” or a “selfless” and “unprompted about-face.” They plainly state that Cohen cooperated to save his hide and avoid a harsher penalty. To that end, they asked that he get a “significant” prison sentence.