Charges against Manafort pre-date Trump campaign
The jailing of Paul Manafort has little to do with President Trump because the charges against Manafort date back to before he was Trump’s campaign manager, the mainstream media quietly admitted.
This is significant because, to the average anti-Trump progressive, Manafort’s incarceration suggests Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe has substance, which is exactly what Mueller wants the public to believe in the aftermath of the Inspector General report released Thursday.
But according to the LA Times:
A lot of anti-Trumpists are likely taking pleasure in the notion of Paul Manafort getting sent to jail today after a judge revoked his bail over allegations of witness tampering. But it’s unclear whether this will have much impact on the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
Remember, the case against Manafort deals primarily with action taken before he became Trump’s campaign manager. The array of federal money laundering and conspiracy charges against Manafort are serious, especially with this new set of witness-tampering charges.
Yet even some of those pre-Trump charges are weak, particularly the witness-tampering charge, according to analysts.
“… I think that the special counsel’s allegations of witness tampering are rather thin,” wrote anti-Trump legal analyst Paul Rosenzweig. “The FBI agent’s declaration in support of the allegations is long on detail about what Manafort and the Hapsburg Group did before the elections and short on information about the tampering allegation itself.”
“Drill down into the exhibits and you will see that only one, Exhibit N, is evidence of communications between Manafort and the witnesses he is alleged to have contacted in a tampering effort.”
It’s also worth noting that Mueller’s other high-profile prosecution, that of the Russian trolls accused of running bot campaigns during US elections, also pre-dates Trump and has significant legal hurdles.
“A 2014 report from Buzzfeed shows that not only was this troll group’s activities known, they were also fairly transparent about what they were doing,” reported Jamie White. “A 2013 article from The Atlantic reveals the same scheme by Russian trolls to influence U. S. opinion on a number of issues.”
In other words, the Obama administration could have easily prosecuted these Russian trolls then, but didn’t because, at the time, the deep state wasn’t pushing a “Russian collusion” narrative against a sitting US president.
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