New developments about Paul Manafort and Jerome Corsi.
It’s been a whirlwind 24 hours of news about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
First, on Monday night, Mueller’s team said that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, who had agreed to cooperate with their investigation, had breached his agreement by repeatedly lying to them.
The special counsel has not yet offered specifics on what Manafort allegedly lied about, and the ultimate implications of the news for the probe aren’t clear.
But some curiosities around the disclosure’s timing suggest that Mueller may have wanted to wait until President Donald Trump submitted his answers to some of investigators’ questions last week before revealing this news.
Second, on Tuesday, the Guardian published a stunning report alleging that Manafort had secretly met WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the 2016 campaign. But the story been vigorously disputed by WikiLeaks and has not yet been confirmed by any other news outlet. It could be massively important for the investigation if it’s correct, since it would provide a link between Trump’s campaign and the organization that posted emails Russian hackers stole from leading Democrats. But it’s best to treat it with caution for now.
Finally, in the midst of all this, conservative commentator Jerome Corsi — who’s been under Mueller’s scrutiny for months — keeps coming forward with eyebrow-raising new claims about his involvement in the investigation.
Corsi has already claimed that he’s about to be indicted for perjury, and that he plans to reject a plea deal offered by Mueller. But in a forthcoming book obtained by the Daily Caller, he also says that he worked with longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone to concoct a false “cover story” to explain a suspicious tweet of Stone’s. In the tweet, Stone seemed to predict trouble coming for one or both Podesta brothers — over a month before news broke that WikiLeaks had obtained John Podesta’s hacked emails. Corsi also writes that Stone asked him to tell Assange to delay the timing of the Podesta email release.
All this, too, should be treated with caution — Corsi is a conspiracy theorist with a history of making false claims, and Stone denied his account to the Daily Caller. But Mueller has been investigating Stone’s connections to WikiLeaks for months, and if Stone did in fact concoct a false story, it would suggest there is something he wanted to hide about those Podesta emails.
Back in September, Paul Manafort agreed to a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team. The deal averted an imminent second trial for Manafort (he’d already been convicted of financial crimes at a first one), and required Manafort’s cooperation.
The news was widely viewed as a likely turning point in Mueller’s investigation. It seemed that Mueller had been trying to get Manafort to “flip” for quite a while, and had finally achieved his aim — landing him a cooperator close to the president himself.
Except it does not seem to have panned out. “After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement,” Mueller’s team wrote in a filing Monday evening.
Manafort’s lawyers disputed this assertion and wrote that Manafort “believes he has provided truthful information.” But both parties signaled that further cooperation would be fruitless, and said Manafort’s sentencing should be scheduled.
