The breaking down of Paul Manafort ’s plea deal has dealt a blow to special counsel Robert Mueller ’s investigation. A witness to the June…
The breaking down of Paul Manafort ’s plea deal has dealt a blow to special counsel Robert Mueller ’s investigation.
A witness to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and a Russian lawyer predicated on damaging information about then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Manafort was seen as a valuable potential witness in Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
The decision to call him out as a liar effectively takes his testimony off the table, removing a valuable asset for the government. It comes after a lengthy trial where prosecutors won guilty verdicts against Trump’s former campaign chairman.
“They viewed him as giant prize and that’s why they were willing to take the risk of exposing parts of the investigation by going to trial,” said Seth Waxman, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor in D. C. “To lose the cooperation of Manafort is a devastating loss for the government.”
The government has accused Manafort of breaching his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to federal investigators. It asked a federal judge on Monday to move forward with Manafort’s sentencing just more than two months after he began cooperating.
Mueller’s prosecutors wrote that Manafort lied to the FBI and the special counsel’s office “on a variety of subject matters,” saying they would file a “detailed sentencing submission” to the probation department and federal court laying out the nature of his lies.
While the details are unknown, experts say the development signals Manafort is lying about something significant, though it’s not necessarily information that’s key to the Russia investigation.
Glen Kopp, a former assistant U. S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Manafort could have lied about a number of smaller items that raised doubt among prosecutors about whether he would be truthful about other, bigger issues.
“It is not, on its face, a positive development in terms of further investigation when you have someone you believed could be helpful,” he said.
It’s possible prosecutors believe Manafort was untruthful with investigators working on other foreign lobbying investigations that grew out of Mueller’s probe. The special counsel has reportedly passed on three such cases to federal prosecutors in New York, and prosecutors in Washington secured a guilty plea from Manafort associate Sam Patten in late August.
