Department of Justice

This 31-Page Manafort Indictment Feels Like Flip Bait

The indictment has nothing to do with the campaign, but can bury Manafort pretty good.

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Paul Manafort (Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

Former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has been indicted on 12 counts: conspiracy against the United States, failure to register as a foreign agent, making false statements, and money laundering. Richard Gates, Manafort’s associate, has also been indicted.

The charges do not relate to the 2016 presidential campaign.

UPDATE: MAnafort and Gates have pleaded “not guilty” to the charges.

I’ve read the whole indictment, and you can too below. But if you’re looking for the smoking gun that connects the Trump campaign to colluding with Russia to influence the presidential election, you’re not going to find it. There are a lot of serious crimes alleged in this document, but not the crime everybody is waiting for.

This isn’t getting Al Capone for tax evasion. This is getting Frank Nitti for carrying an unlicensed hand gun.

Which is all very bad for Paul Manafort and Richard Gates. Without the connection to the Trump campaign, their scheme to lobby on behalf for foreign governments and not tell anybody where they were getting the money would probably have gone unnoticed. It certainly would not have been investigated.

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If somebody had told Paul Manafort, “You’re going to run the Trump campaign for a couple of months, get humiliated and replaced by Steve Bannon, then have your whole life picked through by a former director of the FBI while the president pretends to barely know who you are,” I’m sure he would have given the job a hard pass.

I mean, just check out Count 2, the money laundering charge.


That’s asset forfeiture of basically everything he owns (the indictment contains a long list of properties the government potentially wants now), and, oh yeah, 20 years in prison.

This indictment is meant to bury Paul Manafort.

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Which… is maybe good news for Donald Trump. Manafort knew this was coming. You don’t see this happen to witnesses who are willing to cooperate and flip on the higher-ups. Clearly, Manafort has not, to this point, divulged any information about the Trump campaign, and how it interacted with the Russians, if at all.

One must assume that this indictment is designed to make him. Maybe Manafort thought the Mueller wasn’t serious or maybe he thinks that he can beat the rap. But maybe he’ll look at his situation differently when he’s under indictment, out on bail, and is being thrown under the bus by Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the podium and Donald Trump on Twitter.

This indictment has nothing to do with what Mueller is really looking at. Paul Manafort can take advantage of that, or he can go down for his entire scheme. This investigation doesn’t have to be about him, if he doesn’t want it to be.

But — and here I’m just totally spitballing — you read through this thing and you’re left with the impression: “Wow, Paul Manafort has been neck deep with some really bad dudes for a really long time. Maybe Donald Trump isn’t the person he should be most afraid of. Maybe Bob Mueller isn’t that person either.”

Stay tuned. The investigation is just now entering its time of consequences.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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