Moscow Mueller: What the Indictments and Plea Agreements Mean for Donald Trump
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/03/robert-mueller-trump-campaign-russia-manafort-papadopoulos/
This week, Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller revealed the opening blows in his investigation into potential collusion between members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and operatives working for or on behalf of Russia. On Monday, things kicked off with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort turning himself in to the Justice Department after being indicted on 12 counts stemming from his financial dealings, including with pro-Russian Ukrainian entities. While the indictments allege a wide range of criminal activity, they do not cite anything related to the Trump campaign and Russia. In fact, the indictment overwhelmingly deals with shady deals Manafort allegedly made throughout an extended period of years before he joined the Trump campaign. But that, of course, does not mean Manafort is not implicated in potential attempts by Trump officials to work with Russian sources to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, or other unknown offers from Russia to help Trump. The investigation has not provided the public of evidence of that, but it may well exist.
Perhaps more significant than Manafort’s actual charges is the fact that Mueller revealed to the public that a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos had pled guilty to lying to the FBI in an interview about his contacts with a professor who claimed to have links to Russian sources closely connected to the Kremlin or Vladimir Putin. Papadopoulos’s plea agreement portrays him as a first-class imbecile on multiple fronts. First, someone clearly told him that he was going to be hooking up with Russians closely connected to Putin — including someone he believed was a relative of Putin. Turns out, that part was false. It is clear from the indictment and his guilty plea about lying that Papadopoulos thought he could get dirt on Clinton in the form of stolen emails in the possession of his contact’s Russian sources. Maybe that professor had good connections to Moscow, or maybe he didn’t. We don’t know. It is possible that Papadopoulos was also trying to make himself seem more connected and valuable to Trump’s senior people than he actually was and inflated his connections and his ability to deliver. Papadopoulos has a track record of dishonesty regarding his resume and past work. Papadopoulos hardly seems to be the criminal mastermind of some grand plot to get the Russians to hack the elections. But it is still significant...
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