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One of the central questions in the Russia investigation is whether the Trump campaign got a heads-up from Moscow about the release of hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. The past two days has yielded a handful of tantalizing suggestions about who the middleman—if he exists—could be. Was it Paul Manafort in the embassy with Julian Assange? Jerome Corsi with an email to Roger Stone? And what was it federal prosecutors say that Manafort lied to them about?
Stop snitching: The Wall Street Journal got the scoop that Special Counsel Robert Mueller yanked Manafort’s plea agreement because he allegedly lied about his business dealing with Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian army linguist and reportedly a former officer in Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). Kilimnik worked for Manafort’s political consulting firm and showed up in a host of emails displayed at Manafort’s August 2018 trial on tax and bank fraud trial discussing strategies to help elect Ukraine’s since deposed pro-Russian prime minister.
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Why does it matter? It depends on who you ask. If you’re Bob Mueller, someone lying to you is grounds enough to tear up a plea agreement. But if you’re hoping to learn about some juicy Russian secret Manafort was sitting on, you’re going to be disappointed. Manafort’s business relationship with Kilimnik was already well known and it doesn’t appear that whatever details he allegedly held back are directly relevant to the question of whether the Russian government colluded with the Trump campaign. In other words, he may have lied for the same boring and self-destructive reasons that most people lie rather than as part of some grand defiant act of deception.
Pardons in the air: Not that Paulie has much to fear in the long term from thumbing his nose at the special counsel’s office. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump once again telegraphed to Manafort that he’s inclined towards a pardon for his former campaign aide. Trump said he hasn’t discussed a pardon with Manafort but said he “wouldn’t take it off the table,” as he praised his former campaign manager and others in Mueller’s crosshairs as “brave.” Trump has plenty of reasons to look favorably upon a possible pardon beyond lingering fondness given that Manafort’s lawyer has been keeping Trump in the loop on everything he’s been coughing up to Mueller.
An unlikely credibility boost: We also got a look at what charges against conspiracy king and conservative activist Jerome Corsi might look like. Corsi, the former Washington bureau chief for Infowars, has been warning for the past two weeks that he’s about to be indicted by the special counsel’s office for perjury. Given that Corsi is infamous for, among other things, promoting the “birther” lie that former President Obama wasn’t born in America, many weren’t quite prepared to take his claims—peppered with requests for donation to a legal defense fund and ahead of his new book about his ongoing “witch hunt” ordeal—at face value.
But the leak of a draft charging document as part of Corsi’s plea talks with the Mueller team has buttressed the claims of an indictment hanging over his head. The document alleges that former Trump adviser Roger Stone, thinly veiled as “Person 1,” used Corsi as a middleman to get a heads-up on when WikiLeaks would release its next tranche of Clinton campaign emails hacked by the Russians. Corsi allegedly lied to prosecutors in an attempt to conceal his role and deleted his correspondence with Stone.
Corsi told NBC that he had no foreknowledge of WikiLeaks’ October release of the Clinton emails and merely divined their release through common sense guesswork. In interviews with both MSNBC and the Daily Caller, Corsi has admitted to helping Stone lie to the House intelligence committee about a tweet of Stone’s hinting that there was more leaked dirt to come on John Podesta. “I openly admitted to [prosecutors and a grand jury] in their terms that this is a lie,” he told Ari Melber.
Stone and Trump: Why focus in on Corsi and Stone? Because Stone was reportedly often in touch with Trump during the 2016 campaign despite being fired the year before. In particular, Trump and Stone spoke in August the day after the draft charging document claimed Corsi told Stone he’d heard that WikiLeaks was going to drop more damaging Clinton material.
Guardian walkback: Lingering across all of this is the Guardian’s Tuesday scoop that the paper has since oh-so-subtly walked back a bit. The paper reported that Paul Manafort had met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in the spring of 2016. The story noted that it was “unclear” why Manafort and Assange had met and what they discussed. To fans of the as-yet unproven Trump-Russia collusion theory, it offered the tantalizing possibility that WikiLeaks could’ve tipped off Manafort about the hacked emails Russia was sitting on.
But the assertion that Assange and Manafort ever even met is less certain than when the story first dropped. Where once the article stated confidently that Manafort had definitely met Assange, the headline now includes a suffix that “sources say” the meeting took place in a new, more circumspect reference to an “apparent” meeting. For their parts, both Assange and Manafort have vigorously disputed that the meeting ever took place. WikiLeaks has blasted the story as “totally false and deliberately libelous” and Manafort released a statement denying the meeting and warned that he was “considering all legal options against the Guardian."
One of us cannot be wrong: There’s been plenty of speculation both that Mueller will soon wrap up his investigation and that his investigation is far from over. We do know one thing for sure: we’re about the learn a lot more about his investigation within the next two months. On December 18, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn is up for sentencing and a sealed pre-sentencing memo detailing his cooperation with the special counsel’s office is already sitting on the desk of the judge in his case. Given that Flynn was among the most senior members of the Trump campaign (and then administration) to be charged by Mueller, the details of what he gave prosecutors are likely to shed some much-needed light on where the special counsel’s inquiry is headed.
We’re also overdue for an update from another Mueller star witness, Rick Gates. Gates, the jilted aide who then took a turn as star witness at the Manafort trial, has had his sentencing pushed back a few times already due to his ongoing cooperation with the Russia inquiry. His sentencing was postponed in mid-November to accommodate his continuing cooperation with a joint status report due on January 15. If Mueller doesn’t kick the can again on sentencing for Gates, that could be a sign that the probe is entering a new, possibly final, stage.
