Robert Mueller reveals the five Paul Manafort witnesses he’s giving immunity to – and none of them are Tony Podesta

| 8:35 pm EDT July 23, 2018
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Last week Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed court papers seeking immunity for five unnamed witnesses against Paul Manafort. This set off a flurry of speculation as to their identities. Fox News made the dubious claim that one of them was Tony Podesta, the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta. Now Mueller is revealing the names of the five witnesses – and suffice it to say that none of them are named Podesta.

The judge granted Robert Mueller’s immunity request today, and in the process, the names of the five individuals were unveiled: James Brennan, Donna Duggan, Conor O’Brien, Cindy Laporta and Dennis Raico. To be clear, James Brennan is not the same person as former CIA Director John Brennan, who is also in the news today because Donald Trump is trying to revoke his security clearance. In fact, while these five people are clearly important to Mueller’s case against Manafort, none of them are household names on any level. What stands out here is who’s not on the list.

Mueller has only filed immunity requests for five people, and none of them are Tony Podesta. This means that Fox News was either relying on bad sources, or making up its story entirely, when it came up with this storyline that was way too conveniently on-the-nose for what its audience wanted to hear. It never made sense that Mueller would give immunity to Tony Podesta to begin with, both because he’s facing potential criminal charges that are too serious for immunity, and because it would be unnecessarily bad optics to give immunity to Clinton’s campaign chairman’s brother in a trial against Trump’s campaign chairman.

In any case, Robert Mueller has succeeded in getting the immunity he sought for the five witnesses in question. This marks yet another court victory for Mueller over Paul Manafort. To date, Manafort hasn’t won a single major ruling heading into the trial. The judge has consistently sided with Mueller as far as which evidence to allow. The judge also threw Manafort in jail for trying to tamper with witnesses, and then later moved him to a worse jail.