The real reason Rick Gates’ testimony today was so devastating to Donald Trump

| 9:00 pm EDT August 6, 2018
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Make no mistake: Rick Gates cut a plea deal against Donald Trump, and not merely against Paul Manafort. When you cut a deal like that, you have to give up everything and everyone. However, when Gates took the stand at the Manafort trial today, Robert Mueller’s team didn’t ask him about Trump, and he didn’t mention Trump in his answers. This left some observers disappointed. But as Palmer Report spelled out just before the trial began, this is the whole point – and it’s Mueller’s shortest path to get to Trump.

Even if Mueller’s team had tried to ask Rick Gates about Donald Trump today, the judge would have cut them off, because Trump isn’t on trial. But it wouldn’t have made strategic sense for Team Mueller to go there anyway. This is all about Mueller getting a conviction against Manafort as quickly and cleanly as possible, because it’ll change everything.

In the court of public opinion, the people in the middle aren’t quite sure what they’re looking at. The Resistance tells them that Donald Trump is a traitor and everyone working for him is a criminal. Trump’s base tells them that it’s all one big witch hunt, and that even the plea deals cut by three of Trump’s top advisers were somehow coerced. But that all changes if and when Mueller lands a felony conviction of the guy who was in charge of Trump’s campaign. That’s a judge and jury saying that the Trump campaign was a criminal operation.

It’s ostensibly why Robert Mueller split the charges against Paul Manafort across two different federal districts. It allowed him to swiftly put Manafort on trial for the quickest and easiest charges to prove, thus allowing him to land that felony conviction right off the bat. From there, Donald Trump will look foolish for trying to claim that this is all a witch hunt. And if Manafort is sentenced to decades in prison, it’ll force Trump’s other underlings to start thinking about a plea deal.