Rick Gates just blew up Donald Trump

| 5:08 pm EST February 18, 2018
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Just hours ago, Donald Trump was frantically ranting online about how his campaign supposedly didn’t collude with the Russians, and that the extensive Russian meddling effort had no impact on the outcome of the election. Now Trump’s former campaign adviser Rick Gates has decided to rain all over Trump’s parade and blow up Trump’s entire last ditch narrative.

Gates has confirmed that he’s pleading guilty this week to fraud charges in connection with the political work that he did for the Kremlin prior to the 2016 election, according to a Los Angeles Times report. So now we have one of Trump’s own campaign people confessing that he did indeed collude with the Russians. He’s not known to conspire with the Russians specifically with regard to Trump. But Gates is going to testify against Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Manafort did collude with the Russians with regard to the Trump campaign during the election.

Manafort is in deep financial debt to a Russian oligarch, and his emails reveal that he offered Trump campaign favors to that oligarch in an attempt at getting out of that debt. Now that Gates is testifying against Manafort, it means that Manafort has virtually no choice but to plead guilty and cut a deal of his own. Manafort will have to testify that he colluded with the Russians about the election while he was running the Trump campaign.

So much for “no collusion” between the campaign and Russia. In fact it’ll go beyond that. Paul Manafort will have to testify about Donald Trump’s role and knowledge of Trump-Russia collusion, including the overlapping financial connections between Manafort, Trump, and the Kremlin. Rick Gates just put something in motion that’ll blow up Trump’s entire premise, and paint him as not merely an illegitimate Russian puppet, but a co-conspirator.