Paul Manafort pretrial hearings delayed as he negotiates plea deal against Donald Trump

| 11:00 pm EDT September 11, 2018
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The on again, off again plea deal negotiations between Paul Manafort and Special Counsel Robert Mueller are now definitely back on again, at a time when the bad news for Donald Trump just keeps coming. If you’re wondering how serious the discussions are this time around, the judge in the trial just delayed the Manafort pretrial hearings. So where does this get us?

Four days ago, Bloomberg reported that Paul Manafort and Robert Mueller were indeed negotiating a plea deal. Tonight the Washington Post is independently confirming that report, hours after Judge Amy Berman Jackson delayed the Manafort proceedings by two days without offering an explanation. If only one side had asked for a delay, there would have been a debate about the merits of such a delay in open court. These circumstances strongly suggest that both sides are now deep enough into negotiations, they’ve jointly asked the judge in private to delay things.

Robert Mueller unmistakably has the upper hand at this point. He already has eight felony convictions in the bank against Paul Manafort. He’s likely to prevail again in Manafort’s second trial. So it’s impossible to imagine that Mueller would even consider giving Manafort a plea deal unless Manafort is offering to give up Donald Trump. Last month it was reported that Manafort initially approached Mueller about a plea deal during the first trial, and that Mueller was unwilling to give Manafort the kind of lenient sentence he was seeking.

If Paul Manafort does indeed cut a plea deal against Donald Trump, it should blow things wide open when it comes to exposing Trump’s criminal election conspiracy with the Russian government. The judge delayed tomorrow’s pretrial hearing until Friday, suggesting that Mueller and Manafort believe they may be able to get this hammered out by end of day Thursday. Stay tuned.