Did Paul Manafort just flip on Donald Trump too?

| 9:29 pm EST January 24, 2018
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A wise man once said that you should never assume something is a conspiracy when it can instead be adequately explained by mere stupidity. It’s a good guideline in general. But Paul Manafort’s high priced attorneys just did something so profoundly stupid, so damaging to their client, it’s difficult to write it off as a mere honest mistake – particularly when you put it within the context of what Manafort’s longtime sidekick Rick Gates just did.

On Tuesday, it was revealed that Gates had hired a new attorney, and that the attorney in question had been seen meeting with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. In other words, the inevitable is finally happening: Gates is too broke to put on the kind of creative legal defense needed to have any chance of getting him off the hook for an easily proven crime like money laundering, and he’s now negotiating a plea deal. He’ll give up hard evidence against Manafort in the process, meaning Manafort will have virtually no chance of winning his own case. So how did Manafort’s attorneys respond today? By royally screwing up.

Rachel Maddow reported on her MSNBC show on Wednesday evening that Manafort’s attorneys – who happen to be high priced skilled professionals – somehow screwed up on Wednesday and accidentally uploaded their entire case notes to a publicly visible government website. From the look of it, they just blew the case. Mueller and his prosecutors now know the strategies that Manafort’s attorney were planning to use at trial. Moreover, the public now knows the ugly details of what Manafort was doing with Russia.

So did Paul Manafort’s attorneys just make the absent minded mistake of a lifetime, sinking their client’s legal prospects and accidentally blowing the Trump-Russia money laundering scandal wide open? Or is there something else going on here? Keep in mind that Manafort had just learned that Gates was negotiating a deal against him, meaning that Manafort just learned he’s going to have to cut a deal of his own against Trump.

Is it possible that Paul Manafort saw the news about the impending Rick Gates deal, realized he was going to have to cut a deal of his own against Donald Trump, and convinced his attorneys to give him cover by tanking the entire case? Thanks to this leak, Manafort truly has no choice but to cut a deal. If he’s looking to sell Trump on the notion that he had no choice but to cave, on the faint hope that Trump might eventually try to pardon him, “My lawyers published my homework” would certainly be an interesting excuse. Or maybe Manafort is just having the worst luck in the world.