Donald Trump lied to Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort about pardoning them

| 7:04 pm EDT March 28, 2018
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The news has broken today that Donald Trump’s former attorney John Dowd discussed pardons with attorneys representing Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort. This has led to headlines focused on the fact that this discussion happened, while failing to connect the most important dots in the story: this happened a long time ago, and the pardons predictably never did happen, because Trump was making false promises to them, and Flynn clearly knew Trump couldn’t be trusted.

Dowd discussed pardons with the Flynn and Manafort camps while the grand jury was still underway against Flynn, according to the New York Times, which broke the story. This means that the discussion took place sometime between mid-2017 when Dowd was first hired by Trump, and the start of December of 2017, by which time the grand jury was complete and Flynn pleaded guilty. So this was at least five months ago.

Dowd was obviously doing this at Trump’s instruction, so this was Trump trying to prevent Flynn and Manafort from cutting deals by leading them to believe he was going to pardon them. Either Flynn didn’t think Trump was telling the truth, or he didn’t trust Trump to be able to competently pull off a constitutionally questionable pardon of an alleged co-conspirator, as he cut a plea deal after hearing Dowd’s pardon pitch. We don’t know if Manafort was naive enough to fall for this, but several months after the pardon pitch was made, Manafort is still rotting away awaiting trial, and he clearly never was pardoned.

So the bottom line is this: Donald Trump tried to get Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort not to flip on him by dangling pardons in their faces. Flynn knew better, and cut a deal. Manafort didn’t cut a deal, and now he’s learning the hard way that Trump is a liar. Even worse, John Dowd surely would have explained to Trump that Robert Mueller was going to nail these two guys on state charges even if they were pardoned. So it’s fair to assume Trump was trying to trick them into thinking that a federal pardon would get them fully off the hook.