Robert Mueller begins using the Paul Manafort trial to expose Donald Trump’s guilt
Last week Palmer Report pointed to the various moves that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was making in preparation for the upcoming Paul Manafort trial. It seemed fairly clear that Mueller was planning to use the Manafort trial to effectively put Donald Trump on trial by default in the court of public opinion. Now Mueller has begun that process with an explosive court filing regarding the Trump-Russia money trail.
Mueller’s new filing reveals that Paul Manafort had a $10 million loan from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska while he was serving as Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, according to Reuters. Why does this matter? In Manafort’s case, it speaks to his motivation when he emailed Deripaska asking if there was a way he could use his position in the campaign to “get whole.” In Trump’s case, it demonstrates something else.
Keep in mind that if Mueller is indeed using the Manafort trial to put Trump on trial by proxy, he doesn’t actually have to prove Trump guilty in the legal sense; he merely has to convince the court of public opinion. This has nothing to do with Trump’s supporters or detractors, who long ago made up their minds. It’s about the people in the middle. Most casual observers sitting at home still have no idea if Trump is actually guilty in the Russia scandal; they merely hear the claims of both sides, and they don’t know which side to believe. They don’t really grasp (or care to grasp) why this or that Trump campaign person was meeting with this or that Russian official, or why Trump had his party change its platform to a pro-Russia stance, and so on. But they do understand “follow the money.”
Now Robert Mueller has proven that the highest ranking person in charge of Donald Trump’s campaign was using the campaign to try to square away a multimillion dollar debt to a Kremlin-connected Russian billionaire. What are the odds that Trump didn’t know about it? Come to think of it, what are the odds that Trump would have hired Manafort, unless Trump himself was also in financial debt to the Kremlin? Again, Mueller doesn’t have to prove that Trump took Kremlin money beyond a reasonable doubt. All he has to do is convince the American public that, yeah, Trump probably did take Kremlin money – and that’s the ballgame.
