Robert Mueller just seized his first piece of Trump Tower

| 9:05 pm EDT September 14, 2018
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Now that Donald Trump’s longtime fixer Michael Cohen and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg have cut deals with prosecutors, and New York State has begun moving arguably even more aggressively than the Feds against the Trump Organization, it’s not that difficult to envision this ending with Trump Tower becoming government property. In fact, Special Counsel Robert Mueller just literally seized his first piece of Trump Tower.

Paul Manafort cut a plea deal with Robert Mueller today which saw Manafort pleading guilty to two more felonies, agreeing to cooperate with any and all government investigation, and allowing $46 million of his assets to be seized. According to publicly released court documents, Mueller was going to allow Manafort to keep his apartment in Trump Tower, but Manafort traded away the apartment in exchange for getting to keep one of his bank accounts.

It’s not difficult to parse what may have transpired here. Mueller was going to let Manafort keep something in exchange for his cooperation, and perhaps Mueller decided that seizing an apartment in Trump Tower would have been a bit too on-the-nose. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Manafort feeling comfortable ever setting foot in Trump Tower again after cutting a plea deal against Donald Trump, so he traded it back to Mueller. Neither one of them seemed to want it, which is humorous in its own right. But the bottom line is that the United States federal government now literally owns an apartment in Trump Tower – and that’s more than just apt symbolism.

The Paul Manafort plea deal makes clear that the Trump-Russia investigation is going to seize the assets of everyone in the scandal who committed financial crimes in the name of acquiring those assets. Manafort just lost most of what he had to his name, and he only got to keep a sliver because he flipped on a bigger fish. Donald Trump’s real estate empire has long been built on money laundering. It’s a matter of whether the Feds or New York State ends up seizing his properties first.