Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia show trial

| 2:07 am EDT April 7, 2018
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When taking down any multi-level criminal syndicate, the most efficient way for a prosecutor to move forward is to convince the smaller fish to cut deals and flip on the bigger fish. So what do you do when a guy simply refuses flip, no matter how bad his prospects become? Just ask Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is rapidly turning his prosecution of Paul Manafort into a show trial for the sake of furthering his investigation in a number of ways.

In hindsight, Paul Manafort was never going to flip, or at least he was never going to flip easily. Unlike Rick Gates and Michael Flynn, who appear to be financially broke, Manafort was always going to try relying on super high priced attorneys to get him off the legal hook on technicalities. Sure enough, six months after his arrest, Manafort is still trying one increasingly desperate legal maneuver after another. If he goes to trial, that won’t even begin for another few months, and the trial could then drag on for years.

In other words, even if the jury finds Manafort guilty in the end, that still won’t do Mueller any good when it comes to moving in on his real target, Donald Trump. By that time Mueller will have built his case and Trump’s fate will have been decided. But Mueller still has to put Manafort on trial. So we’re now seeing Mueller use the Manafort trial to flex his prosecutorial muscles and to shift the Trump-Russia narrative in the direction he wants.

In recent days we’ve seen Robert Mueller use his court filings in the Paul Manafort case to send a warning to Donald Trump and his political advisers that he does indeed have the legal authority to go after them for obstruction of justice. We’ve seen Mueller use filings to reveal that he seized Manafort’s bank accounts last year, a warning to Trump’s financial associates who might be thinking of not cooperating. The closer we get to trial, the more Mueller is using the prosecution of Manafort as a vehicle for everything else he wants to do when it comes to taking Trump down. Contribute to Palmer Report!