Judge slams the door in Paul Manafort’s face
Awhile back, the judge in the Paul Manafort case famously asked if Special Counsel Robert Mueller was only pursuing Manafort to try to flip him against Donald Trump, and whether Mueller really cared about the crimes that Manafort has been accused of committing. It set off a bit of a firestorm. Was the judge truly challenging Mueller’s authority to bring the case, or was he merely playing devil’s advocate? Now we have a rather definitive answer.
The judge has formally rejected Paul Manafort’s request that the charges be tossed out. This is a crucial development, because it was one of the very last lines of defense that Manafort had. Most legal experts think that the mountain of evidence against him is more than enough to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life. His only two shots were getting the evidence tossed out, and getting the charges tossed out – and now he’s lost both halves of that equation.
Late last week, the judge rejected Manafort’s request that the evidence seized from his storage locker be tossed out. So as things are now shaping up, the charges against Manafort will stand, and the most damaging evidence will be used against him at trial. Manafort’s legal team may yet succeed or fail at getting other, lesser pieces of evidence thrown out. But they’ve been focused on the storage locker, which means that it’s the primary evidence against him.
If you’ve been wondering why Paul Manafort is choosing to sit in a jail cell rather than cutting a plea deal, it’s probably at least partly because he was hoping that one or both of these two key motions would work out in his favor. Now that he’s failed on both counts, he really has nothing left to go on, unless he’s naive enough to think that Donald Trump is going to take the extraordinary risk of trying to pardon him, which would likely fail for a number of reasons. So now we see if this pair of devastating defeats is enough to convince Manafort to flip.
