The real reason Paul Manafort is suddenly so panicked about his Trump-Russia storage locker

| 12:33 am EDT April 24, 2018
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As Paul Manafort continues to hold out for a trial instead of cutting a plea deal against Donald Trump, the ongoing legal proceedings are shedding more light than ever on just what it is that Manafort doesn’t want anyone to see. Specifically, he’s doubling down on a seemingly hopeless legal argument that the contents of his storage locker should not be allowed into evidence. That, of course, means that the storage locker is a major piece of the puzzle, and that this may not even really be about Manafort.

Only a judge and jury can officially send Manafort to prison, but one look at the mountain of publicly available evidence against him makes it pretty clear that he’s going to lose at trial. He knows he’s hosed. He’s putting on this defense in an effort at protecting Trump, in the hope of earning a pardon from him. Based on Trump’s nature, that pardon is never coming, but Manafort doesn’t seem ready to admit that to himself yet.

So Manafort’s “defense” is really Trump’s defense. That suggests that whatever is in that storage locker, it’s the kind of evidence that can incriminate Trump as well. If Manafort and his lawyers can get it thrown out on a technicality, then maybe it can’t be used against Trump either. If this sounds overly presumptuous, consider that as we speak, Trump’s lawyers are essentially running Michael Cohen’s legal defense team in an effort at getting the seized communications between them thrown out.

All we know about the contents of Paul Manafort’s storage locker is how some of the boxes were labeled. The most relevant one relates to Manafort’s political work in Ukraine on behalf of the Kremlin. That was conducted before Manafort took over the Donald Trump campaign. However, Robert Mueller’s team has recently revealed that Manafort was acting as the campaign’s backchannel with the Kremlin during the election, by going through the same oligarch who had been paying Manafort for his Ukraine work. Follow the money.