Someone is rope-a-doping Donald Trump with the Paul Manafort wiretap story
We’ve seen it before in this investigation. Someone leaked the details of Donald Trump Jr’s Russia meeting one day at a time, in progressively more damning fashion, so that he would foolishly issue partial denials each day that would subsequently be exposed as lies the following day. It tripped him up far worse than if the entire story had simply been leaked at once. Now we’re seeing someone rope-a-dope his father Donald Trump in similar fashion.
On Monday evening, it was revealed that Paul Manafort had been under secret FISA wiretap surveillance both during and after the election. Notably, no details were included as to what had been caught on that wiretap. By Tuesday, more details were leaked including the fact that Manafort had been caught communicating about the Trump campaign with the Russians. By Wednesday, those details became darker, as it was revealed that Manafort had offered to give a Kremlin oligarch regular briefings about the campaign. There’s a reason it’s playing out this way.
Even though these leaks are being given to different major news outlets, their nature strongly suggests that they’re all coming from the same place. That source could have leaked all of this at once. But by stretching it out this way, it gives Donald Trump the opportunity to foolishly step in it by issuing some kind of partial denial. Thus far he hasn’t done so, but his nature is to lash out. So if not today, then tomorrow or the next day, Trump will angrily tweet that Manafort did this all on his own.
That’s when this same source will leak the part that begins to incriminate Donald Trump himself. That’ll come in the form of intercepted phone calls in which Manafort briefed Trump about his plan to collude with Russia, or something along those lines. We know that part happened. Manafort wouldn’t have made such a major decision without running it past Trump. The source – whoever is leaking this – is just waiting for Trump to step in it before dropping the hammer.
