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Two trials have come to a conclusion in Alexandria.
One found former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty of eight charges
of tax and bank fraud, which could put him in prison for up to 80
years. The other was a verdict on the credibility and professionalism of
special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Manafort
lost; Mueller won. This was a victory Mueller needed, and one that
likely will strengthen his hand going forward in his investigation of
how Russia tried to influence this country’s 2016 presidential election
and whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with a foreign
adversary.
In
the court of public opinion, Mueller’s straight-arrow reputation has
slipped over the past year, thanks largely to the beating it has gotten
from Trump.
When a Quinnipiac University
poll last week asked whether Mueller “is conducting a fair
investigation,” barely half — 51 percent — of those who responded said
yes. That marked a decline of nine percentage points since November.
The president is already spinning
this verdict as meaningless, noting that the charges against Manafort
had nothing to do with any work he did for Trump. U.S. District Judge
T.S. Ellis III had cautioned both sides not to even mention the Russia
probe during the trial. Nor was Mueller’s victory a clean one: Ellis
declared a mistrial on 10 additional charges over which the jury had
deadlocked.
Yet the implications of the outcome
were clear. Had Manafort been acquitted, it would have been a big boost
to Trump’s efforts to discredit Mueller’s work and brought more calls by
Republicans for the special counsel to wrap up the inquiry soon. It
might even have created a pretext for the president to fire Mueller.
As the jury deliberated, Trump was showing signs of a full-on panic. On Monday, he shot off a new barrage of tweets attacking the special counsel and his team directly, calling them “Disgraced and discredited Bob Mueller and his whole group of Angry Democrat Thugs.”
That came the day after Trump tweeted:
“Study the late Joseph McCarthy, because we are now in period with
Mueller and his gang that make Joseph McCarthy look like a baby! Rigged
Witch Hunt!”
Manafort’s conviction shows that Mueller’s probe is neither rigged nor a witch hunt.
But
Trump is half-right. It is indeed worthwhile to study the infamous
Wisconsin senator and his anti-communist crusade during the 1950s —
because the enemies-within hysteria it fueled tells us a lot about the
tactics of Trump himself.
McCarthy’s chief aide
in that shameful endeavor was attorney Roy Cohn, who would later become
a mentor to Trump and who remains the president’s ideal of what a
lawyer should be. When Trump is exasperated at what he sees as
insufficient ruthlessness on the part of his current lawyers, he has been known to demand: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Mueller’s
approach has been pretty much the opposite: methodical, focused,
thorough and by the book. In Manafort’s case, the weight of the evidence
he put together was enough to overcome the evident hostility of Ellis, who repeatedly berated the prosecution from the bench.
This is the point at which the walls have begun closing in.
Trump’s
personal lawyers do not have a clear picture of what information White
House counsel Donald McGahn has offered in 30 hours of interviews with
Mueller’s investigators. Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer who once said he would “take a bullet” for Trump, has instead
taken a plea deal with prosecutors investigating payments he made to
women on his then-client’s behalf — hush money, Cohen acknowledged
Tuesday in court, that was paid “at the direction” of Trump himself.
And
Mueller is not done with Manafort, who will face a second trial in
September on charges of money laundering and failing to register as an
agent for a foreign government.
Those charges
may come closer to touching on his actions during the five months he was
involved with Trump’s presidential campaign. The prosecution has
compiled more than twice as much evidence as it presented to the jury in his first trial.
Manafort’s
conviction will also increase the pressure on others in Trump’s orbit
to cooperate with Mueller. And it may encourage Mueller to move sooner
rather than later to bring in the president himself to testify, possibly
by issuing a subpoena.
Legal experts say the
special counsel’s chances of success in that are high, despite the vow
of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s lead lawyer, to fight a subpoena all the
way to the Supreme Court.
“I am not going to be rushed into having him testify so that he gets trapped into perjury,” Giuliani said Sunday
on “Meet the Press.” But for all their foment, Trump’s team knows they
have no more than the illusion of control. With one big victory under
his belt, the next move is Mueller’s.
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