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| Paul Manafort to plead guilty to two criminal charges - reports | |
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| Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty to two criminal charges, as part of a plea deal between Manafort and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, according to US media reports, | Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty to two criminal charges, as part of a plea deal between Manafort and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, according to US media reports, |
| Manafort pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Manafort had been facing seven counts of foreign lobbying violations and witness tampering, relating to his time lobbying for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych over a decade ago. | Manafort pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Manafort had been facing seven counts of foreign lobbying violations and witness tampering, relating to his time lobbying for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych over a decade ago. |
| In a separate trial in Virginia last month, a jury found Manafort guilty on eight counts of tax and bank fraud crimes. | |
| While he was prosecuted by Mueller - originally tasked with uncovering alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 - none of Manafort’s charges relate to collusion. After the former campaign chair was found guilty last month, Trump tweeted that the felt “very badly for Paul Manafort,” and accused prosecutors of pressuring his former colleague with old charges to force him to cooperate with the ongoing ‘Russiagate’ investigation. | |
| In the Virginia trial, Mueller’s team had sought to portray Manafort as a man of wealth, who lived a life of luxury at the expense of the American taxpayer. | |
| Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused US media of hyping up Manafort’s prosecution by Mueller, despite the fact that he had no ties to Russia. | |
| “They began hyping up the case of Manafort, who was accused of being almost the main executioner of Kremlin’s sinister plot to stop Hillary Clinton from winning” the presidential elections, he said. “In the end, after months-long investigation, hearings, he was charged only with being an agent of the Ukrainian government and working in the interest of the Ukrainian government.” | |
| With Manafort possibly facing decades in prison, President Trump has vaguely teased the possibility of extending a pardon to his old campaign chairman, telling Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt last month that he has “great respect for what he has done in terms of what he has gone through.” | |
| Trump would be well within his rights to pardon Manafort, but Democratic lawmakers have cautioned him against such a move. Any attempt to pardon Manafort, Senator Ron Whyden (D-Oregon) argued, “would be a gross assault on the rule of law, and constitute high crimes and misdemeanors” - grounds for impeachment. | |
| It is not yet clear whether Manafort intends to cooperate with Mueller’s ‘Russiagate’ probe. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, tamped down talk of cooperation on Thursday, telling Politico that if Mueller’s team “were going to get anything from him, they’d have gotten it already.” | |
| “There’s no fear that Paul Manafort would cooperate against the president because there’s nothing to cooperate about and we long ago evaluated him as an honorable man,” Giuliani continued, adding that the possibility of a pardon is still open. | |
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