From the Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt:
Mueller Strikes: The Thrilling, Exciting Drama That Isn’t That Thrilling or Exciting
I know everyone else in the Washington press corps is treating the first indictments and plea deals with special counsel Robert Mueller as a combination of Christmas and Watergate. But in the clear light of Tuesday morning, don’t Monday’s events feel… predictable?
As everyone who bothered to look could see, Paul Manafort always had some unusual and shady connections in Ukraine. Think back to last June. Manafort received his promotion to campaign manager because Corey Lewandowski had proven completely unprepared to run the campaign of the Republican nominee:
Shortly after it began, the children peppered Lewandowski with questions, asking him to explain the campaign’s lack of infrastructure. “They went through the punch list. ‘Where are we with staffing? Where are we with getting the infrastructure built?’” one source explained. Their father grew visibly upset as he heard the list of failures. Finally, he turned to Lewandowski and said, “What’s your plan here?”
Lewandowski responded that he wanted to leak Trump’s vice-president pick.
It’s not like Manafort was a longtime Trump confidante. He was brought on to run the convention and ensure Trump didn’t lose the nomination because of a delegate rebellion. Manfort met two key criteria: He had done it before (way back in 1976!) and he was willing to work for Trump. The Trump campaign, at least at midsummer, simply didn’t have that many other figures who could credibly serve as campaign manager. Remember, at the time, Trump’s campaign looked like the Titanic.
Even then, he only lasted until mid-August, when Trump and Manafort chafed and Kellyanne Conway became the new campaign manager. One of the reasons for that chafing was Trump learning from the press about Manafort’s foreign lobbying and connections:
According to two people familiar with Trump’s decision, Trump on Thursday night was given a copy of an Associated Press story about how Manafort’s firm had not properly disclosed its foreign lobbying, shortly before taking the stage in North Carolina. Trump “blew a gasket,” one person said, and told Bannon and others that he should be dismissed.
Our favorite former prosecutor, Andy McCarthy, writes that yesterday’s Manafort indictment is “a dubious case of disclosure violations and money movement that would never have been brought had he not drawn attention to himself by temporarily joining the Trump campaign.”
The widespread perception is that Mueller is trying to pressure Manafort to get him to flip. But the big question is, what, if anything, does Manafort know that would be of value to Mueller and dangerous to Trump? If you’re skeptical of the Trump-and-Putin-cackling-together-as-they-plot-world-domination narrative, there’s a possibility that Manafort doesn’t have that much dirt to spill, at least about the president.
The guilty plea from foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos will probably prove more significant to the arguments about alleged collusion. But even then, the portrait painted by the indictment makes the Trump campaign look like amateur hour and Papadopoulos look painfully naïve. Papadopoulos was fooled by a woman who claimed she was Vladimir Putin’s niece. Did she promise him a pile of magic beans, too? She didn’t offer to throw in the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge?
I mean, just Google a little: “Putin, now 61, is his parents’ youngest and only surviving child and was born nearly 20 years after two older brothers named Albert and Viktor. Albert died as a baby and Viktor succumbed to diphtheria during the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.”
Putin has no surviving siblings, and I can’t find any reference to Putin’s first wife having any siblings, either. There, within five minutes, I proved reason to doubt the claim of this woman being Putin’s niece, and I’m just a schmo with an Internet connection. This so-called “foreign policy expert” couldn’t do that. Then again, this guy was a 2009 college grad who listed Model U.N. as one of his credentials. The Trump campaign was scraping the bottom of the barrel when trying to assemble a foreign policy advisory team.
So the big revelations of yesterday are that Manafort tried to hide his work for foreign interests, the Trump campaign had a lot of not-so-smart hangers-on, and the Russians were tricky and hungry to make connections with the Trump camp? This is not “black swan” level unpredictability.