That's true, but there's a big difference between a cooperating witness and a reluctant one. If he's pardoned and subpoenaed he'll fall in the latter camp, which means he'll be looking to say the bare minimum necessary while keeping himself out of jeopardy.
Prosecutors could set a perjury trap for him, but might decide his testimony as a reluctant witness is too weak to call in trial. It could still pose a potential minefield for Manafort, he's better off guaranteeing future immunity from the law by flipping now. But my reasoning that he'll go to trial is that something in his calculus has caused him to take things this far. In spite of the overwhelming odds and punishment he'll face if convicted while burning through millions in additional legal fees from all the desperate pretrial maneuvers. I think he fears the fate he or his family would face from Russia if he flips more than anything Mueller could do to him if he doesn't.
If you look at the entire body of open source material on him so far, it's hard not to think he's been working as a Kremlin asset for most of the past decade. That's why he's been under continual surveillance from FISA warrants, even before he ever got involved with Trump's campaign. His work in Ukraine was as a Kremlin agent of influence in Ukrainian politics. Russia doesn't like traitors from their own ranks. Putin likes to make public spectacles to discourage defections, hence the very public attempted execution of the Skripals. For all we know, that could have been done to send a very public message to Manafort and other potential defectors caught up in Mueller's web right now and probably was.
reply
share
Thrillhouse (1509)
6 years ago
This is called "LARPing", or live action role playing. This is what the media did when they predicted Trump had a zero percent chance of winning even the primary. They had these detailed analysis and they were worthless because they were based on fantasy.
reply
share
eYeDEF (5050)
6 years ago
I wouldn't know anything about live active role playing. That's your cup of tea. But everything I said in my post is an ironclad, established fact except the final sentence where I'm openly speculating on the most likely reason behind the public assassination on the Skripals using a cold war soviet biological weapon on British soil.
Meanwhile what you're calling "detailed analysis" are actually known as "public polls". The media predicted Trump's loss because public polling by all the private polling firms in the country had predicted his loss based on scientific polling.
But given what we know now that Trump received active Russian assistance, it explains why Trump won and why all the public polling was wrong. It wasn't their fault, it was Russian interference.
If the Russians hadn't interfered polling would have been more on point son. Your logic really falls apart.
reply
share