What Does "Cooperate" Mean? Like "Sing?"

As part of plea agreement...

NBC News: "Manafort agrees to forfeit multiple properties and bank accounts, and cooperate with investigators, including participating in interviews, providing documents and testifying, and delay his sentencing until his cooperation is fulfilled."

ABC News: Manafort will admit guilt to ten related charges in Virginia that a jury was unable to reach consensus on at a trial last month."

So Manafort plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy yesterday, forfeit a number of his bank accounts and properties and is already cooperating with Mueller. In return, he gets a 10 year cap on prison time at the sentencing session, after "successful cooperation" with Mueller. No one outside Mueller's office knows if he's been ratting out Señor Trumpanzee-- or if he has agreed to.

Prosecutors, who made a point of noting the activity occurred “at least through 2016,” used bank records and other documents to show what they say Manafort did to hide evidence of his work for Ukrainian politicians, hide millions in proceeds in offshore accounts, and then spend the money lavishly on clothing, luxury items, homes and cars.

The new court filing indicates that prosecutors have taken a number of the earlier charges against Manafort, including a money laundering charge that could, on its own, bring a 20-year sentence, and folded them into two charges that would each yield five-year sentences.

Amy Berman Jackson, the federal judge in the case, said that Manafort is agreeing to "cooperate fully and truthfully" with the investigation into Russia's role in the 2016 election. For now, he's still residing in prison, while the White House spins the episode nay way it likes. Although their very fluid spin (see below) is somewhat different from the way John Dean is interpreting what happened yesterday and what he sees coming down the road.

Giuliani's statement: "Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign. The reason: the President did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell the truth." [UPDATE: the White House sent out a "corrected version" of the statement, leaving out the phrase "and Paul Manafort will tell the truth." You know... like just in case.]

"Axios had a good summary of what the charges against Manafort that he admits were all about.

• The filing claims Manafort broke the Foreign Agents Registration Act by not revealing his lobbying efforts on behalf of his Ukrainian clients.
• Manafort purposely planted a fake story in the media that a senior Obama official, who supported Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, was anti-semitic in order to persuade the U.S. public to instead favor his client, pro-Russia former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

◦ Manafort "sought to have the Administration understand that 'the Jewish community will take this out on Obama on election day if he does nothing,'" according to the filing.

• He tried to keep his lobbying efforts on behalf of Ukraine secret, asking his lobbyists at one point to spread a false story that claimed "Tymochsenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official," but with "no fingerprints." He said the "goal is to plant some stink on Tymo," per the filing.
• The report also suggests that lobbying firms who worked with Manafort-- and received payment from his off-shore accounts-- were aware that they were working on behalf of the pro-Russia, Ukrainian government.

Don't expect Trumpanzee to stop using the phrase "witch hint"-- not anytime soon, not ever! He and his dull-witted supporters and fans, who think this is all a reality tv series anyway, have grown very accustomed to it, sort of like "Lock her up." In there last 48 hours, as they ticked by, the media coverage got more savage. Jennifer Rubin, a #NeverTrump conservative Republican in the Washington Post: "Trump Can Start Panicking Now: Manafort Will Cooperate With The Special Counsel." Darren Samuelson for Politico: Manafort's surrender shows Mueller probe's overwhelming force. Harry Litman for USA Today: Manafort plea is new proof that Mueller is Trump's worst nightmare. He's on to him.. "Trump," he wrote, "never expected Manafort to flip on him. The plea and cooperation agreement Mueller won proves that truth is truth, whatever Rudy Giuliani says." But let's stopper a second at the coverage in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer: What Paul Manafort Knows.

What kind of threat does Paul Manafort now pose to Donald Trump? Robert Mueller’s indictment of the fallen lobbyist is a masterful portrait of a craven man and his methods. But the chronology contained in the document filed this morning takes us right up to the eve of Manafort joining the Trump campaign, and then leaves the reader bursting with curiosity about what comes next. While Mueller has tied up all sorts of narratives about Manafort’s strange career in Ukraine, so many strands of the Manafort story remain maddeningly untidy.

...At the very beginning of his time working in Ukraine in 2003, Paul Manafort was in the employ of one Russia’s richest men, an aluminum magnate named Oleg Deripaska. We lazily describe many Russian oligarchs as residing in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. But in the case of Deripaska, that closeness is a documented fact.

From 2003 to 2008, Manafort and his firm worked for Deripaska across Europe-- in Montenegro, Georgia, and Ukraine. Over that time, the consultant and the client also became business partners. Deripaska invested millions in a private-equity fund that Manafort established, with the intent of buying assets across the former Soviet Union. Based on various court filings and lawsuits, we know that the relationship went very badly. In these documents, Deripaska suggests that Manafort might have stolen his money. And based on the special counsel’s filings, we also know that Manafort owed Deripaska even more money in the form of unpaid loans. Instead of making an effort to settle these large debts, Deripaska says that Manafort simply stopped returning his messages.

Manafort finally reached out to Deripaska, just after he joined Donald Trump’s campaign. In emails obtained by The Atlantic that Paul Manafort traded with an aide, Manafort proposed giving Deripaska special access to the campaign, with the apparent hope of making his debts disappear. We don’t know what became of Manafort’s outreach to Deripaska. Perhaps it yielded nothing. Deripaska claims that he never received messages from Manafort in 2016. But it’s also worth watching hidden video footage of Deripaska sitting on his yacht with a top Putin official, procured by the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. The video captured a meeting held in August 2016, two weeks before Manafort resigned as campaign chair. According to Navalny, the video lends credibility to the theory that Deripaska might have been a crucial intermediary between Manafort and the Kremlin.

Robert Mueller has periodically suggested that Manafort’s top aide was an active agent of Russian intelligence in 2016. When I profiled Konstantin Kilimnik earlier this year, an old colleague of his quoted Manafort as describing him as “my Russian brain.” Is this connection to Russian intelligence just a meaningless coincidence? Kilimnik was Manafort’s primary interface with Deripaska.

Paul Manafort’s recent career could be read as a rolling series of nadirs. One of those low points was his departure from the Trump campaign on August 19, 2016. He left after the New York Times reported that Manafort was receiving off-the-books payments from his Ukrainian clients. The very day that Manafort resigned, he created a new LLC called Summerbreeze. In the months that followed, the LLC began receiving millions in loans from financial institutions with ties to Trump. Why would these lenders give cash to Manafort given the press attention he was receiving and his clearly troubled finances? (In the previous Manafort trial, the  special counsel alleged that Manafort promised to help the head of one of these banks obtain a job in the Trump administration.)

Roger Stone by Nancy Ohanian

We know that the political consultant Roger Stone has proclaimed that Mueller will possibly indict him soon. (Stone apparently conversed with WikiLeaks about hacked material.) But that promise of an indictment hasn’t actually arrived. Manafort might be able to fill in whatever blanks exist in that case. Manafort’s friendship with Stone traces back to the 1970s, when Manafort managed Stone’s campaign to run the Young Republicans group. During the ’80s, they became business partners and created a legendary consulting firm together. If Mueller does intend to pursue a case against Stone, he suddenly has his oldest confidant as a cooperating witness.

I have never invested much significance in the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. It doesn’t seem to have been the prelude to anything meaningful, an apparent disappointment to all those who attended. But Manafort was a presence in the room, a careful note-taker, and a witness to whatever transpired. And until we know more about the meeting, it’s impossible to know with certainty whether it was as hapless as conventionally portrayed.

When reading Mueller’s technicolor account of Manafort’s tactics in Ukraine, it’s clear that Manafort had no scruples about his work. He prided himself on smearing his client’s political opponents; he created sham think tanks and generated phony pressure campaigns. He funded his work using methods designed to evade detection and to skirt legal constraints. This work merely repeats patterns that appear elsewhere in Manafort’s body of work. Why would he suddenly have broken with character in the course of the Trump campaign? Thanks to the cooperation of Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates, Mueller probably has a very keen sense of how to lead this line of questioning. For nearly two years, the public has lived with the tension that comes with an unresolved narrative, the outcome of which has potentially extraordinary implications. Today represents a looping turn in the direction of closure.

I wonder which tranquilizers they had Señor Trumpanzee on last night. They must have been powerful. And... not a single tweet this morning. That's a first. It should be volcanic when he starts. But, never forget to always keep this in mind. It's the key to everything Trumpy: