Manafort Revelations Show Trump Team Crime, Legacy Of Injustice

by Andrew Kreig
editor, Justice Integrity Project

Among the remarkable Mueller probe revelations last week was the claim that attorneys for former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort have been sharing confidential information about the special counsel’s investigation with the legal team of “Individual 1,” aka President Trump.

The New York Times broke the main story electronically on Nov. 27 under the headline, Manafort’s Lawyer Is Said to Have Briefed Trump Team on Mueller Talks. Reporters Michael S. Schmidt, Sharon LaFraniere and Maggie Haberman wrote:

A lawyer for Paul Manafort repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Mr. Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.

The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with the special counsel’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Mr. Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal experts speculated that it was a bid by Mr. Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed.

A number prominent legal pundits soon warned that such cooperation was not only rare but could be regarded as criminally illegal and / or unethical, thereby triggering potential liability for President Trump, Manafort and the lawyers involved. Potential problems could include obstruction of justice (under the theory that the actions could have the intent and effect of undermining the special counsel’s investigation). The conduct also could provide grounds for impeachment of Trump and potential bar sanctions against attorneys involved.

More importantly, the controversy illustrates continuing tension between the federal enforcement “community” and the opportunists (or worse) who operate within the justice system or on its fringes. Such conflicts are especially important and outrageous as the Trump administration draws upon some of the very worst Bush administration attorneys.

Among the many such shocking situations, this column focuses on three such officials who have become extremely prominent and otherwise newsworthy, in part because of their ties to President Trump and his team.

• Manafort’s lead defense attorney, Kevin Downing, is a former senior litigator within the Justice Department’s tax fraud section, which missed a series of colossal tax frauds, including by Downing’s future client Manafort. Downing reportedly is also one of the attorneys involved in the liaison with the Trump White House that the New York Times reported last week;
• U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta as U.S. attorney for Miami in the Bush administration was involved both in major tax fraud cover-ups and also in whitewashing the federal-state prosecution of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is a Trump friend and neighbor who is back in the news this week with the beginning of a major defamation trial in West Palm Beach, Florida; and
• Our third Bush-era former Justice Department official is Matthew Whitaker, whom Trump named as acting attorney general after Whitaker tried out for the job by arguing on cable news shows that Mueller’s investigation are excessive and unwarranted. Whitaker’s career includes a stint as a Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for southern Iowa, where he vigorously prosecuted one of his political enemies whom a jury acquitted in just two hours.

An Overview

Let’s provide some context before exploring more thoroughly the abusive conduct of these three officials-- and the utter failure of watchdog mechanisms, whether in the Justice Department, courts, Congress or the media, to do much about these problems, at least so far.

The problem of rogue officials using their powers within the U.S. Justice Department for political purposes exploded into the national consciousness in late 2006 and early 2007 with the so-called “U.S. Attorney firing scandal.” Bush administration forced the resignation of nine (by some counts eight) of the nation’s 93 powerful regional U.S. attorneys.

Most of the mainstream media focused on the injustice visited upon that handful of prosecutors who were fired for their failure to bring political cases (often involving prosecuting Democrats on flimsy charges, including “corruption” and “vote fraud”).

Yet the much larger real scandal was the actions by the remaining U.S. attorneys around the nation to keep their jobs despite pressures from Bush White House senior advisor Karl Rove and ambitious political operatives in the Justice Department.

Their goal? Apparently this: To drive prominent Democrats out of office and into prison, often via flimsy “corruption” charges of the kind that framed (there’s no other word for it) former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, his state’s most prominent Democrat. 

Siegelman was sentenced to prison for a seven-year term, with significant segments in solitary confinement to punish him for interviews about the gross injustice. The nearly two decades of prosecutions have helped destroy the Alabama Democratic Party aside from the unique circumstance of former Siegelman attorney Doug Jones' victory over accused pedophile Roy Moore for a U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, Trump's pick to become attorney general last year.

Other goals of the politically driven Bush Justice Department included protecting important Republicans and Republican-oriented institutions from prosecution. Another was to lay the groundwork for current voter suppression efforts by hoked-up prosecutions and fear-mongering about the largely non-existent problem of individual voter fraud while ignoring larger scale efforts to rig entire elections, particularly in swing states.

Down With Tyranny was prominent among the news outlets, primarily in the alternative media, that helped expose these problems in the Siegelman case and similar situations. One of dozens of reports that I wrote about this was for the Huffington Post in 2009, “Siegelman Deserves New Trial Because of Judge’s ‘Grudge’, Evidence Shows... $300 Million in Bush Military Contracts Awarded to Judge’s Private Company.”

Democrats Forgive, Forget?

Sadly, however, the Obama administration took little interest in documented injustices in these kinds of cases throughout the nation.

In many instances, Obama officials sought to ratify in the courts the abusive tactics initiated by the Bush Justice Department. Obama Attorney Gen. Eric Holder and Solicitor Gen. Elena Kagan, for example, opposed Siegelman’s appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court that had been endorsed by unprecedented numbers of law professors and former state attorneys general who underscored the injustice of his prosecution. Holder, after a recent speaking appearance at the Center for American Progress seeking to energize Democratic voters this year, told me in a brief interview that he was not familiar with the Siegelman case. That was a brush-off given the case’s notoriety. Holder had fired a Justice Department whistleblower against the government’s tactics {See “From Justice Dream Job to Nightmare…Tamarah Grimes, Justice Department Paralegal… Why This Whistleblower Was Dissed & Dismissed”, KNOW: The Magazine For Paralegals.} As if that weren’t enough to focus Holder’s attention on Alabama, his late sister-in-law, Vivian Malone, had integrated the University of Alabama in an iconic desegregation advance.

Where's Accountability?

So here we are, December 2018. The public faces large numbers of lingering injustices from the Bush era and large cadres of “law enforcers” from that period who have positioned themselves for higher office in an even more lawless Trump administration.

Let’s look again at Kevin Downing, Manafort’s lead defense attorney. The Manafort prosecution includes, among other charges, jury verdicts and Manafort’s later guilty plea involving Manafort’s receipt of $60 million in income from 2012 to 2016, a period when he reported just $13 million.

Downing left the Justice Department as a senior litigation counsel in mid-2012 for private practice. His representation of Manafort raises questions about "revolving door" justice.

In fairness to Downing, Manafort’s wrongdoing described in the Mueller indictment thus largely fell outside of Downing’s prominent role at the Justice Department’s tax fraud section. It's true also that Downing received an award from Holder for prosecuting fraud by Switzerland-based UBS, one of the world’s most influential financial companies.

However, the whistleblowing former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld portrays Downing in Birkenfeld’s 2016 memoir Lucifer’s Banker as one of the villains in what became one of the leading documented financial fraud investigations in U.S. history.

Birkenfeld asserts that Downing and his Justice Department team reacted with scorn and other hostility when Birkenfeld came to them voluntarily in 2007 with massive evidence revealing the identities of what he called 19,000 U.S. tax cheats who were part of a tax and money laundering fraud that UBS was perpetrating against the U.S. Treasury and public.

Birkenfeld writes that Downing and his team, under pressure for another major investigation that was failing, appeared to be frightened at the prospect of criminally prosecuting the powerful UBS and its ultra-wealthy clients. Instead, Birkenfeld alleges that they made him a convenient scapegoat with the help of the Miami U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta.

Birkenfeld, a fall guy by his account, received a three-year prison term even though he was the one who alerted the federal government to the massive scheme and brought them the documentary evidence. Meanwhile, the Justice Department handled UBS higher-ups and their crooked clients almost entirely via civil actions far less onerous than criminal prosecution. At the same time, Birkenfeld and his attorneys learned in the midst of his ordeal that the Internal Revenue Service was collecting $15 billion in taxes and penalties from the UBS scandal, leading to a $104 million whistleblower award for Birkenfeld.

That’s history. What may be ahead is a claim by some legal pundits that Manafort, his attorneys and Trump’s team appear to have illegally colluded by conveying information this fall after Manafort’s plea deal in mid-September, as reported in the New York Times story.

Several experts have said there is no basis for “joint defense agreement” between a defendant who has pleaded guilty and others who are fighting the special counsel. We are reaching out to Downing for comment.

The Epstein Pedophile Scandal

Acosta, a Harvard-educated son of Cuban immigrants, became assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights beginning in 2003. 

The positioning provided the Bush administration with the politically useful, especially in Florida, a public image of a Hispanic professional in a key post. As it turns out, many of the key hiring decisions there were being made by Acosta's aide, Bradley Schlozman, who would be rebuked by the department’s Inspector General for improperly favoring conservatives in hiring decisions. 

Schlozman went on to become U.S. attorney in Kansas City where he became a notorious vote-suppression and "voter fraud" zealot who sought to crucify Democrats and minorities for relatively trivial misconduct in voter registration drives. In one such case, Schlozman and his colleagues threw the book at minimum-wage voter registration canvassers who made up names for voter registration lists but without proving that the fraud involved an effort to compromise actual voting. Yet that prosecution could be touted as "voter fraud" requiring "reforms" best categorized these as the voter suppression increasingly common in many GOP-controlled voting regions.

Acosta’s own most notorious action came when he approved a sweetheart plea deal for the billionaire pervert and investor Jeffrey Epstein after West Palm Beach police documented more than 100 “Jane Doe” complaints of teenage girls whom Epstein allegedly victimized in a ring targeting junior high and high school girls. Epstein used surrogates to recruit the girls to give him "massages" that evolved into sexual encounters at his mansion located in a ritzy area just a mile from the Mar-a-Lago estate Epstein’s friend Donald Trump.

What helped make the case outrageous is that Acosta ended a joint federal-state investigation with a highly unusual plea deal whereby Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution. Under a highly unusual provision of the plea deal, the government agreed not to investigate anyone else, including those who recruited the girls and Epstein’s high-powered friends. They included Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew of the United Kingdom.

As it turned out, Epstein served just 13 months and was permitted "work release" whereby he could leave a West Palm Beach jail during the day and return at night during his sentence. Acosta did not inform victims and their families of the terms of the sweetheart plea deal. That has prompted years of acrimony, litigation and adverse news commentary, including a major Miami Herald investigation published on Nov. 28 entitled "Perversion of Justice."

Herald reporters led by Julie K. Brown identified 60 victims, among other sources, focusing heavily on Acosta's decision-making more than a decade ago. Their powerful stories included How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.

Trump apparently rewarded Acosta by naming him in February 2017 as nominee to become Secretary of Labor, the federal government’s main post protecting American workers.

Some reporters at that point (including me) promptly highlighted Acosta's role in the Epstein case but senators proved too timid to question him in depth about it before his confirmation.

My colleague Wayne Madsen, editor of the Wayne Madsen Report and a former Navy intelligence officer, last year began reporting that two girls, aged 12 and 13, filed legal papers alleging that Epstein and Trump had raped them in the early 1990s in New York City.

Defendants denied the claims. The girls then withdrew their allegations shortly before the 2016 presidential election, with one accuser “Katie Johnson” (a pseudonym) claiming fear at the time from death threats from unknown persons.

Madsen and I documented the story last January in a series that included the segment underscoring the blackmail / extortion liabilities of such predatory behavior targeting underage girls: Trump’s multiple sex scandals endanger U.S. national security.

The accusations continue to percolate. This is in part because Acosta is reported to be a long-shot to be nominated at the next U.S. Attorney General. Trump has said he wants a loyalist in the position, unlike the now-dismissed Sessions, who recused himself from supervising Mueller because Sessions had been implicated with Russian contacts during the presidential campaign.

Beyond that, a much-delayed civil trial unfolds on Dec. 4 in West Palm Beach to resolve vexatious litigation and defamation claims between Epstein and Bradley J. Edwards and attorneys representing victims. Madsen and I were among the reporters planning to cover the trial.

The Next Mueller Boss

Finally, we revisit the appointment of the current acting attorney general Matthew Whitaker, whose appointment by Trump without U.S. Senate confirmation has been widely denounced as unconstitutional tactic to shift supervision of the special counsel’s probe of alleged crime by Trump and his team away from the current supervisor, Deputy Attorney Gen. Rod Rosenstein.

As of this writing, Whitaker is not known to have interfered with the Mueller probe which Whitaker had denounced during his de facto "audition" for the Justice Department's post as a pro-Trump pundit on cable news shows. But that may be only because Whitaker's appointment is under several legal challenges, which are compounded by Whitaker’s remarkably shabby professional qualifications for such a high post.

News reports have indicated that Whitaker helped direct a scam company fined $26 million by the Federal Trade Commission for deceiving customers, for example, and that the company is currently under federal criminal investigation. These dubious achievements are chronicled in our column, updated almost daily, Trump's New Acting AG Is Unfit To Serve.

As indicated by that roundup, Whitaker’s critics have found a trove of unseemly conduct in his past. But perhaps most relevant to this column’s themes is his zealous prosecution beginning in 2007 of Iowa State Sen. Matt McCoy, a gay Democrat with a seemingly bright political future.

In a pattern similar to other Bush political prosecutions across the nation, Whitaker ruthlessly targeted McCoy as corrupt for seeking commissions totaling about $2,000 from a local company. But a federal jury ultimately acquitted McCoy in just two hours, as reported by the Washington Post Nov. 9 in Whitaker’s term as U.S. attorney in Iowa draws scrutiny.

Bottom line: The injustices portrayed above largely focus on the actions of just three prominent Trump-era alumns from the Bush era. We know lots about them now. Looking ahead, one question is whether anyone is going to do much to prevent similar abuses from the Trump administration's ex-Bushie  "law enforcers" that Senate Republicans are trying to confirm en masse into the federal judiciary and Justice Department.

In January 2009, President-elect Obama tried to mollify Republicans and the public by saying that he was "looking forward, not backward" regarding alleged Republican injustices during the Bush administration. That must not happen again with the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

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Justice Integrity Project editor Andrew Kreig is a Washington, DC-based reporter, attorney and author whose non-partisan project has long investigated political prosecutions and other official misconduct, including cover-up. He has extensively covered voter suppression, the Siegelman and Manafort federal corruption cases, and corrupt actions by prominent federal officials.

Is Whitaker A Distraction? Or Just Another Catastrophic Trump Regime Screw Up?

Trump and his advisors are desperate for Republican voters to not look too closely at the GOP’s exploding deficit— only a self-obsessed idiot pretending to have been educated at Wharton would not understand the toxicity of tax cuts for the rich and cascading and pointless spending hikes that invest nothing in the American people. So the 300-ring circus intensifies. The Washington Post reported that “During his 43-hour stay in Paris, Trump brooded over the Florida recounts and sulked over key races being called for Democrats in the midterm elections that he had claimed as a ‘big victory.’ He erupted at his staff over media coverage of his decision to skip a ceremony honoring the military sacrifice of World War I.” The fuming asshole was angry and resentful over Macron’s public rebuke of rising nationalism, which Trump (rightly) “considered a personal attack. And that was after his difficult meeting with Macron, where officials said little progress was made as Trump again brought up his frustrations over trade and Iran… All the while plotting a shake-up in his failed regime.

He’s back and what does he find? On-again-off-again ally and tukas-licker Lindsey Graham has announced he supports a bill to protect Mueller from Trump and his allies. Graham is demanding a vote, exactly what McConnell and Trump advisors do not want. In the background, more Trump rubber-stamps— like Jeff Denham and Mimi Walters in California and Karen Handel in Georgia— are losing their seats as votes continue to be counted. And then there’s the growing Matt Whitaker disaster.

Tuesday evening, Eliana Johnson and Darren Samuelsohn covered the bipartisan outrage against Trump’s naked power play and how it’s already backfiring. Obviously unvetted, as well as utterly unqualified to head the Justice Department, even temporarily, Whitaker’s appointment has not exactly been warmly received… anywhere. Trump wants Whitaker to protect his family from impending corruption charges but Maryland’s Attorney General just filed the first legal challenge seeking to overturn his dubious appointment, “while on Capitol Hill newly empowered House Democrats are already making plans to have the acting attorney general appear as one of their first witnesses when the next Congress launches in January. The uproar over the appointment, which effectively removes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as Mueller’s primary supervisor, has put Whitaker in a difficult spot, trapped between setting off a political firestorm by clipping Mueller’s wings and angering a president intent on having him do just that. Even Trump’s Justice Department is wavering about whether Whitaker will do the deed the president wanted him for." Whitaker is being pressured to recuse himself and Trump is running around the White House with smoke coming out of his ears.

Lanny Davis, the former Bill Clinton White House crisis manager, said that if Whitaker were to follow the president’s wishes and meddle with the Mueller probe, he would be susceptible both to legal fallout and long-term reputational problems.

“This guy is vulnerable criminally. He’s vulnerable morally. He’s just plain out vulnerable,” said Davis, who is now representing Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen in his criminal proceedings.

There is also the fact that Mueller’s investigation may be too far along to merely smother it. A Washington-based defense lawyer representing a senior Trump official in the Russia investigation said Whitaker couldn’t make decisions “based on his seat-of-the-pants preferences.”

The special counsel’s work is now into its 18th month and includes guilty pleas involving former senior Trump aides and indictments against more than two dozen Russian officials accused of sabotaging the 2016 presidential election.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) told Politico on Tuesday: “To try to stop it when it’s nearly concluded would be a mistake.”

The new constraints on Whitaker represent a harsh reality check for a White House that helped kick-start his promotion back in August 2017. That’s when the White House counsel at the time, Don McGahn, pressured Sessions into hiring the little-known attorney as his new chief of staff, replacing Jody Hunt, who had just left to run the Justice Department’s civil division.

Sessions, stung just weeks before by a series of humiliating Trump tweets, came away from his interactions with McGahn with an impression that he had little choice but to accede to the White House’s demands, according to two sources familiar with Sessions’ thinking.

Whitaker had others pushing for his hiring, too.

The Federalist Society’s executive director, Leonard Leo, whose stock has been high in the Trump White House for his behind-the-scenes vetting of potential Supreme Court picks, recommended Whitaker to McGahn.

Trump also liked Whitaker’s cable television appearances and his attack-dog style challenging Mueller’s investigation. While working for Sessions, Whitaker used his post to engender the president’s belief that Trump had a friend in him. The two men also bonded over football— Whitaker was a tight end on the University of Iowa team that went to the 1991 Rose Bowl.

Whitaker’s promotion has been anything but smooth. Trump last Friday told reporters outside the White House that he didn’t even know the new acting attorney general, though in an Oct. 11 interview on Fox & Friends the president called him a “great guy,” adding, “I mean, I know Matt Whitaker.”

Some of the president’s own aides, including members of his legal team, expressed frustration on Monday that neither the White House nor the Justice Department had made any attempt to put an end to the controversy generated by Whitaker’s appointment by issuing a statement about Whitaker’s views on the Mueller probe or his role overseeing it— making clear he had no intention of curtailing it or providing some window into his thinking.

Others said that although they believed it was unlikely Whitaker would take aim at Mueller, issuing a public statement saying as much would infuriate the president, who would view it as a betrayal akin to Sessions’ initial recusal from the investigation in early 2017.

But Whitaker’s appointment has created anything but certainty for Trump and the Russia investigation.

The Maryland motion on Tuesday asking a federal judge to name Rosenstein the acting attorney general argues that Whitaker’s promotion violates a constitutional provision requiring Senate confirmation for top positions like attorney general.

Senate Democrats have said they’re considering their own lawsuit, and the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), has already promised to make Whitaker the first witness when the new Congress convenes in January.

“He’s totally unqualified,” Nadler told CNN on Sunday. “And his only qualification seems to be that he wants to be— that the president wants him to be the hatchet man to destroy the Mueller investigation.”

The shakeup at Justice is also creating internal demands on its own lawyers.

The department on Tuesday was reportedly expected to finalize a legal opinion backing Whitaker’s appointment.

Mueller’s office faces its own deadline next Monday to tell a federal appellate court panel what the changes atop the department mean for a lawsuit that seeks to knock the special counsel out of his job on constitutional grounds.

Nadler on Tuesday also sent a letter to Whitaker and FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking responses to more than 100 information requests from Democratic lawmakers that have gone unanswered while the party has been in the House minority, including details about “improper communications” between the White House and Justice Department.

And Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), the minority leader, made clear on Tuesday the position of Senate Democrats: There are “serious questions,” he said, about whether Whitaker’s appointment— rather than that of the special counsel— is constitutional.

CNN reported today that this is all having a bad impact of Trump’s health. Already morbidly obese, he’s been binge eating and putting on the pounds and could die, answering the prayers of most Americans. The mood in the White House is darker than usual, as he storms around angry and petulant. As we’ll probably be reporting later this afternoon-- waiting for a second confirmation now--, he’s too strung out on Adderall to carry out his basic duties as president, finally seeming to understandi that the major congressional losses were a rejection of him by the vast majority of Americans, including in areas that had voted for him in 2016.

Maine Had A Wave

Republicans in Maine did a lot of losing yesterday. Eric Brakey tried taking out Angus King and got 35.2% of the vote for his effort. Chellie Pingree was reelected to the House with 58.9% of the vote. Republican Mark Holbrook took just under a third of the vote-- 106,750 (32.3%). And in the second district, the race is too close to call, although it looks like Democrat Jared Golden may well replace Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin. The Democrats also took control of the state Senate, winning at least 21 seats in the 35-seat chamber, and increased their majority in the state House, with at least 81 of the 151 seats. And... the day after termed out Governor Paul LePage announced he's had enough of Maine and is moving to Florida, the voters chose Democrat Janet Mills to replace him. She took 310,493 votes (51.1%) with Republican Shawn Moody, the Republican in the race, taking 261,353 votes (43.0%) In all, a very bad day for the GOP.

So no one should have been surprised today when she took one look at Trump's immediate steps to end the Mueller investigation and tweeted her disapproval:

Too late; the damage is down. She voted to confirm Kavanaugh and she cuddled up with Trump enough to make normal Mainers sick (literally and figuratively.

But now she's concerned? Was she not paying attention for the last coupla years? Who, oh, who could have guessed Trump would interfere with the investigation? Or that there is a single normal Trump would hesitate to break? Susan Collins is concerned. She's going to be a lot more concerned when she's on the ballot with him in 2020.

And what about Trump's threats today to "have" the Senate "investigate" Democratic members of Congress if any committees start investigating him, probably the top reason why millions of voters decided to replace Republicans with Democrats in the House. The New York Times reported that Trump said he would adopt a "warlike posture" towards the House Democrats if they did. "They can play that game, but we can play better because we have a thing called the United States Senate and a lot of questionable things were done between leaks of classified information and many other elements that should not have taken place... I could see it being extremely good for me politically because I think I’m better at that game than they are, actually, but we’ll find out."

It doesn't seem like any other Republicans are concerned about that or that Trump fired Sessions half a day after the midterms and replaced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with a stooge, Matthew Whitaker, to "oversee" Mueller and his team. Don't recall Whitaker? He was the one who wrote an OpEd last year claiming that if Mueller looked into the Trump crime family finances he would be "dangerously close to crossing" a red line.

Into the Swamp by Nancy Ohanian