President Trump’s personal legal team has a joint defense agreement with Paul Manafort’s attorneys, allowing them to share confidential information, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani told Politico.
Giuliani — the most visible and outspoken lawyer representing Trump — also claimed to Politico that he and Manafort’s attorneys are in regular contact, including before and after a jury in Virginia delivered its verdict in the federal trial Manafort faced there.
The President had joint defense agreements in place with former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn and with his fixer Michael Cohen, before those agreements were ended when those Trump allies decided to plead guilty.
Manafort was convicted on eight counts in Virginia, where the case focused on bank fraud and tax fraud allegations, and the jury was hung on 10 other charges. He is reportedly in plea discussions with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to avoid a second trial in D.C., where he is facing money laundering and failure to disclose foreign lobbying charges. According to ABC News, Manafort has been resisting prosecutors’ desire that a plea deal include cooperation.
Manafort’s attorneys did not respond to TPM’s email seeking confirmation of the joint defense agreement.
Smells like collusion to me…
IANAL and I don’t really understand the practical importance of this. What would prevent this sort of confidential sharing without such an agreement? Is this anything more substantial than Trump and Manafort telling their respective lawyers “yes, you can share info with each other”? Wasn’t this everybody’s operating assumption already? It certainly was mine.
Lets defend ourselves from collusion by, wait, one sec, colluding…
Makes perfect sense when you’re co-conspirators - and when the pardon is just waiting. Because Mueller is being so unfair to such great men … who sold out the country (I started to write ‘their’ country, but I reject the premise that the US is Manafort’s or Trump’s country any longer - and it hasn’t been for a long time).
If you have a joint defense agreement, the lawyers for the separate parties can share attorney-client privileged and attorney work product documents and information without waiving the privilege. The parties have to have a legitimate shared interest in jointly defending against the existing or threatened claims/ charges against them.