Today as I was writing up various bizarre new permutations of the George Papadopoulos/Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos story, I didn’t know there was even more bizarreness emerging from a separate interview Simona Mangiante gave The Daily Caller. The Caller interview, which was conducted Sunday, largely tracks with what Mangiante told Tucker Carlson last night on Fox News. The new detail is her claim that George Papadopoulos old pled guilty to the charge of lying to federal investigators because the Mueller team had threatened to charge him with acting as an agent of Israel without registration as such – the same crime Paul Manafort got hit on with Ukraine.
What on earth is going on here?
Let’s take these points one at a time. Read More
Dershowitz: “The President wasn’t wrong when he said I want loyalty from my Attorney General. It’s the constitution that’s wrong for allowing that kind of a division to occur.”
Dersh: "The President wasn't wrong when he said he wants his Attorney General to be loyal. It's the constitution that's wrong for allowing that kind of division to occur." pic.twitter.com/p4VhIhVA88
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 5, 2018
Note that in the tweet I had the transcription of the first sentence slightly off. The text in the post is correct. Same gist, slightly different wording.
So much news emerged overnight that I’m not sure how much attention will get focused on this odd development in the George Papadopoulos case. Let me address it briefly. We knew little about George Papadopoulos until last October when his plea deal with the Special Counsel’s office revealed that he was a key point of contact with Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign. Later we learned that his inebriated discussion with an Australian diplomat was the trigger that launched the Russia probe in July of 2016. He made a deal, has been cooperating and recently the Special Counsel’s office filed court papers signaling he’s likely completed his cooperation and is ready for sentencing. All of this is what you’d expect for a cooperating witness. But last night, Papadopoulos’s wife was on Fox asking President Trump for a pardon and seemingly claiming that George had been set up. Read More
Hard not to notice that within the last 48 hours the President appears to be making a final break with Paul Manafort, now claiming the FBI should have warned him that Manafort was dirty and maybe in league with Russia or pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. (He’s hinted at similar logics before but never been quite this explicit about it.) He is also aggressively claiming an absolute right to pardon himself. Not only are these not the actions of an innocent man. They aren’t the actions of anyone who isn’t seeing their legal jeopardy rapidly increasing. It will be fascinating – in the future – to understand what developments were occurring in the background that made sense of these actions.
President Trump is up this morning with the audacious claim that he has an absolute power to pardon himself and that all legal scholars agree this is so. Needless to say there’s zero consensus on this point. It’s more of a conceptual black box. It’s not immediately clear what specific constitutional or historical fact would preclude a self-pardon. But I think I’m on safe ground asserting that most legal scholars would agree that this is clearly not the intended use of the power. Indeed, it puts the entire constitutional framework on its head. Below I note a column by Douglas Kmiec in which he notes that the same DOJ opinion which says a sitting President shouldn’t be indicted notes that a self-pardon is similarly a contradiction in terms.) But set that aside, because it’s preposterous that such a thing would even be considered. More salient is the question of whether a sitting President can even be indicted – which precedes the question of a pardon. Read More
Very interesting piece by our Investigations Desk reporter Tierney Sneed. The Special Counsel’s office does not leak and they’ve been famously good at keeping major components of their investigation totally under wraps. But in this piece, Tierney pulls together a series of hints and references in different court filings and arguments which seem to point to separate, on-going investigation into Manafort which is not connected to the various money laundering, bank fraud and failure to register charges he’s currently facing. Check it out here.
In the latest Episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast Adam Davidson and I do a deep deep dive into Trump, Russia, money laundering, 9/11 and the evolution of the commercial real estate business all which paved Trump’s decades long road to Moscow. Fascinating stuff and I learned a lot. Listen.
The issue of presidential pardons raises an important issue with “norms”. I have written many times over the years that Presidents don’t use the pardon power nearly enough. The pardon power is archaic and in some ways hard to reconcile with our modern concepts of justice and judicial process. But mercy is an important element of justice. Indeed, without a role for mercy there can be no justice. There are many people rotting in prison who shouldn’t be there, even if they were guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted. In the past, the pardon was used sometimes for reasons as simple as managing prison over crowding. Sentences do not need to be sacrosanct. The pardon power is a tool to cut through the harsh indifference of criminal law and right wrongs. Read More
There are people who get convicted of campaign finance violations who you can make a decent case got a raw deal, even if you think campaign finance law is an important democratic safeguard. Here at TPM, we covered a case like that closely: the prosecution of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, a Democrat who was targeted by Karl Rove and some powerful state Republicans.
Dinesh D’Souza, who President Trump pardoned today, saying he was “treated very unfairly,” definitely doesn’t fall into that category. As Tierney Sneed explains, D’Souza knowingly had his mistress and his assistant make $10,000 contributions to a GOP candidate, with the understanding that he’d pay them back – a clear scheme to get around individual contribution limits. The mistress even told her husband, in a conversation he recorded, that D’Souza had told her that if caught, he planned to eventually plead guilty, though not before first trying to “get his story out there.” That “story,” it seemed, was that he had been targeted by the Justice Department because of his (unhinged and racist) attacks on President Obama – a claim the judge in the case called “nonsense.”