Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 election has worked the peripheries of the case since May 2017, scoring a conviction and a few guilty pleas while peppering the ranks of Russian intelligence with criminal indictments. Mueller’s main subject of interest, President Donald Trump, escaped his lash if not his interest this week as four hotly anticipated court filings were handed down. The investigation finally placed Trump in its sights and telegraphed Mueller’s methods to all the president’s men: If you are good, like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and provide “substantial assistance,” you might get a nice note from the special counsel and avoid prison time. Tell “discernible lies,” as former campaign chairman Paul Manafort did, and expect holy hell from Mueller. Do a little of both, as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen did, and expect a treatment somewhere in the median.

Lying, or in Cohen’s case, declining to tell the whole truth, has consequences for the liars. But, the consequences of these lies continue to pile up at the president’s doorstep too. Redacted and cagey as these filings are, each one has provided some new tidbit that reinforces the connections between Trump, his campaign and people trying to influence the 2016 election on his behalf—most of them Russian.


Last year, talking like a goombah, Cohen made a big fuss about how he'd take a bullet for Trump, if need be. But what has Cohen actually done now that the time has come for him to eat lead for Trump? According to Mueller’s addendum to the sentencing memo filed by the U.S. attorneys for the Southern District of New York, he fragged his old boss by tattling to prosecutors about the crimes they've committed together and about the Trump Organization's interactions with unnamed Russians during the 2016 campaign. These detonations leave the president's hide bloodied with legal shrapnel. If you need evidence of the extent of the wounds, just look at Trump’s Twitter feed, always an excellent diagnostic for his mental pain. On Friday night, he tweeted: “Totally vindicates the President. Thank you!”

According to the SDNY attorneys, Cohen confessed to not only having broken campaign finance law by paying two of Trump’s paramours to keep silent about their affairs, but also literally fingered his former client as his partner in crime. “As Cohen has now admitted, with respect to both payments, he acted in coordination with and at the direction of Individual-1”—Individual-1 being Trump. I'm guilty, guilty, guilty, Cohen telegraphed, but so is the president of the United States. Every legal beagle and political commentator to speed-read the sentencing memo spotlighted the fact that in no uncertain terms the prosecutors have accused—but not charged—Trump with a felony. Compared with the relatively forgiving tones of Mueller’s memo, the SDNY attorneys poured their fury on Cohen for insufficient cooperation after he pleaded out, and called on the judge to sentence him to serious time.

Mueller’s memo details the nature of Cohen’s lies. He misled Congress about what he knew about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and about Trump's efforts to build a Moscow Trump Tower. And he told these lies, according to the memo, to “minimize links between the Moscow Project and Individual 1 [Trump] … in hopes of limiting the ongoing Russian investigations.” Smells like obstruction of justice, doesn’t it?

In another Mueller filing, he documented the alleged lies told by Manafort, convicted by Mueller on eight counts of financial fraud in the summer. Manafort began cooperating with prosecutors after his August conviction and subsequent guilty plea to additional charges, but Mueller soon learned that the mendacious political consultant was an unreliable narrator. Seeing as Mueller had already successfully prosecuted him for lying, concealing and deceiving, Manafort should have known better than to fling a bounty of lies at the special counsel after promising to tell the truth. But he did, and like Cohen, his lies were serial.

Claiming to have had no communications with Trump administration officials, Manafort was found to have made multiple contacts with them, including an effort as late as May 26, 2018, to convey a message through an intermediary to an administration official. This is the sort of lie that would go down like a whiskey chaser after shopping for a pardon with the president, attempting to coordinate an alibi with Team Trump, or both.

A heavily redacted part of the filing alleges that Manafort lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, his former business associate in Europe and suspected Russian spy. In one mysteriously redacted passage, Manafort is accused of having lied about a redacted topic “that was pertinent to an investigation in another district.” Nested like Russian dolls, this investigation is, as Yoda would put it. Returning to the Cohen sentencing memos, we find more explicit Russian intrigue. Cohen repeatedly lied about what he knew about the Moscow tower, twice to Congress and once to Mueller’s team. Not until he pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges in New York did he finally level with Mueller and “admit that his prior statements about the Moscow Project had been deliberately false and misleading.”

Last week, we learned that Cohen and others in the Trump Organization were still working on the Moscow project until June 2016, belying the previous timeline in which the organization was supposed to have bailed on the tower in January of that year. With the new timeline come additional Moscow facts that further bind Trump and his people to the Russians, who were known to be meddling in the election. According to Mueller, Cohen has spilled new details to him about whom he worked with on the proposed tower, whom he dealt with inside the Russian government (an assistant to Putin’s press secretary), and prospective plans he made about traveling to Russia to discuss the deal with the government figures who were essential for its completion. Cohen’s incentive to pursue the deal was the same as Trump’s. He told Mueller that “financial aspects of the deal would have made it highly lucrative for the Company and himself.” The intimacies with unnamed Russians disclosed in the memo whiff of Russian meddling in the Trump campaign if not straight up collusion. Trump was trying to have it both ways: Campaign for the presidency while pursuing a potentially lucrative business deal with an adversary’s government.

Russian nationals infest the Mueller memo like termites in rotten wood. They made repeated efforts to contact the Trump campaign, including one around November 2015, when Trump was leading the Republican field. Cohen was approached by a “Russian national who claimed to be a ‘trusted person’ in the Russian Federation who could offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’” Last June, BuzzFeed reported former Olympic weightlifter Dmitry Klokov as the likely Russian go-between. Whoever he was, this Russian intermediary repeatedly proposed a meeting between Trump and Putin , Cohen told Mueller, one that was promised to provide political as well as business payoffs. In a footnote, Mueller writes that Cohen once conferred with Trump about contacting the Russian government about its interest in a Trump-Putin meeting, but no meeting took place.

Like Manafort, Cohen remained in contact with the White House in 2017 and 2018. Although Mueller writes that Cohen “provided relevant and useful information concerning” these contacts, he doesn't spell them out. Was Cohen triangulating his story with Trump and associates? Was he pardon shopping?

After a year and a half of buildup, Mueller has now sketched out the framework of interlacing business collusion and political collusion by Trump with the Russians. If Trump has any pardons in stock, he might want to save them for himself.

******