1. Would SDNY ever charge President Trump?

Perhaps the most serious development on Friday — at least as far as Trump’s legal liability goes — was how the Southern District of New York prosecutors implicated Trump in a crime. While Cohen had said Trump directed him to make the hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, which was a campaign finance violation, this time the prosecutors themselves said it.

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That suggests they have evidence to back up Cohen’s claim. It also leads to the next logical question: Why do that?

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It’s generally accepted that the Justice Department doesn’t indict sitting presidents — something that has been standard operating procedure for decades. Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani has said special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III has assured Trump’s legal team that he will abide by that DOJ guidance. Thus, any liability Trump might have while in office would likely come from impeachment proceedings, not criminal charges.

But as former FBI director James B. Comey noted Sunday night, you normally don’t include such sentences just because. “The government wouldn’t make that sponsoring allegation if they weren’t seriously contemplating going forward with criminal charges,” he told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace. “Now where it stands now, I can’t say.”

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Even if we accept Giuliani at his word — which isn’t easy to do these days — that only precludes charges from Mueller. Would SDNY try to charge Trump? They’d have to get sign-off from whoever is acting as attorney general, which might be a fight. And even if Trump is in the clear as long as he’s in office, what if he loses reelection? Could charges be in store then?

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That seems like a real possibility, according to one New York Times source:

The prosecutors in New York have examined the statute of limitations on the campaign finance violations and believe charges could be brought against Mr. Trump if he is not re-elected, according to a person briefed on the matter.

2. Was there a quid pro quo with Cohen’s Trump Tower Moscow outreach?

The second most conspicuous inclusion in the filings Friday was the extensive rationale it supplied for probing Trump’s business dealings in Russia.

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Emphasis added:

The defendant’s false statements obscured the fact that the Moscow Project was a lucrative business opportunity that sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government. If the project was completed, the Company could have received hundreds of millions of dollars from Russian sources in licensing fees and other revenues. The fact that Cohen continued to work on the project and discuss it with Individual 1 well into the campaign was material to the ongoing congressional and SCO investigations, particularly because it occurred at a time of sustained efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the U.S. presidential election. Similarly, it was material that Cohen, during the campaign, had a substantive telephone call about the project with an assistant to the press secretary for the President of Russia.

It had been evident from the week before, when Cohen pleaded guilty to lying about his pursuit of Trump Tower Moscow, that this prospective business deal was on Mueller’s radar. Here, Mueller’s team decides to slip in an argument about just how relevant it is, collusion-wise.

But do you include that argument if it’s all much ado about nothing? That’s a lot of detail about a very specific event in the much vaster Russia investigation.

It’s possible it’s included because that is the extent of collusion-adjacent events that Cohen was able to shed light upon. But given Cohen lied about these contacts and that Mueller seems quite interested in the whole thing, we have to wonder what Mueller knows that he’s not saying. Could there be more to the negotiations than meets the eye? Could there have even been some kind of quid pro quo?

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This plot is thickening more than most.

3. What did Cohen and the Russian national talk about?

This was something brand new that we learned Friday — that Cohen had more contacts with Russians. Specifically, Mueller’s filing detailed how a “Russian national” with ties to the Kremlin reached out to Cohen in late 2015 claiming to “offer the campaign ‘political synergy’ and ‘synergy on a government level.’”

That unnamed national appears to be Olympic weightlifter turned entrepreneur Dmitry Klokov, as first reported by BuzzFeed News. Klokov’s wife also reportedly reached out to Ivanka Trump shortly before, in October 2015, and Ivanka Trump passed along the message to Cohen. Mueller’s team concedes, “Cohen, however, did not follow up on this invitation” — apparently believing he already had the ties he needed through Felix Sater.

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But again: Why include this? Does it speak to anything broader? Does it make Ivanka Trump a person of interest? Whatever the case, it certainly adds to the list of contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign, which stands at 14 in total.

Klokov, for what it’s worth, is being coy:

Asked on Saturday via a message to his Instagram account about his reported communications with Cohen, Klokov responded with three laughing-in-tears emoji and the words: “This is someone’s nonsense.”

4. Why did Manafort allegedly lie about Kilimnik?

Mueller on Friday provided some details about the things that Manafort allegedly lied about to lose his cooperation agreement. Most notable in there, perhaps, were Manafort’s alleged lies about his contacts with a Ukrainian business associate, Konstantin Kilimnik. He’s the one the U.S. government has conspicuously noted had ties to Russian intelligence as of 2016.

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Two of the five areas of alleged lies, in fact, deal with Kilimnik. Manafort allegedly lied about both his interactions with Kilimnik and Kilimnik’s role in witness-tampering with him. But almost all of the first section is redacted, meaning we don’t know what specifically Manafort said that wasn’t true. We can only surmise that there were several lies.

To wit:

But Kilimnik is not someone who will likely ever see the inside of a U.S. courtroom, so it’s not like lying about him would do anything to protect him. And why would Manafort risk his cooperation agreement for that?

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Manafort’s Russia ties have long been a source of suspicion, but we haven’t been given much to grab hold of, legally. Mueller seems to be zeroed in on Kilimnik, and Manafort’s alleged lies are quite curious, in context.

5. Why was Manafort still working with the Trump legal team and contacting the administration?

The other big thing Manafort allegedly lied about was his contacts with Trump administration officials — as late as earlier this year. There was a text exchange in May. He was in contact with a senior official through February. He authorized one official to speak with another on his behalf. And there were “additional contacts,” too. He allegedly lied about all of them, saying he hadn’t been in contact with the administration.

Then you layer on top of that the thoroughly strange arrangement in which Manafort’s legal team was still briefing Trump’s team even after Manafort agreed to cooperate.