The indictment Monday of Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, and his associate, Rick Gates, begins a new phase in special counsel Robert Mueller's sprawling investigation whose ultimate outcome remains unknown but that will consume the White House for months to come.

True, Mueller’s 12-count indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates involves charges of money laundering, failure to disclose foreign bank accounts and making false statements to federal authorities – none directly related to the Trump presidential campaign that Manafort once led. But the simultaneous revelation that George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to FBI officials about his contacts with Russian nationals close to the Kremlin, raises sharp new questions about whether the campaign colluded with Moscow’s documented efforts to skew the election.


Plainly put, there is now blood in the water. And blood spilled not by political rivals, or the “fake” media, or any of Trump’s many enemies, real or imagined – but by the full power of the federal government as embodied by a special prosecutor with wide authority and a crack staff. It may not mean the beginning of the end of the Mueller probe, but it has put Washington (and Moscow) on vivid notice that the special counsel's investigation has at last reached the end of its beginning.

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In Washington legal proceedings, way leads onto way in patterns that are hard to predict. Who would have guessed that the Supreme Court’s decision allowing Paula Jones to proceed with her sexual harassment lawsuit against Bill Clinton would ultimately lead to the Monica Lewinsky case and his impeachment?

An indictment is not proof of guilt, of course. The longtime Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes liked to say that an indictment is merely “the accusatory instrument” by which criminal proceedings are commenced. But it is a clear sign that a prosecutor – and a majority of 23 citizens on a grand jury – have probable cause to believe that a serious crime has been committed, and it opens the door to a potentially long and twisted legal path whose political ramifications can often be even more complicated.

All by themselves, the charges against Manafort are bad enough, accusations that the leader of a sitting president’s campaign bilked the government (and the voters) of millions of dollars to finance a lavish lifestyle, even as he was working to elect Trump. Not since John Mitchell was convicted in 1975 for Watergate-related offenses as Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign chief have such serious allegations been leveled at a top official in the American electoral process.

“If this is all there is, and we have no sign that such is the case, then this is still a major prosecution,” said John A. Farrell, author of “Richard Nixon: The Life,” a new biography. “The president’s onetime campaign manager, involved up to his armpits in Ukrainian-Russian intrigue, cheating his fellow taxpayers and defrauding the government on a massive scale, is a huge scandal, and happening against the background of the Russian attempts to disrupt the presidential election magnifies its importance.”

Indeed, the president’s tweeted defense – “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign” – is really no defense at all, both because the indictment alleges that Manafort’s misdeeds persisted through last year, and because concerns about his dubious lobbying ties to foreign governments were widespread before Trump ever hired him. In fact, it was just such ties – to Ukraine – that led to Manafort’s eventual dismissal from the campaign.

Moreover, Papadopoulos’s guilty plea, entered secretly earlier this month, means that he is cooperating with the authorities to tell what he knows about the campaign’s interactions with Russian operatives or officials, in exchange for leniency. Even one friendly witness can lead to another, and open a lot of doors for determined prosecutors. Will Manafort, like such Watergate figures as John Dean and Jeb Magruder before him, be the next to turn state’s evidence?

“Manafort owes no loyalty to Trump,” said Peter Fenn, a longtime Democratic strategist in Washington. “He’s in a situation now where his lawyers are trying to figure out how they can negotiate some kind of plea deal here. It doesn’t serve him to plead the Fifth or die on his sword. If he’s got anything to sell, he’s going to sell it. I think Mueller’s very wise on this because, in a sense, this is the low-hanging fruit, but it is also exactly what you do if you’re moving up the chain.”

Since FBI agents picked the lock at Manafort’s home in Virginia and burst through the door last July, an indictment has been anticipated. Agents seized documents and copied computer files. That kind of raid typically occurs when prosecutors fear the subject of an investigation may be trying to destroy evidence, so the White House can hardly be shocked at the latest turn of events.

But Trump’s increasingly fevered efforts to shift the focus to Hillary Clinton – and the revelation that her campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped to finance opposition research that eventually wound up in a scurrilous dossier about Trump and Russia – are a reflection not just of his usual pugilistic tendencies, but of his realization that Mueller’s long expected indictment would change the political and legal landscape in ways bound to damage him.

At a minimum, the assertion in the guilty plea of the campaign adviser Papadopoulos – that a Russian professor with “substantial connections to Russian government official” – had told him that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails” adds fresh credibility to the notion that the Trump campaign was willing to accept help from official Russian sources in discrediting her.

Geoffrey Kabaservice, the author of “Rule and Ruin: The Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party,” said he could think of no precise parallel to the Manafort case in presidential history, since John Mitchell was convicted of crimes committed in the service of Nixon, rather than for personal enrichment. Still he said, he wondered if Trump’s fellow Republicans would exact any price, the way even Dwight Eisenhower’s allies were upset by his White House chief of staff’s acceptance of a vicuna coat.

“How outraged, if at all, will Trump's supporters be at this evidence of criminality in the Trump campaign?” he asked. “My guess is not very -- because this will be rationalized as (at worst) one individual's actions rather than evidence of collusion with Russia -- or evidence of any problem with Trump's brand of populist conservatism for that matter. We're certainly a long way from the GOP outrage over Sherman Adams' vicuna coat.”

And Mueller’s ability to track Manafort’s raft of overseas shell corporations and foreign bank accounts – not to mention real estate from Virginia to Long Island through which he allegedly laundered payments – is a troubling sign for the president that the prosecutor and his team of experts in financial crimes are prepared to follow the money, wherever it may lead them, and however indirectly it may be linked to last year’s campaign.

“Given President Trump’s reluctance to release his income taxes,” author Farrell said, I would suggest that the president and his family, and the family business, can take no comfort from Mueller’s readiness to prosecute whatever wrongdoing he and his financial sleuths uncover in their probe – whether it had to do with Putin’s disinformation campaign or not.”