Earlier this month, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to every crime Robert Mueller accused him of committing, and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation into potential Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. This was not great news for Donald Trump! Also potentially worrisome for the president was the news, back in March, that Manafort’s former business associate Rick Gates had likewise decided to play nice with federal prosecutors. And in a turn of events sure to absolutely floor you, it’s now emerged that the president’s former top lawyer seemingly wanted to buy the two men’s loyalty through what some people—not us, of course!—would describe as bribes.

According to The Wall Street Journal, John Dowd, who headed up Trump’s legal team for the Russia investigation beginning in June 2017, told associates of the president at the beginning of this year that he wanted to use money from a defense fund set up for White House officials and campaign aides to pay Manafort and Gates’s attorney fees. No one was super into the idea, considering the fund had been set up “specifically to aid those who faced legal fees stemming from their involvement with the president,” and the charges the two men were facing were related to activities that predated the campaign, making them ineligible. Plus, ethics advisers at the White House had the crazy idea that paying their legal fees would make it look like Dowd & Co. were attempting to stop Manafort and Gates from cooperating with prosecutors. But Dowd, who clearly is just a big softie at heart, was reportedly undeterred.

Per the Journal, on February 22—one day before Gates pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with investigators—the lawyer wrote in an e-mail that Manafort and Gates “needed funds immediately,” and that he was going to pony up $25,000 to the former campaign chairman’s legal defense fund the next day. Trump associates and White House advisers again pushed back on these entirely innocent propositions, worried about the “perception that the president’s legal team was seeking to interfere in the investigation,” and the potential for “Mr. Dowd’s efforts [to] undermine their own work to downplay the White House’s concern about the charges facing the former campaign aides.”

Dowd, who quit a month later, told the Journal this week that he wanted to help pay Manafort and Gates’s legal bills because he “care[s] about a lot of people,” and the Russia probe “offended” him “as a citizen and a lawyer.” That’s right, you haters and losers—it had nothing to do with anxiety over two men who could probably shed a whole bunch of light on the 2016 campaign cooperating with the Mueller investigation, a possibility Dowd said he was “not concerned at all” about.

Obviously, it’s only a matter of time before the the follow-up story comes out about Dowd sifting through court documents to identify other, less well-to-do people in need, whose cooperation could not potentially take the president down, and paying their legal fees. That's how much he cares!

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We found someone who loves Trump’s trade war

It’s Steve Bannon, the former senior adviser who just won’t die, and who may or may not like the president’s wildly unpopular trade policies because he was one of the key architects of them. Per Politico: