Of the twelve counts enumerated in the indictment, the first stands out: “Conspiracy Against the United States”. Let us just take that in: the president’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well as the manager’s close associate, have been charged with serving as “unregistered agents of the Government of Ukraine” and its pro-Russian leader, Victor Yanukovych.



Even in the absence of any further allegations of criminal associations between Trump and the Russians, the news would be extraordinary.

And yet the day brought a second, no less remarkable development in the Mueller investigation: the news that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy expert who advised Trump during the campaign, has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Papadopoulos had lied about an April 2016 conversation he had with a professor with close ties to the Kremlin, who informed Papadopoulos that Moscow had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton contained in “thousands of emails”.

The president has reacted to the news in predictable fashion, tweeting that the charges filed against Manafort all involve actions committed before taking the helm of the Trump campaign, then reflexively insisting that “Crooked Hillary” should be the real target of investigation. (The president remained curiously silent about Papadopoulos, perhaps, as some have observed, because a guilty plea cannot be fobbed off as Fake News.)

And while Trump is correct that Manafort’s alleged crimes predate his work for the Trump campaign, his tweet has all the persuasive force of Nixon’s insistence that he never ordered the Watergate break-in. Clearly, Mueller’s interest in Manafort extends beyond prosecuting a case of extravagant money laundering.



We know Manafort was present at the now infamous meeting that took place in Trump Tower in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, with the Kremlin’s blessing, was also offering to deliver the dope on Hillary. But profound questions remain about that meeting. What exactly was discussed? Had Trump been briefed about it in advance? What was the follow-up?

These are matters that Manafort could likely help clarify. Which makes the timing of the day’s two extraordinary events all the more telling. By indicting Manafort (and his associate Rick Gates) on the same day that the Papadopoulos plea agreement was announced, Mueller sent a powerful signal that cooperation has its benefits.

The great question, then, is how Trump will respond as Mueller’s investigation grinds forward. To my mind, small tactical issues, such as whether Trump will pardon Manafort, fail to appreciate the crisis that is looming. Trump shares the authoritarian instincts, but not the strategic savvy, of the Russian president, whose actions arguably catapulted Trump into the White House.



Ethically unmoored in the best of times, Trump has recently engaged in the unprecedented practice of personally vetting his nominees for top federal prosecutor positions in New York and Washington DC. By asking to meet nominees who could one day prosecute the likes of Manafort, Trump again seems to be obstructing justice – if he is not doing it in fact.

We also know how Trump behaves when cornered. His only defense is to attack – recklessly, mendaciously and unrelentingly. He seems more than prepared to fire Mueller and cast the nation into a destructive constitutional crisis rather than acknowledge fault or wrongdoing.

This is a president who has been called a “fucking moron” by his own secretary of state. He has been accused of having the discipline of a spoiled toddler, and being so intemperate that he could trigger a nuclear war – charges that come not from the “people’s enemies” in the mainstream news but from within his own party and administration. An admirer of Mussolini’s dictum, “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” Trump may see his day coming.