His transgressions are only a temporary setback for the Special Counsel.

Paul Manafort and Steven Miller during the 2016 Trump campaign. Source: CBS Detroit

The Special Counsel investigation broke wide open last week with the news that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had violated his plea agreement with Robert Mueller. Manafort apparently invalidated the deal by lying and possibly feeding details of the investigation to the Trump legal team. He faces potential federal charges for lying and refiled charges for bank fraud that an earlier jury had deadlocked on. A sentencing document outlining Manafort’s specific transgressions could be released as soon as this week.

This news greatly worried a number of pundits and writers who have devoted much of their time to speculating on the future of the Mueller investigation. Some writers declared that Manafort’s failed deal had imperiled the future of the investigation by invalidating its star witness. Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman tweeted

No way to know how bad this is for Mueller, but it can’t be good. Manafort will be hammered, but the public import seems to be that the special counsel has lost evidence he expected to obtain. And anything Manafort did cough up may be tainted by new charges that he’s a liar.

Others noted that Mueller lost a star cooperator, “a man at the nexus of Russian oligarchy, the subversion of western democracy, Republican Party dark arts, and Trump’s campaign.”

Paul Manafort was certainly a helpful source for the Mueller investigation over the past several months. He was able to provide an insider’s account of early connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Manafort was also presumably a helpful source in Mueller’s attempt to find out how far the conspiracy went inside the campaign. Did peripheral campaign figures such as Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi conspire with the Russians over the Clinton campaign’s emails on their own? Or did they have intimate help from Trump himself, Jared Kushner, or Trump Jr.? Manafort may have already provided the answer to these burning questions. While the extend of his help to Mueller is still unknown, Mueller’s offer of an originally generous plea deal to what could have been his most prominent target shows that Manafort’s cooperation was necessary for Mueller’s greater case.

The problem for Manafort is that his continued cooperation is not as essential to the Mueller investigation as either he or many pundits think. Pundits, drawing on the Richard Nixon precedent and that of earlier organized crime prosecutions, have fixated on the idea of Manafort as the star witness who could decide the future of the investigation. But Manafort would never be another Sammy “The Bull” Gravano or John Dean. The Mueller investigation is not attempting to jail one singular mob boss like John Gotti, and Manafort has never been as trustworthy a public servant as Dean was. At this point, Mueller is mainly attempting to uncover a criminal conspiracy made up primarily of foreign nationals, and then create a document laying out credible evidence for whether or not Donald Trump should be impeached. Manafort provided information needed to uncover that conspiracy within the first 24 hours of his cooperation. Having a well-known political operative on the witness stand was a perk, not an essential part of Manafort’s cooperation.

Manafort has also lost his usefulness for the Trump administration. Besides sheer hubris, the only clear reason for Manafort to turn on Mueller was to feed information about the investigation to Trump’s legal team. Giuliani bragged about this activity, stating that Manafort’s attorneys “shared with me what they thought was appropriate and what their client authorized them to tell us,” including specific questions that Mueller was investigating. But even that utility has evaporated over the past month. Once Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fired, his replacement, Matthew Whitaker, could give all of the information he wanted to his boss without repercussions. There is no chance that Mueller would have divulged information to the notoriously wily Manafort that he has not already discussed with Whitaker as legally required.

The Mueller investigation is likely reaching its most active period. Mueller will soon begin issuing a new round of indictments and may be close to releasing a final, devastating report. The information from that report will influence political campaigns and debates for the rest of the Trump presidency. And all of these actions will occur without the influence or input of Paul Manafort. He may have once been a global powerbroker, but as he prepares to go to jail for the next decade or so, he has never been more irrelevant. A case that was once seen to hinge on his testimony will now leave him in the dust.