The Daily - What’s Going On With Paul Manafort?

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

The special counsel’s office says that Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to investigators, even after agreeing to cooperate in the Russia inquiry. Meanwhile, The Guardian is reporting that Mr. Manafort met with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, in 2016 — a meeting the special counsel seems to know nothing about. Guest: Michael S. Schmidt, who has been covering the special counsel investigation for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. The special counsel's office says that Paul Manafort repeatedly lied, even after agreeing to cooperate in the Russia investigation. Meanwhile, The Guardian is reporting that Manafort met with Julian Assange in 2016, a meeting that the

special counsel seems to know nothing about. What's going on with Paul Manafort? It's Wednesday, November 28th. I think he genuinely doesn't know what you said. Yeah, no, I don't. What is the show? What is our reporting about? Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I'm going to try again. No, I heard it like, you know, it's the Paul Manafort show. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun.

Yeah, no, I'm serious. I'm a serious guy. I'm serious. Yeah, no, no, I know you are. Mike Schmidt, on Tuesday morning, what is our reporting on Paul Manafort. The last time we were concentrating on Paul Manafort was this summer when he accepted a plea agreement to cooperate with the special counsel's office because he was trying to reduce the amount of time

he would spend in prison. He's 69 years old. He faced up to 10 years in prison for a string of fraud charges that had been unearthed by the special counsel's investigation. And he was trying to show Mueller's office that he had something to offer, that he could help the investigation. As part of that process, he began meeting with investigators. Now, Manafort is in solitary confinement at a jail, but he would get pulled out and sit in a room with these prosecutors for Mueller and try and tell them everything that's gone on in the past few years, whether it was his contacts with Russians, what was going on inside the campaign. But what we learned on Monday was that Manafort, in that process, had lied to the investigators, at least in the investigators' eyes.

And Mueller's saying, hey, Manafort, we entered into a deal where you said you were going to help me and tell me the truth about everything you knew. You didn't hold up your end of the bargain. You lied to me. The deal's off. Now let's ask a judge to sentence you. And could that potentially lengthen Manafort's sentence? It's not going to help it.

And do we know what Manafort apparently lied about? What we do know is that when the special counsel's office put out this document that disclosed this, it did not say what he had specifically lied about. But what the special counsel's office did say was that they would be detailing that to the court in the future. So we expect to learn about that going forward as we get closer to the sentencing date. And why might Manafort be lying to the special counsel? It would seem that he has every incentive imaginable to cooperate. He's already been found guilty on all these counts of fraud, like you said.

He could be looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. He's already been found guilty on all these counts of fraud, like you said. He could be looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. He's a pretty old guy. So the better a witness he is to the special counsel, presumably the better his situation would be at the end of his process. So we don't know

why the special counsel's office believes he's not telling the truth. But let's come up with what the possibilities are. One, Paul Manafort's a guy that had lied before and continues to lie. And even though he's talking to Bob Mueller, doesn't want to tell the truth. Two, he simply doesn't remember specific things, has a different understanding of them than Mueller does, and they don't agree on that, and Mueller thinks that means he's lying. Three, whatever it is that

he would have to disclose, what could come of it is even worse than the fact that he may spend the rest of his life in prison. So his calculation being, if I disclose this piece of information, I'm pretty sure I will get caught lying, but the disclosure of it would be more damaging than me at 69 having to spend the rest of my life in prison. Fourth, he could be awaiting a pardon from the president. So as of Tuesday morning, does it seem like that's where you're focusing your reporting? What Manafort lied about and why he might have lied? Well, we started the day in that direction, trying to understand why it was that Mueller thought he lied.

And was there other factors going on? Was a pardon at play? Was there something larger here afoot, or was it simply a dispute? We were trying to answer that. But then... We begin with a new report that Paul Manafort, the president's former campaign chairman,

paid secret visits, multiple ones, to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Around 9.30, The Guardian moved a story about Manafort. They say that Paul Manafort held these secret talks with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015, and 2016. Of course, you know, that's in the time when he played a key role on the Trump campaign. Unclear why he went or what was discussed, but significant, no? Hugely significant. If those meetings happened, it's a very big deal

because WikiLeaks had been the ones to publish the stolen emails that the Russians had hacked from the Democratic National Committee and from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman. WikiLeaks tweeting out just as we were coming on the air here, Tom, that this is a total, I believe the phrase was fabrication that is destroying the Guardian's reputation. So WikiLeaks out with that tweet, which we can show you here, very strongly denying any of this took place.

So much more reporting to be done on that. strongly denying any of this took place. So much more reporting to be done on that. From the story, perhaps the most significant meeting was one that they said occurred in the spring of 2016 when Manafort was advising the campaign. And that was before the emails had been published and around the time that the Russians were taking them from the Democrats. So if you have Paul Manafort meeting with Julian Assange, who was the quarterback of getting the emails out just a few months before they're made public, it moves along our understanding of potential coordination that may have happened between the campaign and WikiLeaks. So then what are you thinking when you hear about this reporting by The Guardian?

What am I thinking? I'm thinking it looks like we've gotten beat on a story, a very significant story about potential collusion. very significant story about potential collusion. Look, we're at a stage in the Mueller-Trump story where we're sort of looking to see whether there is another shoe to drop. Is there more evidence that changes our understanding of whether there was collusion between the campaign and Russia and whether the president obstructed justice? So you're looking to see whether there is another big story here that moves the narrative forward or if we simply know as much as we're going to know about what happened. Right. And so this Guardian story would suggest that there are things that we still don't know that are very significant that make all of this bigger than what we know so far. Correct. So I imagine that the first thing you're trying to do on Tuesday morning after you read this Guardian story is try to confirm its reporting, right, to figure out if it confirmed, we came to believe that this is not something that Mueller knows about,

that this would be new information to Mueller. That's surprising. And either Mueller didn't know about it because there wasn't any intelligence that was passed back to the United States about it, Manafort didn't tell him about it. Or as Manafort said in a statement today, it didn't happen. So if this happened and Manafort didn't tell the special counsel, one of the possibilities,

and as you said, investigators in Washington don't seem to know about this, how would the Guardian have found out about this? I realize we don't often speculate on how news organizations get their reporting, but what are the other possible ways in which they could have learned about these meetings? It's clear from the story that they have some type of documentation

and or footage from inside the embassy. The story carries a Qito dateline from ecuador on it and the story has very specific information like the fact that manafort was wearing sandy colored chinos a cardigan and a light colored. Which suggests a kind of local knowledge and record from the Ecuadorian government. As a reader of the story, you would think that they have some type of information from within the embassy, from within the Ecuadorian government.

So might that explain why the special counsel investigation is unaware of this meeting, if it happened? Because presumably the special counsel is not looking into meetings at the ecuadorian embassy in london no i think you might be a little off on that because the united states government through the brits has the ecuadorian embassy under enormous amount of surveillance because Assange is a wanted man and the U.S. and the Brits and others want to know who's coming and going to meet with him, who's talking to him, what is he doing. It was from there that WikiLeaks was able to orchestrate

putting out the Russian emails. Right. So there is some belief that the United States understands sort of the depth and breadth of the folks who have come and gone in there in recent years. So I guess then the question becomes, how could the British government or its ally, the U.S. government, have missed an appearance by Paul Manafort to visit Julian Assange inside this embassy. Look, no surveillance is perfect.

Maybe he came in with a disguise. I don't know. You know, I think we have to be open to a lot of different possibilities here of what could have happened. But, Mike, The Guardian is reporting three separate trips to a very highly surveilled embassy, which suggests that either the British government or the U.S. government would pick up on one of them. Correct. It's super specific information,

which makes this story believable. But we're struggling to get it confirmed ourselves. That doesn't mean that it's not true. They may have a line into information that we'll never be able to get to. And then maybe the U.S. government itself somehow missed. Look, Mueller knows a ton more than we do and has turned over a lot of different rocks.

But to assume that he knows everything, I think is a bit short-sighted. So, Mike, if this is true, if Paul Manafort had these meetings with Julian Assange, it sort of feels like we're coming back to where we started this conversation, which is why Manafort wouldn't be entirely forthcoming or might even omit information from the special counsel

because of all the valuable information Manafort might provide to Mueller, a meeting with Assange, who has leaked all of this damaging information that helped undermine a U.S. presidential election involving Russia, would seem to be the most valuable and would provide the greatest benefit

to Mueller and therefore to Manafort when it comes to leniency in his sentence. So let's play this out. Is Paul Manafort sitting there trying to cooperate with Mueller's team to prove to them everything that he knows to help the investigation to spend less time in prison? Or is he doing that to sort of show face and in reality is laying on the brakes on certain information to hopefully get a pardon from the president? And we do not know the answer to that. But what do we know about the way Paul Manafort is thinking about the possibility of a pardon? What we do know is that there's been a lot of communication between Trump's lawyers and Manafort's lawyers in this period of time in which Manafort has been cooperating. There's essentially been this pipeline from one end to another, which has given the Trump team a good view into what Mueller is asking about and what Mueller is looking to

understand. I can see why the Trump lawyers would want that. What exactly does Manafort get out of sharing that much information with Trump's lawyers? We don't know, but Manafort has two potential masters. One of them is Mueller, who can go to court and say to a judge, you should give him a more lenient sentence. At the end of the day, that will knock some time off of Manafort's sentence, but he's still going to go to jail for many years. The other master is Trump, who's the only one who has the power to keep Manafort out of prison for the rest of his life.

I wonder, Mike, if this is now a potentially even bigger problem for the special counsel, which is that there's a world where cooperating witnesses in this investigation realize that their best option is to cooperate, but not all that well. To tell the truth, but not too much truth and hope to be pardoned by the president. Does that message, if it's absorbed by everyone in the investigation, totally undermine the special counsel investigation? It is the inherent tension of the Mueller story. The president, the head of the executive branch, who oversees the Justice Department and has the power to pardon is also under investigation. So how does the president navigate or use his powers even as his own conduct is under scrutiny?

It's highly unusual and presents challenges that no other type of criminal prosecution would have. Mike, thank you very much. Thanks for having me. I got a little distracted there. Rudy Giuliani tried to FaceTime me. Well, you should probably take the call. No, Maggie's good. Okay. On Tuesday evening, Rudy Giuliani, one of the president's personal lawyers,

acknowledged the Times reporting that Manafort's legal team has been regularly briefing the president's legal team on Manafort's discussions with the special counsel. Giuliani defended the arrangement as a source of valuable insight into the special counsel investigation and where it's headed. It also appears that Giuliani and other members of the president's legal team

used the information provided by Manafort's legal team in their public relations campaign against the Mueller investigation. The Times reports that the arrangement is a highly unusual one that inflamed tensions with lawyers for the special counsel when they discovered it after Manafort began cooperating with them two months ago. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know.

Let me first say that a minute ago I did call Senator Cindy Hatt Smith. And I, no, no, no. And I congratulated her defeated her Democratic opponent, Mike Espy, who was seeking to become the state's first Black senator since Reconstruction. This is just an unbelievable night. This has been an unbelievable campaign. But you know, God above is the reason we're here, and I'm going to give him glory every single day for it. No doubt. Hyde-Smith prevailed, despite widely condemned comments made during her campaign about her desire to attend a public hanging and to suppress voting among college students. I will work very hard, do my very best to make Mississippi very proud of your U.S. senator.

Her victory expands the Republican majority in the Senate, leaving it with 53 Republicans and 47 Democrats. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.