The NPR Politics Podcast - Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort Goes To Trial

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort's trial begins Tuesday. It is the first case by Robert Mueller's special counsel to go before a jury and will test the strength of the probe. This episode: reporter Sarah McCammon, political editor Domenico Montanaro, and justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Allison Lyons with my dog Beans calling from the Trinity Trail in Fort Worth, Texas, where it's currently 103 degrees. We aren't sure what's hotter, the heat or the politics. This podcast was recorded at 1032 a.m. Eastern Time, Monday, July 30th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Hopefully the heat. Keep up with all of NPR's political coverage on NPR.org, on the NPR One app, and on your local public radio stations. I know that's what Beans does. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. Tomorrow, the trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort begins.

So we're here to explain what you need to know about it. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the White House. I'm Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. Now, this trial is tangled up in a web involving the Trump campaign, the Russia investigation, and Manafort's personal business dealings. So we should start by breaking it down, figure out what it's about, what it's not about. Carrie, you're our expert on this. Let's start with what Manafort is charged with, and we'll go back from there.

Yeah. Paul Manafort's facing something like 18 charges of tax fraud and bank fraud and failing to file certain reports with the government. It all relates to income he generated by doing some really lucrative work for the government of Ukraine, the pro-Russia government in Ukraine. And the Justice Department says when that work started to dry up, Manafort started to take action to borrow against real estate. And really, things went very south in terms of his finances. So mostly, this is a money in a paper document case involving Paul Manafort. And Carrie, these charges came up because of the Russia investigation, right? I mean, how did we get here? Yeah, Paul Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman for a critical period of time in 2016. And he had longstanding relationships with people in Russia

and people in Ukraine who had ties to Vladimir Putin and others in Russia. And so he, of course, came under the purview of the special counsel looking for links between Americans and Russians in 2016. Now, he's not charged with anything specifically related to Russian election interference, Russian hacking, or anything like that. But the thinking is that Paul Manafort could have a lot of useful connections and understanding of whether anyone in the campaign was talking with Russians on the QT during 2016. Yeah. I mean, there was some reporting around the campaign and around the time some of this was coming out about Manafort's lifestyle, right? I mean, he had managed to develop a

pretty lucrative, pretty nice lifestyle, and he had to support it somehow. Yeah. In fact, the Justice Department list of witnesses in this case includes somebody from the New York Yankees because Manafort had season tickets to the Yankees. There's going to be some testimony about his custom made suits, his real estate, Persian rugs that he bought, landscaping fees, luxury vehicles. This is going to be his lifestyle on trial. But apparently, according to the Justice Department, these were ill-gotten gains, stuff he should have paid tax on and did not. So, you know, Manafort was somebody who was the campaign chairman for a specific period of time to try to win enough delegates for Trump to win at the convention and was, you know, never seen as somebody who was like a deep Trump ally from before that, but certainly was essentially running the campaign for a really important period. The summer of 2016.

Summer of 2016. So the point of all this was supposed to be about Russia, but none of what you're talking about sounds anything like about Russia, right? Yeah. In fact, one of the prosecutors in this case, one of the guys who works for special counsel, Robert Mueller, Greg Andres, said, I don't anticipate that a government witness will utter the word Russia at this whole trial. But remember, Paul Manafort took this job for Donald Trump for free. He didn't take any money for it. And their question has been, what was he exactly doing working for Donald Trump for free? I don't think we're going to get answers to those questions in the course of this trial. But the government certainly wants to know. I think the government believes

that Paul Manafort has answers to questions about Russia, but he is not providing those answers. Instead, he is fighting these charges and going to court. Yeah, I mean, he's somebody who really revolutionized lobbying in a lot of ways in D.C. You know, he was a political operative back in the 80s, really. And so to see him sort of pop up out of the blue in 2016 with his, you know, pompadour and pinstripe suits, you were like, where, what period is this guy coming from? And then you start to see what he had been doing for all those years. Well, something we saw with the Trump campaign, remember, is that there were so many candidates in the primary, right? And so a lot of the sort of more experienced,

more professional, more sort of relevant at the time political operatives were working for people like Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz. They weren't working for Donald Trump. And so we saw, you know, the Trump campaign kind of picking up people, sometimes with less experience, and then people like Manafort, who are sort of a blast from the past. And the other thing I know from covering that campaign is that he wasn't the only person who wasn't getting paid. Sometimes the financial arrangement with the campaign, from sources I had, wasn't always clear. Sometimes it was based on a promise. And so clearly people thought they had something to gain by working for Donald Trump. The question is, what was that? Well, he spent a lot of time on CNN and other

news outlets, and certainly getting his name out there is one way that these guys can continue to drum up business and look like they're relevant again. But Carrie, I'm wondering, can you sort of lay out a little bit what this trial is going to look like? Who's expected to testify? You mentioned this Yankees guy, but I'm sure there's other more relevant people. And how long this might go? Sure. So this is being tried in a jurisdiction called the rocket docket. The rocket docket because it's supposed to move super fast. So courts never move super fast. But this one in Alexandria, Virginia, does actually move pretty quickly.

The judge in this case is a Reagan appointee. He likes to hear himself talk, Judge Ellis. But Judge Ellis has told the prospective jurors in this trial that it's going to last three weeks. He's already put pressure on both sides to limit their witnesses, not take up a lot of time and get people in and out. And so the government has put forward a list of something like 35 witnesses. They include people who have had real estate dealings with Manafort, people who have known him through the clothing business and his rugs and all these other purchases that he

made. And we expect the star witness, though, to be Rick Gates. Remember, Rick Gates was Paul Manafort's business partner and Rick Gates was the deputy chairman of the Trump campaign. Rick Gates was charged alongside Paul Manafort for all these financial offenses. But after months of fighting, Rick Gates decided to plead guilty. And he's cooperating with the special counsel team and is likely to be the star witness against his former boss and mentor, Paul Manafort. That's going to be a pretty dramatic moment. Does that three-week timeline, does that tell us anything, Carrie? Do they think they have an open and shut case? Or is that just simply the rocket docket, how it works? Well, this is mostly a paper case, right? It's about

money and finances and whether or not you filed reports with the government you're supposed to have filed. And so those cases shouldn't take that long to do. In fact, you're going to lose the attention of the jury if you take too long. And in fact, a sure sign of trouble in my 20 years of experience covering courts is that if the prosecution cannot streamline its case into one or two weeks in a case like this, they got a problem. They can't tell the story. They're lost in their own story. Trials often are about a narrative, about selling a narrative to a jury. And the judge thinks that this narrative can be sold and delivered guilty or innocent in about three weeks. We'll see if that actually happens. All right. We're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about what this all means politically.

I'm Ophira Eisenberg. Join me on NPR's Ask Me Another as we challenge contestants and celebrities to nerdy word games, music parodies and ponderful trivia. Find us every week on the NPR One app and wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. And of course, this is all happening in the court system, but it has implications for politics. We're talking about Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager. And an election year. In an election year. What does it mean, Domenico? Well, I mean, if you think about it, we've got 99 days now until the midterms, right, until Election Day. And if we're looking at a three-week trial, as Carrie's laying out, that's 21 days. You know, whether or not there's any pad in that, we'll see. But that's roughly around the time of Labor Day when a lot of people really start paying attention to the midterms. So, you know, this being in the full spotlight for the rest of the summer, it's certainly going to

be something that President Trump is not going to be able to let go. Well, in fact, he's already been unable to let go this weekend. Wasn't he on Twitter constantly talking about Mueller and Manafort and everything else? He was. I mean, he was saying that there's no collusion. The Mueller investigation is a rigged witch hunt headed by 17, which he's now increased from 13 angry Democrats, as he likes to call it. He said, is Mueller ever going to release his conflicts of interest? He was asking, why is Mueller only appointing, quote, angry Democrats? And again, kind of going after the dossier and really all over the place. You know,

we could annotate those tweets and it would take us a few hours. He was he's certainly all over it. And you can guarantee he's going to be thinking about this this trial, which he's already said is not really related to the Russia investigation and just has to do with, you know with Manafort and his financial dealings and a guy who he barely knows. And he's tried to minimize, in previous tweets, Manafort's role in his campaign. And it is true that Manafort came in relatively late in the game. But as you noted, Domenico, he played an important role in a really critical time.

He was running the campaign. He was running the campaign as the general election campaign was heating up. It's hard to it's hard to overstate how important that is. This is, of course, not what Republicans want Trump to be focused on. We say again and again, they want him to be focused on the economy, on good news, on good headlines. But he cannot seem to help himself from talking about Russia. And even though Manafort's trial isn't directly linked to, you know, any allegations of Russia collusion or anything like that, it is going to keep this issue alive. Yeah. I mean, I did a story last week and talked to a couple of Republicans and Democrats

about what is this election about? Because usually this far into the election, you have a sense of one driving issue that's driving everything. And one Republican said, frankly, it's about volatility. We just don't know. It's really volatile. And that makes them nervous because they thought they could run on tax cuts. That's not really something they're running on. And it makes things really difficult. And when you look at the president's tweets over the weekend, talking about the Mueller investigation, talking about potentially shutting down the government over immigration and boy, talk about the volatility that we could see over the next, you know, not just 21 days, but, you know, 99. It's unlike anything we've ever seen.

Well, one of the things I'm worried about in terms of volatility is this courthouse in Virginia does not allow you to bring in your phones or your laptop. So I'm going to be in a black box for like eight or 10 hours a day. And heaven only knows what's going to go on outside, not just on Twitter. But remember, the special counsel team, Robert Mueller's special counsel team, is continuing to investigate. We know they've been hearing from witnesses in the grand jury in D.C. with respect to Roger Stone, who denies any wrongdoing. But Roger Stone, the political operative who may have had some dealings with other folks about a release of Hillary Clinton campaign emails and the like.

Also a close former associate of Manafort's. Absolutely. A former business partner, Paul Manafort. And we know a number of other irons are in the fire with respect to this investigation. So it may be that someone's going to have to run into the courthouse and drag me out to go cover something else. You just never know what might happen. I don't know, Carrie. Can I be in that black box hidden away from the news cycle? It sounds good, doesn't it?

Mueller's silence has to really be irritating Trump because he sort of likes to be able to prod people and then have a fight back and forth, which is kind of what you've seen with Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen over the past week, which, you know, of course, also revolves around that Russia probe.

But separately, because it's also Cohen that they're looking at that could broaden into the Trump organization, because that's the Southern District of New York taking that up. Right. Yeah. What we're seeing is kind of a we've seen kind of a proxy war right between, you know, Giuliani on behalf of Trump and Lanny Davis on behalf of Cohen over the tapes that came out.

And all of it seems to be irritating the president. He's tweeting about this stuff. And it's hard to imagine that with the Manafort trial in the news, he's not going to be continuing to feel that irritation. And or at least we'll probably hear more from him right in the days to come as this is in the news. Well, you know, listen, Michael Cohen, his new lawyer, Lanny Davis, a former Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton operative from the 90s, and Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump are people who like to be part of the circus. You know who doesn't like to be part of the circus? The Republican former FBI director and special counsel Bob Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who supervises him. I happened to be at the Justice Department last week as Republicans in the House Freedom Caucus were trying to impeach Rod Rosenstein, went nowhere. Rosenstein walked by the press room, big smile on his face. These guys are sticking to their knitting. They're doing their jobs and they're not going to get in Twitter wars or go on cable TV news outlets all weekend long beating up on the president or Paul Manafort or anybody they're doing their talking in court where it may matter most. So obviously, this is all interesting. You know, Manafort's a former Trump associate. But I mean,

he's not working for Trump anymore. This isn't directly tied to the Russia matter. I mean, does this matter? Why should we care? It does matter. This is the first trial. This is the first person to go to trial who's been charged by the special counsel. Remember, the president and his allies have been deriding this investigation as a witch hunt, baseless and the like. Well, somebody now is facing charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life. That's serious. Another thing that's serious is this. The judge in this case in Virginia, Judge Ellis, basically said weeks and weeks ago before the jury selection process began that the only reason the special counsel has charged Paul Manafort is because the special counsel wants something else out of Paul Manafort, Remember, Paul Manafort was at the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016, where members of the Trump family like Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner were seeking dirt on Hillary Clinton, Trump's political opponent. Paul Manafort saw and heard a lot

of things. Paul Manafort has deep ties to people in Russia, oligarchs in Russia, and the prosecutors seem to believe, the judge said, that Paul Manafort has useful information on the Russia-Trump campaign interaction. And so the question is, why isn't he giving it up? And he's not giving it up. Paul Manafort's people have told me over the months that he doesn't actually have any useful information on Russia. But the government seems to think he does. I mean, every time I talk to Manafort, and it's been months since I have, he has steadfastly insisted that he had, that there's nothing to this. I mean, that's the position you would take regardless, right? But

that has been his position. Does he have any chance left to flip and go against the president? Or is this now we're into trial mode and there's no chance? There is always a chance. I see no, as somebody who's observed him in court for many, many, many months, I see no public sign that he wants to do a deal with the government. In fact, he seems to be somewhat put out by his former business partner and mentee, Rick Gates, taking the opposite approach and getting ready to testify against him. That said, if he really does have something the government wants and only he can deliver it, either about that Trump Tower meeting or something else, there's always a chance to make a deal.

Remember, this is not his only shot. He's going to trial on separate but related charges in Washington, D.C. in September. So we got a couple of more bites at this apple. Do we have any idea potentially what kind of sentence he'd be facing? So Paul Manafort's 69 years old. In the Virginia case, which is going first, if he's convicted, he could face something like 8, 10, 12 years. In D.C., even more years. He's 69 years old.

This is really if he's convicted and those charges are upheld on appeal, he could be facing the rest of his life in prison. Remember, Paul Manafort has been locked up since mid-June when authorities accused him of trying to tamper with witnesses after he was already in legal jeopardy. So this guy's already been seen in court wearing a prison jumpsuit. This is not the kind of life he expected for himself at this late stage in his life. And what's at stake for Bob Mueller in the outcome of this trial? Well, there is this issue of public confidence in him. Domenico has been doing polling and talking with folks, as have you, Sarah, about whether actual voters care about this and whether people have confidence in this investigation.

Certainly the president doesn't and his allies on Capitol Hill don't. But getting a conviction of an American, I think, is a significant step in this investigation, if it happens. In a court of law, you know, when you've had basically at this point, up to this point, a public relations battle. So finally, we're moving away from the court of public opinion and into an actual court of law. Which is where I like to be. Thank you very much. And where you will be this week. And we will be watching for your coverage, Carrie. Thanks. All right. That's a wrap for today. and we will be watching for your coverage, Carrie. Thanks. All right, that's a wrap for today, but we'll be back in your feed as soon as there's news you need to know about. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the White House.

I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Domenico Mazzanaro, political editor. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.