Did the Special Counsel Mueller Set Manafort/Trump Up?

As Donald Trump increasingly appears to be committing obstruction of justice in plain view by dangling a possible pardon before Paul Manafort and likely lying in his written responses to special prosecutor Robert Mueller, some are speculating that Mueller may have planned to allow Trump and Manafort to figuratively hang themselves.  Trump is incapable of telling the truth and thinks (i) he's smarter than anyone else and (ii) thinks he's above the law.  Combine this with Manaforts sleazy history and it's a recipe for obstruction charges - not to mention additional charges against Manafort for lying to the FBI.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at whether Mueller set this trap or if it's the natural result of two despicable and utterly dishonest men, i.e., Trump and Manafort.  Here are excerpts:

It is the kind of fine print to which lawyers devote many billable hours crafting and reviewing. Rick Gates’s plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller includes this line: “The defendant agrees not to reveal his cooperation, or any information derived therefrom, to any third party without prior consent of the Office.” The language of Paul Manafort’s cooperation deal is almost identical—with the exception of that sentence about disclosing information to third parties. “The absence of that gag order is not an oversight,” says Katya Jestin, a former federal prosecutor. “This could be part of a larger strategic play by Mueller. Which gives this a John le Carré aspect.” 

On Monday, Mueller went to court to take the rare step of invalidating a plea deal, accusing Manafort of lying after agreeing to cooperate with the government; Manafort maintains that he told the special counsel the truth. The stunning collapse of Manafort’s deal raises a bigger and more intriguing question: who created that loophole about talking to third parties, and is it part of a sophisticated game Mueller is playing? Or did President Donald Trump just blunder into incriminating himself? The greatest likelihood is that the special counsel agreed to leave out the prohibition on talking to third parties because Manafort had little rational incentive for doing so—and could be punished for bad behavior. Indeed, Mueller is now asking the court to sentence Manafort immediately, and will probably ask for a longer prison term. Yet Mueller’s team has always thought strategically about how to deal with Trump—for instance, farming out portions of the investigation to other jurisdictions who couldn’t be shut down by [Trump] the president. Did they agree to omit the third-party clause as a way to test Manafort and Trump? The tantalizing possibility is that Trump, basing his answers on what he was hearing from Manafort, lied in those written answers and has now stumbled into strengthening the obstruction of justice case against him. “Mueller built the plea agreement to permit Kevin Downing to continue to share information with Rudy Giuliani,” says Marcy Wheeler, a national security expert who blogs under the name Emptywheel. “So in the eventuality Manafort lied and Mueller didn’t tell them what evidence they had that he was lying, then that would in a sense be negative reinforcement for Trump. He would think that he was going to get away with it, just like Manafort was.” “Andrew Weissmann is a chess player, for sure,” says Jestin, who is a former colleague of Weissmann, Mueller’s top adjutant. “So maybe that was lurking in the back of their minds: ‘Manafort doesn’t want a gag order? Fine. Let’s not give them a gag order. If they screw up, they’re facing potential obstruction.’ Sam Buell worked alongside Weissmann in 2003, constructing the government’s case against Enron. “Why was it left out of the agreement? They are so darn careful, it had to have been deliberate,” Buell says. “I’m at a loss. But nobody wants to create obstruction, especially a careful, by-the-book guy like Mueller. Obstruction is bad from the prosecutor’s standpoint. In an ideal world, you would like the president and the White House to be completely out of this: Shut up, sit on the sidelines, don’t meddle, let them do their job.”

We are a long way from an ideal world, though, and Trump is pathologically incapable of shutting up. If [Trump] the president and his former campaign manager colluded to try to deceive Mueller, Wheeler says, it’s clear where the blame belongs. “If these two men, Manafort and Trump, chose to continue to share notes through a period when they’re both being questioned by the special counsel,” she says, “and they don’t understand that Mueller isn’t telling either one of them how much evidence he has, that’s their own damn fault, not Mueller’s.”