No longer can there be any doubt that Paul Manafort expects Donald Trump to pardon him — and that Trump has encouraged that expectation in a broad strategy to obstruct the Russia investigation over the past two years.
The signals emanating from Manafort’s legal team over the past few days could scarcely have been clearer. Moments after Judge Amy Berman Jackson extended Manafort’s federal prison time to seven and a half years, his lawyer, Kevin Downing, assured the assembled press outside the Washington courthouse that the judge’s sentence indicated there had been “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia. Downing uttered that false statement just minutes after Judge Jackson had scolded him in court for making exactly the same irrelevant remark following Manafort’s sentencing last week in Virginia.
As the judge said, those statements were intended not for the court but for the White House, echoing the president’s own favorite alibi. Coming from Manafort, through his legal mouthpiece, “no collusion” means “I didn’t tell Robert Mueller about any collusion.”