John Dowd is said to have broached the topic to Manafort’s and Flynn’s lawyers last year.
By
Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.com Mar
28, 2018, 2:25pm EDT
As
special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators prepared charges against Paul
Manafort and Michael Flynn last year, President Donald Trump’s then-lawyer sent
the two men word that Trump might pardon them, according to a new report from
five New York Times journalists.
Yes
— if the Times report is right, a personal lawyer for the president of the
United States floated preemptive possible pardons in secret communications with
two of the president’s close associates. And this sure looks like an attempt to
prevent them from flipping and telling Mueller what they knew.
The
lawyer, John Dowd, who departed Trump’s legal team last week, denied to the
Times that he talked pardons, saying, “There were no discussions.” But the
Times’s sources claim that Dowd floated pardons to both Flynn’s lawyer Robert
Kelner and Manafort’s then-lawyer Reginald Brown before the two men were charged
last fall.
The
Times cites an anonymous person who claims that Dowd has spoken about the matter
in private:
Mr.
Dowd has said privately that he did not know why Mr. Flynn had accepted a plea,
according to one of the people. He said he had told Mr. Kelner that the
president had long believed that the case against Mr. Flynn was flimsy and was
prepared to pardon him, the person said.
No
pardons in the Russia probe have yet materialized. Flynn pleaded guilty to two
charges of making false statements to investigators last December and began
cooperating with Mueller’s team. Former Trump advisers George Papadopoulos and
Rick Gates have similarly flipped, as part of plea deals.
But
Manafort hasn’t, despite being hit with a plethora of tax, bank fraud, false
statements, and other charges in two different venues, with documentary evidence
that sure seems damning. “Given the nature of the charges against the defendant
and the apparent weight of the evidence against him, defendant faces the very
real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison,” Judge T.S. Ellis,
who is overseeing Manafort’s case in Virginia, said in court.
Read
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