Mueller Tactics on Display in the Manafort Trial

Lost in all the reporting, let us try to remember the role of truth and justice in the rule of law and the Mueller investigation. The Manafort trial has laid bare and revealed a disturbing glimpse at Mueller tactics. Indemnification and flipping are short cuts used by prosecutors, tactics that explicitly trade off truth and justice in favor of results.

Instead of simply relying on trust and justice, these Mueller tactics resort to indemnifying witnesses in order to flip their testimony to achieve political results. In the Manafort trial, Gates is indemnified for the same crimes Manafort is charged with in order to obtain unbridled Gates’ testimony against Manafort. If trust and justice were the controlling ground rules, both would be charged and convicted of their crimes. Instead, with Gates indemnified, just Manafort faced conviction.

Jurors rightly asked for a clear voiced definition of beyond the shadow of a doubt. If I were a juror, I would distrust and disregard all testimony offered by Gates, a proven liar. It is not beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt for a juror to consider Gates’ testimony as unreliable and tainted by self-interest and extensive coaching and instructions from the prosecution.

In addition, the prosecution’s exhibits chosen to be incriminating should be considered selective entries designed to achieve the hoped for political results that come with a conviction. These exhibits have not been argued to be thoroughly complete and provably correct under all circumstances. Instead, they were self serving selections of the prosecution.

With the Mueller investigation and prosecution not focused on trust and justice and a limp and silent defense taking what it gets handed to it, the burden of seeking truth and justice falls only on the jury.

Considering all this, a juror might decide not to serve as a willing pawn. The willing pawn is expected to vote conviction on each of eighteen counts. The less willing pawn, the one that seeks truth and justice, might choose not to. In the Manafort case, there were willing pawns and one less willing pawn among the jurors as they returned convictions on eight counts of tax and bank fraud and no decision on ten others.