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Will he flip?

Published by digby on October 30, 2017

Will he flip?
by digby

My column for Salon got spiked today because the Manafort indictment came down too early. Damn it. Anyway, here it is, even though we now know exactly who was indicted, it’s still at least a little bit relevant:

So, that was quite a week-end of excited speculation, wasn’t it? Everyone in the political world was like five year olds on Christmas eve, so frantic they couldn’t sleep waiting to see what presents they had under the tree. Santa,of course, is Special Counsel Robert Mueller whose Grand Jury CNN reported late on Friday night had returned at least one indictment in the Russia probe.

A federal grand jury in Washington on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter…

On Friday, top lawyers who are helping to lead the Mueller probe, including veteran prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, were seen entering the court room at the DC federal court where the grand jury meets to hear testimony in the Russia investigation.

Reporters present saw a flurry of activity at the grand jury room, but officials made no announcements.
Shortly after President Donald Trump abruptly fired then-FBI Director James Comey, Rosenstein appointed Mueller as special counsel. Mueller took the reins of a federal investigation that Comey first opened in July 2016 in the middle of the presidential campaign.

That announcement came at the end of a week that saw the Trump campaign go to Defcon 1 with their coordinated propaganda campaign to investigate Hillary Clinton’s “real Russia scandal” and somehow force Robert Mueller to resign or be fired. (You can read about it in my Friday column.) It seemed to be going quite well, with the mainstream media eagerly “asking questions” and the hysteria rapidly ratcheting up with multiple announcements of congressional investigations into Hillary Clinton and the Wall Street Journal editorial page demanding that Robert Mueller step down. Predictably, Democrats were beginning to break the line to start condemning Clinton, giving cover to Trump by helping them create a false competing narrative that she was the one who had colluded with Russia.

Fox News gamely kept campaigning through the week-end with Trump’s favorite host (after Hannity) Judge Jeanine Pirro letting it all hang out, proclaiming “It’s time, folks. It’s time to shut it down, turn the tables, and lock her up. That’s what I said. I actually said it. Lock her up.”

Trump himself let fly on Sunday morning with a barrage of tweets presumably aimed at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the congressional Republicans demanding that they “do something!”:

These tweets were so provocative that the president’s lawyer Ty Cobb was forced to make a statement declaring, “his tweets today are not, as some have asked, a reaction to anything involving the Special Counsel with whom the White House continues to cooperate.” Evidently there were some people who thought the president saying publicly that the investigation was a witch hunt and exhorting people to “do something” might fit the pattern of obstruction of justice that we’ve seen since the day he took office. Imagine that.

The president’s hysterical tweet storm and his lawyers attempts to dial it back notwithstanding, the right’s febrile excitement changed to anxiety almost instantly upon the news that indictments were coming down as soon as today. Everyone spent the week-end wondering who it might be. Experienced prosecutors expected that it was probably someone the prosecutors hoped to persuade to cooperate for a lesser charge and that could be anyone. Others speculated that it must be one of the big names — Flynn, Kushner or Manafort, the latter most likely because he had already been informed by the Special prosecutor’s office that they were seriously looking at indictment.

We will soon know the details. The New York Times and the Washington Post were unable to corroborate this story and the Mueller team have been totally tight lipped until now so it’s also possible that there are no indictments. But assuming that it’s true, one detail in the CNN story is worth taking a closer look at: “top lawyers who are helping to lead the Mueller probe, including veteran prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, were seen entering the court room at the DC federal court where the grand jury meets.” If Andrew Weissman was there is indicates that they are playing hardball regardless of who they have decided to indict.

As Betsy Woodruff of the Daily Beast reported last August, Weissman is a very, very hard charging prosecutor known for his “take-no-prisoners” approach to white collar crime. He was among those who prosecuted Enron and personally handled the Arthur Anderson case which resulted in the dissolution of the company. He indicted the whole enterprise for obstructing justice by destroying documents and won a conviction which was later overturned by the Supreme Court. Weissman argued later that the ruling would not hobble prosecutors from making similar obstruction charges because the congress has subsequently passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, although there are some who believe that the case resulted in prosecutors pulling their punches in the wake of the financial crisis a few years later.

But Weissman also has another specialty. He has a particular talent for “flipping” witnesses, which he honed in the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office prosecuting organized crime with colleague George Stamboulidis. According to Reuters:

In 1997, he and trial partner George Stamboulidis brought down one of the country’s most powerful mob bosses, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, with the help of turncoat witnesses.

“We cut our teeth in the organized crime section,” said Stamboulidis, now in private practice. “And the only way you can make those cases is to get people to cooperate, even when the oath of Omerta (a Mafia code of silence and non-cooperation with authorities) was strong and in full play.”

How that talent might be used in this Russia probe is anyone’s guess, but we know already that a number of the players are implicated in money laundering and various financial crimes that may or may not be linked to Russia. If one wanted to “flip” someone to gain cooperation in understanding a larger conspiracy, this is the sort of crime an aggressive prosecutor would use as leverage. For what it’s worth, Woodruff reported that federal prosecutors who had worked with Weissman in the past believed that the early morning raid on Manafort’s condo had his name written all over it.

In any case, Weissman’s presence in the courthouse on Friday does indicate that something important went down. He maintains a reputation for being a decisive, focused prosecutor who moves fast and with the Republicans getting progressively more hysterical by the day, Mueller may believe he’s the best man to get this investigation to the next level quickly.

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