A federal judge expressed skepticism about special counsel Robert Mueller’s wide-reaching probe Friday morning during a hearing related to charges Paul Manafort is facing in Virginia.
Robert Mueller’s team just had a really rough day in court
Judge T.S. Ellis III questioned whether Mueller had just charged Manafort to try to “get” President Trump.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
Judge T.S. Ellis III suggested that he suspected Mueller’s team only charged Manafort with 18 counts of bank fraud and other charges in Virginia as a way to “get” to President Donald Trump — and suggested Mueller shouldn’t have “unfettered power” to do that, NBC’s Ken Dilanian reports.
To recap: Manafort, who chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, has been indicted in two different venues — in Washington, DC, back in October, and on further charges in Virginia in February.
In Virginia, Mueller’s team has charged Manafort with five counts of filing false income tax returns, four counts of failing to report foreign bank and financial accounts, and nine counts of bank fraud or bank conspiracy, related to his handling of money he made doing work for Ukraine’s government.
This was a hearing in the Virginia case, for which the trial is currently scheduled to take place in July. Manafort has filed a motion to dismiss this indictment — arguing that Mueller overreached his mandate by charging him with crimes unrelated to Russian interference with the campaign.
Judge Ellis suggested Mueller’s team just wants Trump’s impeachment
When Manafort’s team made this same argument in court in DC, the presiding judge, Amy Berman Jackson, seemed skeptical. (She hasn’t yet ruled on the motion, though she did dismiss an accompanying civil suit filed by Manafort.)
But Manafort may have found a more receptive audience with Judge Ellis, in Virginia, a 77-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee.
“I don’t see what relation this indictment has with what the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” Ellis said, according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein. “What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”
Though Ellis didn’t issue a ruling, Brandi Buchman of Courthouse News reports that he asked to review an unredacted copy of a memo from last August, in which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized Mueller to investigate crimes related to Manafort’s Ukraine work. Mueller’s team revealed the memo’s existence in court filings, but the vast majority of it is redacted.
If Ellis does in fact end up dismissing Manafort’s Virginia indictment (and, for what it’s worth, many smart court reporters are skeptical that he ultimately will), it wouldn’t get Manafort completely out of the woods, as he’d still face charges in Washington. But it would be a dramatic defeat for Mueller, with major implications for his strategy as a whole — which, it seems, has relied heavily on bringing or threatening unrelated charges against Trump associates to try to get them to “flip.”
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