I'm kind of surprised Gates bailed on the deal, if he knew in some way Mueller had more of these charges filed away for this moment. Unless Mueller was offering something that involved jail time, or taking away something Gates viewed as personally valuable, all Gates has done from reneging on the deal has been making it more likely a court will find him guilty on something among all the money laundering and fraud he's getting accused of.
There may be only one reason Gates would back off: if he really thinks trump will come in and shut this all down. Scary consideration, which is the only reason why I don't put this in the Schadenfreude column yet.
Okay, time to make this a Schadenfreude article!
The deal is back on (via Vox.com)!
Special counsel Robert Mueller just flipped another former Trump staffer. Rick Gates — Paul Manafort’s longtime junior business partner and a 2016 Trump campaign aide — agreed to a plea deal in Mueller’s investigation Friday afternoon in which he’ll cooperate with the probe.
Gates pleaded to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to the FBI. In exchange, other charges related to money laundering, acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and making other false statements will be dropped. Here are his statement of offense and plea agreement.
Though Gates pleaded not guilty after he was first indicted last October, he’s increasingly been looking at an expensive legal defense with no end in sight and a potential decades-long prison sentence — particularly since Mueller filed a dizzying new set of tax, financial, and bank fraud charges against him and Manafort just yesterday.
It's like Gates was all "you must be bluffing, I can't take that deal" and Mueller was all "I don't bluff" and then Gates was all "yuh-huh" and Mueller was "here's 32 more counts on your ass" and Gates was then "oh shit" and...
The thing that stands out: Gates agreeing to plea out to a "Conspiracy Against the United States," something that the previous plea deals never had (nearly everyone else pleading out has gone with just "lying to the FBI"). The indictment seems to spell out that the actual charge involves Gates' lied to the government about his foreign business deals... but the word "conspiracy" itself implies that "more than one person was involved in breaking this particular law". Just how many other people were part of this conspiracy?
It's nice to see the word pop up in this investigation. So far, the word of choice had been calling everything trump and Russia did together as "Collusion", which is suspicious but not criminal. "Conspiracy" is criminal, and we can now describe things happening here in trump-World as conspiracy.
The other thing that the Vox article points out, this is a major turning point in the Mueller investigation, because Gates is someone high enough in trump's 2016 campaign to be a key link to a lot of the questionable acts that have been alleged about them and Russia:
After all, Gates worked on the Trump campaign. And unlike cooperator George Papadopoulos, he actually had a high-level job there, which had him work quite closely with the person running the campaign for several months: Manafort.
For instance, there have been recent reports that Mueller is keenly interested in the White House’s story about the June 9, 2016, meeting Donald Trump Jr. arranged with a Russian lawyer in Trump Tower for the purpose of getting “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Gates wasn’t at that meeting — but Manafort was. And if anything inappropriate involving Russian interference with the campaign did happen there, one person Manafort just might tell could be his close friend and business partner of more than a decade, Rick Gates...
It's also important to note that Gates stayed with trump well after Manafort was kicked from the campaign when his own troubling issues went public. Gates can well flip on other trump campaigners on matters that Mueller is uncovering.
So all in all, fun times.
Until trump freaks out and makes another attempt to fire Mueller, or fires Rosenstein, or shuts down the entire FBI, or...
2 comments:
The way I heard the story is that Gates lied to the feds during his "proffer" interview, where you get limited immunity for the purpose of negotiating with prosecutors any kind of deal involving your cooperation being exchanged for more favorable terms in your own prosecution, but only for the duration of the interview.
It is stressed again and again prior to and during such interviews that you have to tell the truth, and you can't hide anything relevant, or they will charge you with all of the stuff you talked about (plus anything else they have on you) because they have to uphold the notion that lying to them will buy you a worse outcome than providing reliable information, which is what they are trying to get in the first place.
Anyway, he lied to them, and the next day his defense team quit, and a week later BAM! here come 32 more charges.
What I'm curious about is what made him decide to lie?
Everyone knows better than to lie to the FBI, and most know better than to even talk to them, as lying to them is a felony, and a competent agent can catch you in a lie if they want to.
So why risk it? What seemed worse to him and needed to be avoided more than felony charges?
Could it perhaps be concern over the reaction Deripaska might have should it seem like he rolled over on him? Further entanglements with other of Manafort's mob-connected oligarchs?
I find it difficult to believe he was too dim to understand what he was exposing himself to by lying, but maybe I'm wrong about that: he didn't seem to have any problems with the money laundering or mortgage fraud schemes he helped Manafort with, so who knows?
At this point, my money is on Mueller being the one who knows.
-Doug in Oakland
So why risk it? What seemed worse to him and needed to be avoided more than felony charges?
1) liars get into the habit of lying so often that they can't realize when they need to stop.
2) Gates must have thought the investigators didn't know what they knew, so he thought he wouldn't get caught (the "bluffing" mindset).
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