It's Manafort

Manfort's the one. I'm disappointed. Jared would have been so....special.

The indictment presents a strong case, as one might expect. Manafort and Rick Gates (his little buddy) are charged, primarily, with money laundering -- although the charges also include lying to investigators and not registering as a foreign agent. Well, it's about time someone was charged with that: I was beginning to think the Foreign Agents Registration Act had been rescinded.

Deliciously, Manafort and Gates are now required to forfeit all of their ill-gotten gains. This part of the indictment could get good. You see, I am not at all convinced that ALL of the laundered money went into a champagne-and-caviar lifestyle. What if some of it went to fund the campaign's dirtier tricks? After all, Manafort's former partner and (I recently learned) boyhood friend is Roger Stone, the King of the Dirty Tricksters.

This indictment could thus be a prelude.

Incidentally, this is an open indictment which means that more charges can be added. Also:

Use of the word "conspiracy" frequently is there to prevent Trump from pardoning, since he can't pardon co-conspirators

Edited for clarification:

Pardoning anyone who might have been a co-conspirator in misconduct involving Trump himself would much more plausibly be impeachable. If he pardons them, they can't plead the 5th. So, his lawyers would discourage him from doing so, if the co-conspirators can implicate him directly.

Can't pardon a co-conspirator? I'm not sure that this is the case. At any rate, one would have to prove that Trump was a co-conspirator.

While we're on the subject of Manafort, I'd like to reprint a section from that ten-piece investigation of Roger Stone that I keep telling everyone to read:

We might speak of a first state, those who hold public office, a second secret state, that of national security, and a third invisible state, belonging to no nation, whose interests are entirely its own, occasionally allied with representatives of the first and second states, or employing them as a convenient enemy, though this opposition reflect nothing of their actual political identity, which was somewhat apolitical, part of the third state. So you have the phenomenon of Ben Shapiro attacking Hillary Clinton over her support of the opposition in Ukraine, which he does at the bidding of Tony Podesta’s ECFMU, while Rick Davis advises John McCain, who also supports the Ukrainian opposition, while Davis and his partner, Paul Manafort, support Yanukovych. Viktor Yanukovych may well have seen this mix of voices in a similar manner as Noriega did, that the true state, the important state, is the third shadow state of political consultants and secret money, not the first state, which ultimately derives its power from the third, rather than the other way around. This is the most cynical and sinister reading of this mess of relationships, and I don’t know if I believe in it, but I consider it a possibility.

Within this same third state was Roger Stone, who’d later try to raise a few bucks by peddling a conspiracy story involving Lyndon Johnson, which based on his unpublished memoir, Stone didn’t even believe. It was a tale with Lyndon Johnson committing eight murders out of rancid political ambition, while Stone himself had worked for Volodymyr Lytvyn, who appeared to have been involved in a plot of far more substantial basis, which started with the killing of a reporter, and then resulted in Yuriy Kravchenko committing suicide by shooting himself twice in the head, while two other members of his ministry, also believed complicit in the plot, would suffer from devastating strokes within the same year, strokes which would kill both off338. Why invent a story, you might want to ask Roger Stone, when you could just write what you know? The story of Volodymyr Lytvyn and Georgiy Gongadze, or Paul Manafort getting mixed up with a front group for Pakistani intelligence, or who exactly gave $150 000 to set up Take Back Our Judiciary, that Florida group in the 2000 election, or whether there’s any link between a war continued in Angola and a war begun in Iraq over chemical weapons where the evidence turns out to be bunk and with the same woman from Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly involved in both cases, or whether the Libertarian Party in 2012 was taken over for the purpose of a vote split?

I really like this "three states" idea. Note the name-check of Tony Podesta, recently added to Mueller's probe. (A Podesta family Thanksgiving must be particularly uneasy.) But...what's all this about Paul Manafort getting involved with a front group for ISI? Tell me more!