Paul Manafort Keeps Admitting to Stuff On Monitored Prison Calls
Things aren't going great for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's one-time campaign manager who's doing his best to make Michael Cohen look competent. Manafort is one of the highest-profile indictments so far in Robert Mueller's on-going probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and his lawyers have been working on two things lately: delaying his upcoming July 25 trial, and getting Manafort moved to another facility because the one he's currently in is too far for him and his lawyers to coordinate. As CNN reports, it looked like he was going to get what he wanted:
For weeks, Manafort has implored judges to alleviate the distance between him and his lawyers while he's at Northern Neck Regional Jail, about two hours outside Washington. On Tuesday, federal Judge T.S. Ellis stepped in to move Manafort to an Alexandria, Virginia, detention center so he "has access to his counsel and can adequately prepare his defense."
Actually, Manafort decided, never mind. On Tuesdays his attorneys told Ellis that he changed his mind about relocating, claiming that he feared for his safety among the other inmates. And that may well be true. But it turns out that Manafort has a lot of reasons for not wanting to leave: Apparently he's pretty comfortable where he is. He's got his own bathroom and shower, a personal telephone, and doesn´t even have to wear a prison jumpsuit. To use Manafort's own words, he's being treated like a "VIP."
We know those are his words because Manafort has been trying to delay his upcoming July 25 trial, and Mueller's team has filed its opposition to that motion--and in the footnotes in that opposition we learn that Manafort has described all of this in phone calls from prison. He's even explained how he's gotten around the prison's ban on sending and receiving emails:
Manafort has revealed on the monitored phone calls that in order to exchange emails, he reads and composes emails on a second laptop that is shuttled in and out of the facility by his team. When the team takes the laptop from the jail, it reconnects to the internet and Manafort’s emails are transmitted.
One of the fallacies that Trump leaned on during his campaign is the cliche that rich people become rich because they're smarter than everyone else (despite the fact that Trump's wealthy because he was born wealthy). If you ever need proof that it isn't true, just point to Manafort's constant bungling.
