example, stephen miller was pushing for a pardon for arpaio or in other instances a lot of trump s allies pushing for the scooter libby pardon such as joe digenova and almost joined his legal team, of course. one consideration. another, that the stakes are higher if the president were to pardon manafort for himself. legally. manafort, of course, is directly implicated in the investigation into trump s own campaign. he has exposure there. of course, the final thing is that pardoning manafort may be useless, because he may still be vulnerable to being prosecuted on a state level. there are a ton of things pushing back against the idea that trump will pardon manafort. that said i think manafort did go into his first trial expecting that the president would pardon him, because no one thought he would actually go to trial. i think he may still be expecting that going into this second trial which is why it s surprising he s decided to go through with it. that may change, of course, before se
to do with russian collusion. he s all but promised. look at his words and the verbiage used. pretty much dangled this in front of him. look what he said about cohen. looking for a good lawyer, don t call michael cohen, but when we get to paul manafort, this poor guy. such a victim. look how horribly they re treating him. i disagree a little. that he s a stand-up guy. exactly. this chapter of the trump presidency is clearly directed by martin scorsese, obviously. i disagree a little, because this is not a president who necessarily follows the advice of his counsel. right? he s demonstrated that a number of times. when you look at the defense, the trials they put on, didn t make much of a case there. kind of sat back. you saw manafort during the trial give rick gates, former partner, the stink eye the entire time. i m waiting on a pardon. i would put money on it. i ll buy you a drink back in d.c. if it doesn t happen. and what did we learn from the first trial, gentlemen, lookin
involve manafort i think it will, but there s a narrow window there where the president can still say, this is stuff unrelated to the campaign. this is stuff unrelated to collusion. i m not pardoning for personal gain or self-preservation. i m pardoning because paul manafort s been treated unfairly and has two trials, et cetera, et cetera. of course, paul manafort chose two trials. not the government. you can see how this can kind of play out a little. in the second trial in d.c., i can tell you. the first trial was in virginia. in the second trial i promise you there ain t going to be too many trump supporters on the jury pool. natasha. final point, the juror that s going around and making the news, the cable news rounds this week, who did serve on the manafort jury paula duncan, is arguably, like, a huge trump supporter and she said she stands by the president, knows this is unrelated to the mueller investigation but manafort is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
what did prosecutors learn? you ve written about, talked about how rick gates wasn t that effective of a witness for prosecutors to put forward. bearing that in mind, how does their strategy change looking ahead to the september 17th trial? re-evaluate rick gates a little built. he proved to be a worse witness than they expected. essential? told from the get-go, a documents case. how essential was it? how did they make the case themselves he was a couple things they really did sort of need rick gates to explain, but remember, they charged manafort for all of these crimes without rick gates cooperating. at some point they had a case without rick gates. and you know, it s easy to monday morning quarterback it at this point and i haven t been in that position, yes, a great documents case, but if i can get the right-hand man to narrate through the documents, much better. it wasn t clear to me he was narrating through the documents. he proved to be worse than they