Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the former ethics chief for President Obama, Norm Eisen, said today that he believes that the testimony of Paul Manafort will bring down President Trump.
Manafort and his legal team negotiated a plea bargain deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday on the eve of the former Trump campaign chairman’s second trial on a series of charges related to his work on behalf of the Ukranian government when it was headed by a Kremlin-friendly regime. Typically, plea deals are only offered when a defendant agrees to offer something of value to the prosecutors that advance their efforts in pursuing further paths in their overall investigation.
Manafort finally caved into the pressures of mounting legal costs and the idea of spending the rest of his life in prison after having been found guilty of eight charges of tax and bank fraud in his first trial earlier this month. He apparently had enough valuable info to offer Mueller that the Special Counsel found it worthwhile to trade leniency for his cooperation in the investigation into Russian collusion with the Trump campaign and any subsequent obstruction of justice that took place in its wake.
Sponsored Links
Eisen says that Manafort’s plea deal will be catastrophic for the president.
“He’s not going to survive Manafort’s testimony,” he told ABC’s This Week. “I think there’s a substantial possibility that this evidence that Manafort is offering will implicate somebody up the chain,” Eisen added. “Who is up the chain from Paul Manafort, who was the chair of the Trump campaign?”
Eisen dismissed the idea that Trump could solve any potential problems the cooperation deal with Mueller could cause him by simply pardoning Mueller now.
Sponsored Links
“The pardon will only … hurt Trump,” Eisen said. “It will only dig the hole deeper.”
You can watch a video of the former Obama ethics chief, Norm Eisen, on ABC’s This Week in the clip below.
Former Obama chief ethics lawyer @NormEisen says he believes this is "not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning for Donald Trump."
"We have seen the new chapter. He's not going to survive Manafort's testimony," he adds https://t.co/Qtasc7GudN #ThisWeek pic.twitter.com/371R1yMmSm
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) September 16, 2018
Sponsored Links
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
