Robert Mueller has been authorized to [redacted] in the Trump-Russia probe
Paul Manafort tried the last ditch legal strategy of asking all charges against him to be dropped on the grounds that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t have the legal authority to investigate the kinds of crimes that Manafort has been charged with. His premise was that the charges don’t directly relate to the election plot between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia. Mueller responded today with new partially redacted court filings which reveal that he has in fact been given specific authority to investigate Manafort’s crimes – and a whole lot more.
It turns out that last August, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has final authority over the Mueller investigation, wrote a memo which gave Mueller the authority to investigate Manafort’s efforts at “colluding with Russian government officials.” This new revelation means that the judge will almost surely dismiss Manafort’s motion to have the charges dismissed. But that was probably going to happen anyway, with or without this memo. The real story here is that the memo was written to begin with, and what else it tells us.
The two page memo in question appears to be entirely about Paul Manafort. We say “appears” because nearly half the document has been redacted. In fact, in place of the usual black bars, the majority of the second page is simply a giant black rectangle. The only logical reason for these redactions would be that other Trump-Russia names are mentioned in relation to Manafort’s alleged crimes, and that Mueller doesn’t yet want to tip his hand with regard to his prosecution of those individuals.
The redacted portions can’t simply be about Manafort’s longtime business partner Rick Gates, who has already pleaded guilty. It has to be about other Trump-Russia figures; perhaps the likes of Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, just to pick two possibilities. But the real upshot here is that this can’t be the only memo of its type. If Rod Rosenstein wrote a memo authorizing him to investigate specific actions taken by Manafort, then he must have also written other memos authorizing Mueller to investigate specific actions by other Trump-Russia players as well. We won’t see those memos until Mueller is ready to make them public.
