Dropping Paul Manafort as a cooperating witness ruins his credibility as far as anything he told Mueller and any testimony he may be forced to give with respect to that.  The lies Mueller is alleging are almost certainly an exercise of Mueller’s specialty, the “perjury trap” he is trying to set for President Trump.  It must be assumed the Special Counsel has proof of Manafort’s lies.

Manafort’s defense team has been working with the president’s lawyers since the inception of his plea agreement.  The president’s attorney, Rudolph Giuliani, has admitted as much.  Mueller is trying to prove collusion between Trump and Manafort with respect to the written answers the president submitted last week in response to Mueller’s questions.  If any of Trump’s answers to Mueller’s questions include even one of the same lies as Manafort, it would not only be perjury but the “high crime” the incoming Democratic House majority will use to initiate Articles of Impeachment.

It doesn’t even have to be a big lie — saying he didn’t know of the Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskya (who coincidentally, had ties to Fusion GPS, having dined with Glenn Simpson both before and after the meeting), when Mueller has evidence he did, would be enough for Mueller to ruin Trump’s presidency. The Russia Hoax: The I... Jarrett, Gregg Best Price: $1.26 Buy New $7.01 (as of 04:10 UTC - Details)

So, denying foreknowledge of a meeting that was not illegal and certainly didn’t rise to the things Hillary and company did with the Steele Dossier may be insignificant, but it still would be a false statement.

That’s how Mueller got General Michael Flynn, who related a conversation he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that differed from the recordings Mueller had of the meeting.  The meeting would be a legitimate task for an incoming national security advisor and even though interviewing FBI agents didn’t think he was lying and merely misspoke or misremembered, the inconsistency was used to indict him.  Mueller knew what was said because he had recordings of the conversation.  In other words, it was a perjury trap.  That’s not even mentioning that acting Attorney General Sally Yates opened the investigation of Flynn under the pretense that he violated the Logan Act, a 1799 piece of legislation widely believed unconstitutional and never used to prosecute anyone in the more than two-century interregnum.

And that’s how he got George Papadopoulos as well.  He told investigators that a conversation about Russia with suspected CIA spy Joseph Mifsud, an academic and Russia expert, happened before he was associated with the Trump campaign.

Ship of Fools: How a S... Carlson, Tucker Check Amazon for Pricing. Papadopoulos, who was named as a foreign policy advisor for the Trump Campaign on March 19, 2016, met with Mifsud on March 15, 2016.  His crime is not telling investigators that on March 10 he already knew of his imminent appointment.  This resulted in a sentence of 14 days in jail for George even though Mueller asked the court for a much longer sentence because Papadopoulos gave him nothing to implicate the president.

It’s what he’s trying to do to Jerome Corsi also, a septuagenarian who couldn’t remember forwarding an email.  Mueller had seized his computers and thus already knew he had forwarded the email.  Apparently, poor memory can result in jail time for Corsi even though there was nothing illegal about the email itself.

Mueller wanted to flip him, and according to Corsi, lie and say he was the conduit between Assange and Roger Stone (a Trump confidant) for stolen Hillary emails.  In doing so, Mueller was attempting to draw a line from Assange through Corsi to Stone and then to his real target, the president.

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