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George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. He admitted to lying, specifically, about meetings in which he discussed potentially colluding with Russian agents to acquire Hillary Clinton’s private emails.

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What the Manafort and Papadopoulos indictments tell us about Mueller’s strategy

Monday’s big news revealed Mueller’s strategy: treat the Trump campaign like the mafia.

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/10/30/16570518...s-strategy

About two hours later, we learned that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. He admitted to lying, specifically, about meetings in which he discussed potentially colluding with Russian agents to acquire Hillary Clinton’s private emails.

Put together, the charges against the three men illustrate a clear pattern of using whatever charge you can stand up — even if it doesn’t directly relate to the Russian collusion — to build a case against anyone who was involved, with the ultimate goal of getting the lower-level people to testify against the bigger fish.

You’ve probably heard of this kind of approach in mob movies, but it’s also what real prosecutors do. Experts say that Mueller is adapting this playbook for the Russia investigation.

“The idea that he would go after the campaign manager of the Trump campaign is just extraordinary — it means he must have great confidence in the case against Manafort,” says Ryan Goodman, a former Department of Defense special counsel and editor of the legal publication Just Security.

“It does compare to prosecutions of organized crime, with respect to going after someone who is legally exposed … and trying to flip them if they have the kind of information that could really break open the case.”

There are obviously a huge number of different places the Mueller investigation could go from here.

But the Manafort and Papadopoulos cases suggest that targeting individuals and getting them to flip is going to be a key tactic going forward — and no one is more obviously vulnerable than Michael Flynn.

“It is a bad sign for Flynn,” Goodman says of today’s news.

Flynn’s alleged sins are similar to both Manafort’s and Papadopoulos’s. Like Manafort, he failed to fully disclose lobbying done on behalf of a foreign government (Turkey, specifically) last year. Though Flynn filed FARA paperwork retroactively announcing this work earlier this year, it’s not clear if that was complete or enough to protect him from charges.

What’s more, Flynn also took $45,000 from the Russian government in 2015 to appear at a dinner with Putin, but appears to have claimed that the money came from “US companies” on a security clearance form — which would constitute lying to federal investigators under US law.

The fact that Mueller’s team has already deployed both of these charges, unregistered lobbying and lying to federal investigators, means that Flynn is likely to face seriously scrutiny. “[Mueller] is taking substantive FARA violations very seriously and they’re taking false statements to FBI agents very seriously,” Wright says.

What’s more, Flynn is someone whom Mueller would almost certainly love to flip. Multiple reports from inside the Trump camp say that he and the president were personally close; Trump has tweeted support for Flynn repeatedly even after firing him from his post as national security adviser. Flynn also has longstanding ties to the Russian government; he was a regular on Russia Today, the country’s English-language propaganda outlet, for a long time.

Flynn’s own actions both render him vulnerable to the kind of pressure Mueller wants to use and mark him as someone who could very well have known about any collusion between Trump and Russia. It’s hard to imagine a juicier target for this clearly mounting investigation.

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