A Guide to Understanding the Manafort Indictment

What does George Papadopoulos’s guilty plea and the indictment of former Trump-campaign chairman Paul Manafort mean for the ‘collusion’ investigation?

For once, the Twitter speculation was mainly correct. When news broke Friday night that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had obtained an indictment, the smart money pegged former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

After all, the FBI had raided Manafort’s home and widespread reporting indicated that he had complex and lucrative dealings with pro-Russian leaders and entities in Ukraine. Today, Manafort and his business partner, Richard Gates, surrendered to federal authorities, and the special counsel’s office released its indictment. Hours later the special counsel’s office released a “statement of the offense” indicating that former Trump-campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos pled guilty to providing material false statements to the FBI.

Let’s use a question-and-answer format to walk through their scope, meaning, and implications.

First things first, does the Manafort indictment have anything to do with the Trump campaign? No, not on its face. The indictment relates to Manafort’s personal business dealings with the Ukrainian government, former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych, and a Ukrainian political party called the Party of Regions.

It remains to be seen whether Special Counsel Mueller will use this indictment as leverage to pressure Manafort to cooperate fully with his much broader investigation into whether there were “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of  President Donald Trump.”

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