Late last week, we may have gotten a sign that Paul Manafort—or should we say, Pavel Manafort or Pasha Manafort—knows he isn’t getting a pardon from Trump. It turns out that he was a licensed attorney in his home state of Connecticut. That is, until Thursday, when he surrendered that license rather than face all-but-certain disbarment.
Rather than face a disbarment hearing in his native Connecticut, beleaguered Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has resigned his law license.
In a Superior Court filing in Hartford Wednesday, the jailed Trump associate effectively forfeited in a misconduct case against him and waived his right to be readmitted to the Connecticut bar.
A law panel had been scheduled to hear a misconduct complaint Feb. 7 against Manafort.
As it turns out, the chain of events that led to Manafort throwing in the towel were set in motion six months before the start of Mueller time, when Resistance Committee Action Fund executive director J. Whitfield Larrabee filed a complaint with the Connecticut Bar contending that Manafort’s misdeeds made him unfit to practice law.
Read the complaint here. Larrabee, who is a practicing attorney in the Boston area, has filed similar motions against Trump cronies like Jeff Sessions and Pam Bondi.
Larrabee made clear that he was pushing this motion in the event Trump was foolish enough to pardon Manafort.
As I note at RDTDaily, Manafort would have been hard-pressed to mount a credible defense at that hearing. After all, if you read Larrabee’s complaint, many of his claims track very closely with the superseding criminal information Mueller issued when Manafort pleaded guilty in September. With his guilty plea, Manafort tacitly accepted the timeline set forth in the information—thus admitting that he committed numerous crimes while working on behalf of pro-Russian interests. He could have thus been legally prevented from contesting many of Larrabee’s assertions—or, as the lawyers here put it, he would have been estopped from doing so.
Combined with the fact that Manafort’s plea deal is effectively pardon proof, it’s hard not to see that Manafort realized he was screwed eighty ways to Sunday. It’s not hard to conclude that Paulie/Pavel/Pasha has realized that he is likely going to be a decrepit old man if he ever gets out of prison.