The Paul Manafort Dilemma

The Paul Manafort Dilemma

At this time, we can only speculate at what information Paul Manafort has on illegal activities of Russian oligarchs, Vladimir Putin, and, perhaps, Donald Trump and his family.

If he did decide to cooperate with Special Prosecutor Mueller and begin to “tell all,” he would face the prospect of retaliation on he and his family by some very powerful Russian interests. Placement in the Witness Protection Program would be a part of any plea agreement.

This program began decades ago by the US Marshals Service to protect Mafia informants who turned against their former bosses. Despite the wealth of the major Mafia families in the US and Italy, this program has worked well. There were only problems when some person in the program did something stupid to “blow his or her cover.”

When the War on Drugs began in earnest, lower-level drug dealers who wanted to testify against their former bosses were put into this program. Despite the billions of dollars in resources of the drug cartels, the Witness Protection Program continued to work well and protect those giving information against big cartel leaders.

Placing Paul Manafort and his immediate families in the Witness Protection Program would create giant challengers for the US Marshals Service. If Manafort starts to talk about Russian oligarchs or Putin, the full resources of the Russian government including hackers and intelligence agents will be utilized to find Manafort and his family and extract some horrible revenge. Could they crack the US government security apparatus? As the saying goes from the late 1950’s:

“That is the $64,000 question.”