The end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's plea agreement with Paul Manafort on the grounds the Trump campaign chairman lied to investigators indicates to legal experts those falsehoods were large and substantive.
CNBC:
"It has to be a pretty big deal," said Stephanie Douglas, a 24-year FBI veteran and a former senior official in the bureau's national security branch. "It's not that he lied about the color of a jacket that he wore to a meeting."
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"He can't be used as a witness at a trial or in a criminal matter, but I think he can still provide information on the counterintelligence side," she said. That information could be useful if he discussed his interactions with intelligence or business officials overseas, she said.
Before joining Trump's campaign in March 2016, Manafort operated a global consulting business and worked for pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine, among others.
Mueller may also be able to use any information Manafort provided about reported dealings with Julian Assange. The Guardian reported that Manafort held secret talks with the WikiLeaks founder in the Ecuadorean embassy in London on multiple occasions between 2013 and 2016. WikiLeaks denied the report.
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"Manafort is either an incredibly stupid criminal or he's protecting some secret so big that he's willing to spend the rest of his life in jail to keep the world from discovering it," Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department spokesperson and a partner at the strategic communications firm Vianovo, wrote in a post on Twitter.
It is also possible that Manafort is angling for a presidential pardon, some experts said.
The president's attorney, Rudy Giuliani, suggested to NBC News on Tuesday that it was "conceivable" that "the special counsel in their zeal to get the president may be going too far."
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If Trump offers Manafort a pardon, Mueller has little legal recourse. The president has vast authority to issue pardons unilaterally for any reason. In an interview with the New York Daily News published Tuesday, Giuliani said that there had been no recent discussions about a potential pardon for Manafort. But he didn't rule out the possibility.
"Pardons are never really ruled out," he said.