Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics

and the Trump presidency for the New Spectator USA website. I'm joined today by Paul Wood of the BBC

and we are going to be talking about Paul Manafort's plea deal. Paul has been quite excited talk

all day about Paul Manafort's plea. It seems he's come up with, come to some sort of deal with

his special prosecutors, and it's unclear exactly what the deal is, but of course there's a lot of

excited speculation that he's about to turn on Team Trump and put certainly the Trump administration, if not Trump himself, in more

trouble. How do you read it? We know very little at the moment. He's given up the fight,

certainly, but has he flipped? He's given up the fight because he's already facing years in jail from a previous

trial, millions of dollars to defend against these charges, and now the prosecution have said

they will accept guilty pleas to two of these charges and drop the other five. What he's pleading

guilty to is witness tampering, trying to get witnesses to say certain things, and conspiracy

against the United States, which although it's rather grand sounding, is about him diverting

money, income into offshore bank accounts in order to hide it from the US tax man.

And prosecution alleges he did that with at least $50 million of income relating to this charge

and there was other income tax evasion and money laundering charges in the last trial.

It is just possible, I suppose, that both sides in this trial have come to an agreement on the

very narrow issue of these charges. And that, I think, on its own, is a very bad blow for the White House

and for Donald Trump. He has maintained all of this is a witch hunt. There was never any basis to it.

And Paul Manafort was being victimised by the Justice Department because he'd managed

Donald Trump's campaign. Well, if Manafort is now standing up in court and saying, yes, I am guilty of these offences.

It's harder for Mr. Trump to maintain that it's all some kind of fantasy.

Mr. Trump's other main defence against all this is to say, I think correctly, that Paul Manafort was being prosecuted for things he did long before he joined the Trump campaign,

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