The plea deal special counsel Robert Mueller granted to Paul Manafort on Friday appears built to be pardon-proof.

That doesn’t mean President Donald Trump won’t try to legally absolve Manafort anyway, a step the president has considered taking for months. But Friday‘s events mean Trump’s ability to contain the legal damage from his former campaign chairman is now severely limited.

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Two new factors appear to stymie the impact of a potential Trump pardon for Manafort.

The first is that Manafort is already talking. One obvious rationale for a pardon would be to reward Manafort for holding out against Mueller’s pressure for cooperation in building a case against the president or those close to him. But Manafort’s lead lawyer said Friday his client has already cooperated with Mueller’s team, and Friday’s plea agreement says that Manafort “shall cooperate fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly with the Government and other law enforcement authorities identified by the Government in any and all matters to which the Government deems the cooperation relevant.”

Even if Trump might have hoped to stop Manafort from singing, Friday’s plea suggests he has already reached the first chorus.

The pivotal questions Mueller’s lawyers want to ask — including about a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians attended by Manafort along with Donald Trump Jr. and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner — have likely already been asked and answered with Manafort’s testimony locked in.

“Mueller likely already has all of Manafort’s information,” former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara tweeted Friday. “You get the information before you offer the agreement.”

Some attorneys also believe the deal Mueller gave Manafort — accepting a guilty plea to just two of seven charges he was facing — signals that the former Trump campaign chief didn’t just agree to answer prosecutors’ questions but produced answers Mueller’s team found useful to some aspect of a case it is actively pursuing.

“It certainly seems like Manafort had to give up something to prosecutors,” Fordham law professor Jed Shugerman said. “One way or another, Manafort has given information significant enough to get a deal that would benefit him.”

Second, Mueller managed to get concessions from Manafort that limit the value of any pardon. Manafort admitted guilt on virtually all of the charges he faced in both Washington, D.C., and Virginia, including a slew of bank fraud charges. Each of those admissions could give state or local prosecutors a potential charge against Manafort that would survive even in the event of a Trump pardon, since he can pardon only federal offenses.

“By admitting to all of the facts in both indictments, the conviction is pardon proof in the sense that if Trump ever pardoned Manafort, a state attorney general could take Manafort’s admissions in the plea and use them to indict Manafort for state charges,” former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman said.

The steps Mueller’s lawyers have taken mean a pardon won’t likely be a particularly effective way of discouraging Manafort from offering Mueller whatever Manafort has that might be incriminating toward Trump, Trump Jr., Kushner or others.

However, if Trump wants to pardon out of mercy or spite, he will still have the power to do so. Such a move could immediately trigger Manafort’s release from jail and relieve him of the duty to turn over tens of millions of dollars in property and bank accounts to the government. State authorities may catch up with Manafort, but precisely how that will play out is uncertain.

Even wording a pardon to relieve Manafort of not just any federal prison sentence but also his agreed forfeitures of property and cash could be complicated.

“A full and unconditional pardon ought by rights cover any court-imposed penalty, but it would be advisable if it specifically addressed the financial penalties that have been levied. It may not be necessary but it would certainly be prudent,” said Margaret Love, who served as the Justice Department’s top pardon attorney under President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. “If this were my client, I would want this all nailed down right in the pardon document.”

Some observers believe Trump’s lawyers may consider a Manafort pardon such a bad idea that they would be unwilling to go to those lengths to craft one, particularly because Mueller and Democrats in Congress could see the move as obstruction of justice.

“I don’t think Trump has the legal skill to do it himself,” said Shugerman. “And if you’re [White House lawyers] Don McGahn or Emmett Flood, there’s a certain line you don’t want to cross.”

During a 35-minute presentation to U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson as Manafort sat listening nearby, prosecutor Andrew Weissmann seemed to highlight the mundane fact that the former Trump campaign chair had agreed he was guilty of the seven bank fraud charges the jury had deadlocked on in the Virginia case.

“There are other parts of the statement of offense that don’t relate to a plea of guilty here, but are admissions by the defendant to all of the remaining bank fraud counts on which the jury was hung in the Eastern District of Virginia,” Weissmann said. “They are set out in writing.”

Manafort’s agreement on that point could be critical to pursuing state cases against him if Trump grants a federal pardon. Many of the other charges against Manafort, like money laundering, were incorporated in the broad “conspiracy against the United States” charge he pleaded guilty to Friday. Because of laws in some states aimed at preventing state and federal prosecution for the same crimes, that wording might be enough to block some states from prosecuting him over those issues.

However, as Weissmann emphasized, Manafort’s admission to the bank fraud allegations was not part of any specific charges he pleaded guilty to Friday.

“It seems to preserve those charges and create an opportunity for future state prosecution,” Shugerman said. “It preserves Illinois, California, New York, Virginia as well as Florida as potential jurisdictions to go after him on state charges.”

Other uncertainties remain about a potential pardon. It might nullify Manafort’s obligation under the deal to cooperate with the feds, but a pardon could also make it easier to force him to testify in front of a grand jury since there would no longer be a threat of federal criminal prosecution. However, the state prosecution threat would likely still be viable. It’s unclear whether a federal judge would force Manafort to testify under those circumstances. It seems likely he would be required to testify, with the consequence for any state prosecution to be sorted out later.

It could also be tricky for Trump to block any forfeitures of property or money Manafort has agreed to. Experts say the forfeitures don’t usually kick in formally until a defendant is sentenced. Manafort’s sentencings could be months or years away. Language in Manafort’s plea documents seems to leave open the possibility that prosecutors could bring civil litigation to take the funds and property even if the criminal proceedings come to an abrupt end.

Some experts say Trump can use executive clemency to block that, too.

“The pardon power does in fact extend to any sort of penalty imposed by the government, civil or criminal. A lot of early cases involved pardons to release ships that had been forfeited in what we would now regard as civil process,” Love said.

But others say Trump’s authority to do that through clemency is less clear. He might have to order his Justice Department to abandon such an effort.

“Where the assets are subject to civil forfeiture, it’s not clear a pardon would immediately expunge that part of the plea,” Shugerman said. “We’re in uncharted territory. … There is no precedent for this.”

Another question is whether it’s ethical for prosecutors to try to structure a plea deal in a way that seems intended to frustrate the president’s constitutional power to issue pardons.

One prominent legal ethicist, New York University law professor Stephen Gillers, called such crafting “entirely appropriate.” He noted that the Supreme Court declared more than 80 years ago that prosecutors’ duty is to ensure “that guilt shall not escape nor innocence suffer.”

“I think Mueller can insist on sworn admissions that would establish a violation of state as well as federal law,” Gillers said. “It is important that the plea deal include conspiracy to launder money and lots of it, to the point of kleptomania. The charge is supported with abundant factual detail, which I think will make it very hard to suggest that Manafort is an innocent man.”

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this story.

Paul Manafort vowed he’d never flip on Donald Trump. After Manafort’s conviction in federal court last month in Virginia, the president declared he had “such respect for a brave man!” because his former campaign chairman hadn’t folded.

About three weeks later, Manafort broke.

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The longtime GOP operative, who pleaded guilty Friday in a Washington D.C. federal courtroom days before he was set to go on trial, is now the third close Trump associate to reverse course and throw himself at the mercy of government prosecutors.

The surprise twist provided further evidence of the overwhelming power of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, before which a growing roster of defendants are finding resistance to be futile.

While Mueller passed up the opportunity for a public trial that would bring to light more proof of wrongdoing, legal experts say Manafort’s plea agreement contained important new details that continue what has been a public education campaign of sorts by the special counsel.

“The Mueller team is the A team, for real,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a senior fellow at the nonprofit R Street Institute and a former senior counsel to independent counsel Kenneth Starr. “And they are using a series of speaking indictments to, in effect, file their final report.”

Friday’s legal action also provided a new window into the size and scope of Mueller’s investigation, underscoring the sheer legal firepower at the former FBI director’s command.

More than 20 members of the special counsel’s investigation team appeared in the second-floor courtroom Friday morning, where lead prosecutors Andrew Weissmann, Greg Andres and Brandon Van Grack were joined by a phalanx of FBI and IRS agents who did significant grunt work preparing for Manafort’s trial on charges of failing to register as a lobbyist for the government of Ukraine several years ago, before he joined Trump’s 2016 campaign.

It was to be Manafort’s second trial at the hands of Mueller, who last month won the former lobbyist-consultant’s conviction on eight felony counts of tax and bank fraud.

Mueller has also played a role in convincing two other Trump loyalists, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, to turn against a president they had previously vowed to protect.

In court Friday, Weissmann seemed to relish summarizing the rap sheet against Manafort. The longtime federal prosecutor, who has tried mafia dons and Enron executives, spent more than 30 minutes listing for a judge all the charges that Manafort initially fought but pleaded guilty to, from tampering with witnesses to failing to register his lobbying on behalf of Ukraine’s government during the Obama administration.

After he was done, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson joked that Weissmann had just given “probably the longest and most detailed summary” of charges she had heard in a plea hearing.

But in the absence of a trial, the presentation served to create a clear if less thorough public record of the wrongdoing Mueller’s team found.

The charges to which Manafort pleaded guilty do not involve Trump or his 2016 campaign. But the agreement does require Manafort to cooperate with prosecutors as they continue probing whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

Manafort chaired Trump’s campaign during several moments central to the special counsel’s probe, including the public release of Democratic emails that U.S. intelligence officials say were hacked by Russians, and an infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Manafort also boasts a longtime relationship to a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Oleg Deripaska, whom he offered to give private campaign briefings during the 2016 campaign. Mueller’s office has said that Manafort’s intermediary to Deripaska, Konstantin Kilimnik, who also served as the lobbyist’s right–hand man in Ukraine, has ties to Russian intelligence.

Kilimnik, who is believed to be in Russia, was to be a co-defendant in the trial. He is not known to have spoken to Mueller’s team.

The past several weeks revealed the breadth of Mueller’s work in other ways. More than a dozen witnesses during Manafort’s trial in Virginia acknowledged receiving subpoenas from the special counsel, demanding everything from television advertisement scripts to an invoice for a Mercedes Benz.

Mueller also demonstrated that he can tap at will into other federal law enforcement branches and their deep bench of experienced investigators when he needs specific kinds of help.

One has been Michael Welch, an IRS special agent whose has spent 25 years leading investigations into tax cheats. Two others are FBI forensic accountant Morgan Magionos and Paula Liss, a Treasury Department expert in fraud and money laundering. Both testified in the Virginia trial about how the Mueller team relied on their expertise to sift through millions of dollars in payments from secret foreign bank accounts.

The FBI is anchoring Mueller’s probe in other vital ways too. About 14 agents raided Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, condominium last summer to procure the financial documents and emails so central to the government charges. Special agents also went to the homes of bank executives who did business with Manafort for interviews. One of the contractors who did millions of dollars of work on Manafort’s homes described during last month’s trial meeting “for several hours with a very pleasant young lady from the FBI who went step by step, invoice by invoice, over detail of each invoice, matching it with each payment.”

Mueller’s thoroughness has upended the defense plans for other Trump loyalists. Lawyers for Flynn had maintained regular contact with the president’s attorneys until late November 2017, just a week before the former Trump national security adviser pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s prosecutors rather than face trial for lying to the FBI.

Mueller’s investigators also sicced federal prosecutors in New York on Cohen, whose guilty plea last month – on the same day as Manafort’s conviction in Virginia — rocked the president’s inner circle. Even after the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room in April, Trump spoke by phone with his longtime fixer, who once said he’d take a bullet for the president. Rudy Giuliani, a personal attorney to Trump, didn’t signal until mid-May that Cohen was no longer representing Trump.

Those cases and others are earning Mueller’s team new praise as the latest cooperation agreement sinks in.

“The Manafort plea confirms what many observers knew from the outset — that Mueller had assembled a superb team of professional prosecutors who could track through complex financial transactions and figure out whether federal crimes have been committed,” said Philip Lacovara, an attorney who served on the Watergate special counsel team.

“The track record of convictions demonstrates that Mueller is systematically building his cases and charging only persons who have been caught dead to rights,” he added. “Manafort’s belated capitulation should signal anyone else charged by Mueller that there is little chance to escape.”

Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who attended Manafort’s Virginia trial, credited the Mueller team with securing the guilty plea and Manafort’s cooperation by redrafting their indictment against him to encompass all his misconduct in a single conspiracy against the U.S. charge while dismissing the remaining counts.

“This accomplished two goals — requiring him to admit to all of his criminal conduct while at the same time reducing his potential sentencing exposure because of the five-year statutory maximum for that count to provide an incentive to plead guilty,” she said.

Duke University law professor Samuel Buell, another federal prosecutor, said he’s most impressed by the Mueller team’s “incredible discipline with which they have been able to tune out and seal off everything around them and just do what federal prosecutors and FBI agents do.”

“So far, it’s as if Trump and his political operation practically don’t exist for them,” added Buell, who worked with Weissmann to prosecute the Enron case. “What is happening to Mueller’s targets is the same thing that has happened to hundreds of others, for years and years, when faced with experienced, talented, determined, and patient prosecutors and agents.”

“In those circumstances, federal criminal law wins almost every time,” he added. “These prosecutors knew that going in and they’ve kept their eyes on that ball.

President Donald Trump spent Friday confronting the deadly landfall of Hurricane Florence — only to have that disaster eclipsed by the revelation that his former campaign manager cut a cooperation deal with special counsel Robert Mueller and that a growing #MeToo crisis is surrounding his Supreme Court nominee.

The trifecta culminated a week of the president careening from one fiasco to another, before he had fully recovered from the publication of damning excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new White House account “Fear” and an op-ed published anonymously by The New York Times claiming that senior staff are working to undermine him.

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Trump drew criticism for double fist-pumping as he greeted supporters en route to a Sept. 11 memorial in Pennsylvania. He fumed at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz on Wednesday while defending his response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, amid replays of him tossing paper towels at storm victims during a visit to the island last year. On Thursday, he questioned the Maria death count, effectively minimizing the pain and suffering of millions of Americans with ties to the island — and undermining his own defense of his administration’s response.

The president remained out of sight and off Twitter for most of Friday, focusing on hurricane warnings, as aides inside the White House retrenched, telling themselves and one another that the president was being unfairly targeted by his political opponents in every instance, according to conversations with half a dozen people close to the White House, including current and former officials.

“Two things motivate almost 100 percent of his behavior: self-preservation or self-aggrandizement,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “There never is a strategy because he’s not a strategic thinker.”

With Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Carolinas, Trump canceled a pair of the midterm campaign appearances that typically lift his spirits, leaving him cloistered in the White House and fuming about the perceived injustices raining down on him.

In a Friday evening tweet, the president surfaced to double down on the Hurricane Maria death toll, quote-tweeting Fox News journalist Geraldo Rivera, who asked of conditions in Puerto Rico before the hurricane, “So when did people start dying?”

Trump allies, exasperated by the succession of events, said they were most concerned about the new threat to Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh after The New Yorker published details of claims by an unnamed woman that the judge tried to force himself on her at a party when they were both high school students, drowning out her protests by covering her mouth and turning up music.

White House aides began hearing about the allegations a week ago, according to a White House aide, but the specifics — contained in a letter sent to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein — only landed on White House counsel Don McGahn’s desk on Thursday. Trump was briefed on the letter, and the White House made the quick decision to push back hard against the Democrats, framing the matter as a Hail Mary and purely political attack against a respected judge.

The anonymous allegation against Kavanaugh, whose team carefully scripted his reverent approach to women — including a statement describing his respect for his mother — in anticipation of efforts to paint him as a threat to the right to abortion enshrined in Roe v. Wade, casts a shadow over the nomination ahead of the midterm election.

Hill Republicans on Friday pushed out a letter signed by 65 women who knew Kavanaugh during his high school years attesting to his good character.

White House aides expressed hope that efforts to take down Kavanaugh would ultimately backfire amid questions about Feinstein’s handling of the allegation, and they expressed optimism that he will still be confirmed. “If this stuff was credible,” one White House official told POLITICO, “the timing renders it extremely suspect and raises serious credibility questions about the nature of the release.”

People handling the Kavanaugh hearings remained confident that the allegations — which echo last-minute harassment claims lodged decades ago by Anita Hill against Justice Clarence Thomas days before his confirmation vote — would not preclude his confirmation.

People close to Trump were instead worried that it would be the guilty plea and cooperation agreement by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort that would do the most lasting damage. The plea deal on federal conspiracy charges in Washington, D.C., three weeks after his conviction on separate federal tax evasion and fraud charges in Virginia, open the door to a stunning betrayal by someone whom the president has considered pardoning, according to people familiar with Trump’s thinking — and signal that the Russia investigation is far from over.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the plea had nothing to do with the campaign. “It is totally unrelated,” she said. The White House declined to comment on the possibility of a pardon.

The president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, echoed Sanders’ words, issuing a statement saying: “Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign. The reason: The president did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell the truth.”

But that statement was quickly corrected, with Giuliani issuing a second version dropping the assertion about Manafort’s truthfulness.

Andrew Restuccia, Eliana Johnson and Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.

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