What did Donald Trump do today?

He got ready to throw Paul Manafort under the bus.

Today, Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to two felonies in federal court. As part of a deal with prosecutors, he will now cooperate with the investigation into Russia's attack on the United States.

Trump has recently praised Manafort for not "flipping," unlike many other Trump campaign and administration figures who have pleaded guilty and cooperated with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. 

Now, faced with the prospect of Manafort telling prosecutors what he knows, Trump's legal team insisted that Manafort's criminal acts don't reflect on Trump at all. But in doing so, they accidentally admitted that they believe Manafort will be able to implicate Trump in crimes, or simply in the impeachable anti-American act of conspiring with a foreign power to influence an election. Trump's "TV lawyer" Rudy Giuliani's initial reaction was this:

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.

Moments later, the Trump legal team issued a "corrected" statement that left them room to call Manafort a liar:

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.

Manafort, who worked for a Putin-backed puppet government in Ukraine before joining the Trump campaign, has reportedly already begun providing prosecutors with information. 

Why should I care about this?

• What is true, and what will help Donald Trump avoid prosecution and impeachment, are not necessarily the same thing.

• If Trump wasn't part of a criminal conspiracy to help Russia throw the election to him, he certainly seems to know a lot of people who were.