And here I thought Manafort wouldn’t even be offered a cooperation agreement because he was a big enough fish to be worth all the effort of the investigation to begin with (Trump’s insistence that his campaign manager was a low-level volunteer who mostly just got coffee notwithstanding). Turns out, not so much. There are bigger fish in Mueller’s sights after all. And there aren’t many fish bigger than Manafort who aren’t family.

What’s Manfort’s value in a cooperation deal? Aside from the obvious (Trump, Russian Oligarchs, Roger Stone, Russian Intelligence, GOP platform changes and other campaign work including other candidates), there’s this: aside from a few missteps around Flynn, Pence has done a pretty good job keeping an arm’s length between himself and the crime syndicate he works with, at least in public. His only other widely-known direct link, aside from Flynn, is Manafort.

Certain serious crimes cannot be prosecuted at all without a minimum of two witnesses.