I don't think Trump will pardon Manafort

[jmowreader]

4. He was probably told, "it's prison or death."

The Russians have a film of the execution of Oleg Penkovsky (the only Soviet GRU officer to ever be executed), and apparently it's pretty horrific: they dressed him in a fine suit, tied him to a stretcher with baling wire, then put him up on the entry shelf of a cremator. They pushed him far enough in to burn the bottoms of his shoes off before pulling him out and propping him up against the wall facing the cremator while an honored GRU officer who had recently died was cremated. Once the honored officer's cremation was finished, they put Penkovsky into the machine and cremated him alive.

They show the movie to all new GRU officers to reinforce the need for loyalty.

They very well could have taken Manafort into a little room, played the tape for him, and told him something like, "you are the sacrificial lamb. If you don't go along, this will happen to you."