Yesterday’s plea agreement between federal prosecutors and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort was surprisingly one-sided. Manafort pleaded guilty to two new federal conspiracy charges. He also went back and admitted to the additional counts from his prior trial in Virginia where the jury had been unable to reach a verdict. He agreed to cooperate fully and truthfully with prosecutors in their investigations of any other crimes. He forfeited a long list of expensive properties apparently purchased with his ill gotten gains. Apparently the prospect of spending the rest of your life in a federal prison is a substantial motivator.

The surprise plea has produced lots of weekend reading.

If you want details, Lawfare Blog has gathered together the superseding criminal information, plea agreement, and a “statement of offenses and other acts.” All the gory but, for most people, boring details are here.

If you want to listen to the news, try this one: The Lawfare Podcast: Special Edition: Paul Manafort ‘Breaks’.

To discuss what the news means for Manafort, the Mueller investigation, and President Trump, Benjamin Wittes spoke to former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer, independent counsel prosector Paul Rosenzweig, and Lawfare managing editor Quinta Jurecic.

What does it all mean?

Here’s the White House spin: “This had absolutely nothing to do with the president or his victorious 2016 presidential campaign,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said. “It is totally unrelated.”

That’s true in the narrowest sense that the crimes Manafort has now acknowledged were not carried out in his role as a campaign insider.

However, the plea agreement requires Manafort to cooperate and come clean on any other crimes he may have information or documentation about. Those items are not, we can assume, “totally unrelated.”

Here’s my favorite among quotes so far, this one from The Guardian.

Under the deal, Manafort is required to describe any and all criminal activity he is aware of. He is also required to sit for interviews and briefings with the special counsel’s office, to turn over documents and to testify in other proceedings, Judge Amy Berman Jackson announced.

Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general, said that Manafort’s cooperation would be valuable to special counsel Robert Mueller for “only a few other subjects” under investigation, possibly including members of Trump’s family. “The Witch Hunt, already successful, about to get the full coven,” Katyal tweeted.

Also from the Lawfare Blog (“The Manafort Guilty Plea, the Mueller Investigation, and the President“):

Manafort is clearly corrupt, and he seems to have quite a few corrupt associates, so one possibility is that he might be able to tell the Mueller team a great deal about influence peddling and graft involving any number of people at some remove from the Trump campaign. Ominously for Trump, of course, Manafort was also in attendance at the infamous Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 and is plausibly in a position to confirm or contradict the accounts of others regarding what occurred and Donald Trump’s personal knowledge of events. That may be significant: Donald Trump Jr. and others have testified before Congress that President Trump was not aware of the meeting at the time or soon thereafter, and the Special Counsel’s Office has demonstrated a willingness to indict individuals for making false statements. More generally, Manafort was chairman of the campaign for a time and may be able to answer any number of outstanding questions about what happened in the months he was there. He is also an inherently interesting figure because he is one of the only people with direct ties to both the senior levels of the Trump campaign and the Kremlin’s friends on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you’ve got your own list of assessments of the Manafort plea that you would highlight, please share!

For now, though, I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that I’ll be having a more relaxing weekend than the current cast of survivors in the Trump White House.