Trump’s former campaign adviser found guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, and conspiring to hide foreign bank accounts.
A fter months of legal jockeying that culminated in a 16-day trial, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s first legal battle is over. An Alexandria jury found Manafort guilty of eight criminal charges Tuesday, including five charges of tax fraud, two of bank fraud, and one of conspiring to hide foreign bank accounts. The result is the latest and largest court victory for special prosecutor Robert Mueller, whose investigation into Russian election meddling in the 2016 election had previously secured guilty pleas from former Trump staffers George Papadopoulos, Rick Gates, and Michael Flynn.
Judge T. S. Ellis declared a mistrial on the other 10 charges prosecutors had brought after the jury announced they were unable to reach a verdict. Earlier in the day, jurors had asked the judge how they ought to proceed if they were hopelessly split on one of the charges. Ellis encouraged them to “take all the time which you feel is necessary,” but not to “surrender your honest conviction.”
Manafort was facing charges for a bevy of financial crimes related to his previous career as a pro-Russian lobbyist in Ukraine. Mueller’s prosecutors alleged that Manafort made millions from the work, then hid the profits in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes. Their star witness was Gates, Manafort’s longtime business partner, who corroborated the prosecution’s paper trail and testified that he and Manafort knowingly broke the law.
It remains to be seen whether prosecutors will attempt to refile charges against Manafort, who will face yet more criminal charges in a D. C. court later this year. Yet even this decidedly mixed result redounds to the credit of Manafort’s lawyers, who had to fight against a mountainous paper trail of evidence in addition to Gates’s testimony. Mueller’s hand was so strong in the initial indictments that many experts had been declaring Manafort dead in the water for months, especially since it was revealed in February that Gates would testify. Few even thought he’d be willing to take the thing to trial.
Yet as the trial stretched into its third week, pundits who had long since pronounced Manafort’s goose cooked fretted and chafed at the unexpectedly contentious proceedings. Manafort’s lawyers argued that Gates was an unreliable person, a notion aided by Gates’s own testimony that he had embezzled large sums of money from Manafort over the years. Judge Ellis frequently struck a skeptical tone with prosecutors, leading to a few tense, chippy moments during the trial. Meanwhile, across the Potomac, President Trump continued his usual grousing about Mueller’s team, declaring Manafort a “very good person,” provoking media protests that he was muddying the waters for the jury.
A spokesman for Manafort said he planned to appeal the conviction.
