Trial of former Trump campaign chairman began shortly after 10 a.m. with jury selection as President continues to attack special counsel Robert Mueller
Opening arguments in the case are likely this week, and the trial is expected to last several weeks.
Manafort’s trial, in which he faces charges on 18 counts of violating tax and banking laws, is a high-profile test of the Mueller team’s investigation into Russian election interference in 2016.
Manafort was a senior Trump campaign aide and he led the campaign for several months, but the charges are not directly related to campaign activity, as the White House has repeatedly emphasized.
«The judge has very strictly instructed no mention of Paul Manafort’s role in the Trump campaign, no mention of Trump, Russia or collusion,» senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News Tuesday morning. «This trial obviously centers on matters that have nothing to do with the campaign.»
While Trump has repeatedly railed against Manafort and the «witch hunt» on Twitter in recent weeks, he has not tweeted about Manafort specifically in more than a month, when he said Manafort received a «tough sentence» after his bond was revoked over allegations of witness tampering.
Manafort faces a maximum of 305 years in prison if he is convicted on all charges. Prosecutors say Manafort hid millions of dollars in income from lobbying for Ukrainian politicians, failed to pay taxes while spending the money on US real estate and luxury purchases and lied to banks to take out more than $20 million in loans.
Before jury selection got underway, Ellis said that he did not plan to offer decisions on Tuesday about all of the documents that Manafort’s team wants to keep out of trial. They hope to prevent jurors from seeing some documents and photos from Manafort’s lobbying work in Ukraine.
Instead, the judge gave broad directions to the prosecutors: Try to reduce the number of Ukrainian documents given to the jury, use testimony to add context and don’t refer to individual documents in opening statements.
Ellis said he thinks «the government’s correct» in using the documents to broadly show how Manafort made his money. Prosecutors say Manafort made $60 million from his work.
