Manafort lawyers rest without witnesses in fraud trial
ALEXANDRIA, VA — Lawyers for Paul Manafort rested without calling witnesses Tuesday in their client’s trial on bank and fraud charges, a stark contrast from the prosecution’s case that included testimony from nearly two dozen people and hundreds of documents entered into evidence.
Before they rested, Judge T.S. Ellis III denied a motion to acquit Manafort. The trial was expected to next move to closing arguments. Ellis scheduled closing arguments to begin Wednesday morning.
Prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller had rested Monday after mounting what appeared to be a powerful case that Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chair, had evaded taxes on roughly $16.5 million in income and fraudulently obtained more than $21 million in bank loans.
The core of the government’s case rested on more than two days of testimony by Rick Gates, Manafort’s one-time trusted aide, who has pleaded guilty to two felony charges and is hoping his co-operation will keep him out of prison. Gates recounted helping Manafort hide his income in foreign bank accounts and trick banks into extending him loans that he was not qualified to receive.
Manafort’s lawyers had assailed Gates as a liar, adulterer and thief who had committed all of the crimes that Manafort was accused of, and more. On the stand, Gates admitted to a host of offenses, including stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort’s bank accounts and concealing $3 million of his own income from tax authorities. While he appeared confident when prosecutors questioned him about Manafort’s criminal activity, he grew less sure when defence lawyers confronted him with questions about his own misdeeds.
Asked about how he embezzled funds by filing false expense reports, for example, Gates replied: “It wasn’t a scheme. I just added numbers to the reports.”
The trial, the first for Mueller’s office, did not relate to the Trump campaign or Russia’s campaign of interference in 2016 presidential election, but Ellis had ruled that Mueller’s mandate was broad enough for him to pursue the case.
References to the Trump campaign emerged intermittently during the trial. Gates testified that Manafort’s political consulting firm, for which he worked for years, had no clients or income at the time the Trump campaign hired the two men in March 2016. Manafort managed delegates to the national convention, rose to campaign chair in two months, then was forced out in late August amid allegations that he had failed to report his work for oligarchs in Ukraine who were allied with Russia.
Gates, who stayed with the campaign through the election, testified that “it was possible” that he stole money then from the Trump inaugural committee while serving as its executive director.
Defense attorneys attempted to question him about the special counsel’s interest in the campaign, perhaps in the hopes that jurors would see the Manafort prosecution as part of a politically inspired effort to gather evidence against the president. Trump routinely condemns Mueller’s investigation as a “witch hunt.”
But they dropped that line of questioning after the prosecutors objected and the judge apparently ruled it was out of bounds. He sealed the transcript of the discussion of the issue at the bench after prosecutors argued that they needed to protect an ongoing investigation.
The defense’s decision to rest without presenting its own case is relatively common, experts said, given that the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
“The defence believes it has made its point through cross-examination that the government’s proof is not judicial,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor and a former federal judge. “They’re relying on the jury to agree with them.”