Jury to weigh Manafort’s tax- and bank-fraud case
Jury members in the trial of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort heard closing arguments Wednesday as they prepared to deliberate on 18 charges of bank fraud and lying to the IRS that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.
“When you follow the trail of Mr. Manafort’s money, it is littered with lies,” prosecutor Greg Andres said during closing arguments to the sixwoman, six-man jury in Alexandria, Virginia. “Mr. Manafort lied to keep more money when he had it, and he lied to get more money when he didn’t.”
As Andres spoke, slowly and dispassionately, jurors looked at him, occasionally scribbling notes in the black notebooks they have used throughout the trial. Manafort, wearing a blue suit, did not look at Andres or the jury while the prosecutor spoke.
In their final appeal to the jury, Manafort’s lawyers said it defied common sense for Manafort to cheat the IRS or banks when his net worth still exceeded $21 million.
“Given this evidence, how can we say he didn’t have money?” asked Manafort lawyer Richard Westling, who also said it did not make sense for Manafort to involve so many people in a scheme to hide $15 million in income from the IRS.
The jury is set to begin deliberations this morning.
The trial is the first to arise from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, although the charges against the political strategist center on his personal finances.
“The world is watching” the Manafort trial’s outcome, said Ilene Jaroslow, a former federal prosecutor, because the special counsel’s office “doesn’t speak, except in court.”
An acquittal, she said, would embolden Mueller’s critics “and could put the existence of that office at risk.”
“A conviction would show the special counsel has the tools to find out the truth and bring it to light,” said Jarislow, now a partner at the law firm Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney. “It would be enormously important to everyone seeing the threats to the Justice Department and the special counsel to know we can get a measure of justice in the United States.”
During closing arguments, Manafort’s lawyers said the special counsel’s office had gone on a fishing expedition to find evidence of financial crimes.
“Nobody came forward to say we’re concerned about what we’re seeing here, not until the special counsel showed up and started asking questions,” Westling said, suggesting the special counsel “cobbled together” information to “stack up the counts” against Manafort and overwhelm the jury.
“It is not enough that wrong information or false information was given,” Westling said, telling jurors that to convict his client, they had to be convinced Manafort intended to deceive banks and the IRS.
The key witness against Manafort was his former right-hand man, Rick Gates, who provided testimony describing years of deception allegedly orchestrated by Manafort. Gates pleaded guilty in February to lying to the FBI and conspiring against the United States, and is cooperating against his former boss in hopes of getting a lesser prison sentence.
Manafort’s defense has been almost singularly focused on discrediting Gates, telling the jury that the government’s case rests on the word of an admitted liar and cheat.
Lawyer Kevin Downing launched a blistering attack on Gates’ credibility, urging the jury Wednesday to discount his testimony.
“To the very end, he lied to you,” Downing told the jury. “The government, so desperate to make a case against Mr. Manafort, made a deal with Rick Gates.”
Downing said Gates stole millions of dollars from Manafort; Gates testified that he stole several hundred thousand dollars, and admitted he’d engaged in an extramarital affair in London.
Manafort had mistakenly trusted his deputy and applied little oversight to him, Downing argued.
“He did not know the Rick Gates that you saw,” Downing told the jury. “Mr. Gates was orchestrating a multimillion dollar embezzlement scheme” and trying to keep it from the accountants, Downing said.
“If the accountants had picked up the phone, maybe none of us would be here right now,” Downing told the jury before asking them to find Manafort not guilty of all charges.
Andres, the prosecutor, said jurors should believe Gates, but only because the paper trail and other witnesses including Manafort’s former bookkeeper and accountants - back up his story.
Lilian Calderon told her daughter not to worry, that she would be coming right back. Calderon and her husband, Luis, had an interview they couldn’t miss at a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Rhode Island on Jan. 17.
All they had to do was prove their marriage was legitimate, the first step on a long path toward a green card. They brought family photographs, their children’s birth certificates and their marriage documents. Luis was a U.S. citizen. Calderon was undocumented. She had been brought to the United States illegally from Guatemala when she was 3.
The interviews were quick and painless. Calderon’s included “football banter,” she said. But then ICE showed up — and it was quickly clear to Calderon that she would not be returning home to her daughter.
The 30-year-old mother of two wound up handcuffed and then detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for nearly a month, capturing the attention of the ACLU and leading to a class-action lawsuit over what attorneys have described as a “cruel bait and switch” arrest operation. According to emails between federal officials unsealed in federal court documents Tuesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had been coordinating with ICE to alert the agency when certain immigrants eligible for deportation showed up at the CIS office for routine interviews.
The ACLU of Massachusetts is now accusing the agencies of conspiring to “trap” unsuspecting immigrants on a path toward legal permanent residency by inviting them to these interviews only for ICE to arrest them there. This happened to 17 people in 2018, including Calderon, according to the lawsuit. The ACLU argues this violates their rights to due process and the Immigration Nationality Act, among other things, for detaining the immigrants before they’ve had a chance to complete the process for seeking legal status.
“The government created this path for them to seek a green card,” Matthew Segal, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, told The Associated Press. “The government can’t create that path and then arrest folks for following that path.”
Spokespeople for ICE and USCIS in the Boston and Rhode Island field offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Tuesday. But ICE’s Boston field office spokesman, John Mohan, said in a statement to the Boston Herald that any allegations of “inappropriate coordination” between the agencies were “unfounded.”
“This routine coordination within the Department of Homeland Security, not unlike the cooperative efforts we maintain with many other federal partners, is lawful and legitimate in the work we do to uphold our nation’s immigration laws,” Mohan said in part.
Emails between the agencies released Tuesday show USCIS employees scheduling interviews with certain married couples around ICE agents’ availability. When immigrants and their spouses showed up, USCIS employees would alert ICE. If ICE agents were running late, ICE would ask USCIS to reschedule the interviews to accommodate them.
One ICE agent appeared to prefer scheduling the arrests to avoid drawing media attention.
“As far as scheduling goes, I would prefer not to do them all at one time as it is not only a strain on our ability to transport and process several arrests at once, but it also has the potential to be a trigger for negative media interest, as we have seen in the past,” Andrew Graham, an ICE officer in the fugitive operations division, wrote in an October 2017 email included in court documents.
“If you have the availability to schedule one or two at a time and spread them apart, that works best for us.”
ACLU Massachusetts tweeted “Information uncovered by documents and depositions shows USCIS actively coordinated with ICE to schedule and facilitate arrests at USCIS offices.”