Unusual trial to begin for ex-Trump aide
Charges against Manafort not based on ’16 campaign, but there’s a political aspect
WASHINGTON — Bank fraud. Tax evasion. Conspiracy. The charges Paul Manafort faces in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., are largely unremarkable for a white-collar criminal case.
Yet Manafort’s case is anything but normal — starting with the fact that it is scheduled to go to trial at all.
President Donald Trump’s former cam- paign chairman is the first person to stand trial on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. Jury selection is scheduled to get underway Tuesday and is expected to proceed swiftly. Opening statements could start as early as Tuesday afternoon.
The charges Manafort faces are mostly not connected to his work for the Trump campaign, and the prosecution has said that it does not intend to present evidence regarding Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election or any potential collusion between the Russians and Trump or his associates.
Still, an unavoidable political subtext accompanies Manafort’s case. Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, is the first person to be tried in the special counsel’s investigation.
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“There’s the special counsel, a very high-profile defendant, and the specter of the president hanging over the trial,” said Edward MacMahon, a longtime attorney in Washington and Virginia.
The charges stem from Manafort’s role as a consultant for the former Ukranian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and alleged criminal schemes Manafort used to hide the money he earned. In a court filing Monday, prosecutors said Manfort earned more than $60 million from his work in Ukraine.
Manafort funneled his wealth into expensive purchases including nearly a million dollars spent on antique rugs, over half a million dollars to landscape his vacation home in the Hamptons on Long Island, N.Y., and millions more for home renovations, clothing, and luxury cars, the government alleges.
When Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 and Manafort’s income from that work tapered off, he turned to bank fraud, prosecutors say.
Manafort’s decision, so far, to risk a trial on those allegations has surprised many legal experts. The vast majority of white-collar criminal cases are settled without the defendant standing trial, said Georgetown Law School professor Paul Butler, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor. Typically, he would anticipate “a system of plea bargaining in a case like this where the prosecution will have lots of paper evidence to support its charge,” he added.
But Manafort has decided to stand not just one, but two trials. In October, he was indicted in Washington on charges that include acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. In February, he was indicted in Alexandria on the charges he faces in the current trial.
The Washington case is sched- uled to be tried in September. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to all charges. Prosecutors gave him the option of combining his separate indictments for a single trial, but Manafort’s defense team rejected that.
Generally, a defendant would attempt to avoid racking up legal bills with multiple trials, but Manafort appears to have the resources necessary to fund his defense, said Cynthia Najdowski, an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Albany’s School of Criminal Justice. Splitting up the trials may be a legal strategy to prevent the government from stacking up all the charges together, she added.
Whether Mueller has a broader interest in prosecuting Manafort remains unknown. The judge presiding over the trial said during a hearing earlier this year that he believed Mueller had brought the case to force Manafort to “sing” about Trump.
The case seemed to be an effort to “turn the screws and get the information you really want,” Judge T.S. Ellis III said in May. So far, there’s been no sign that Manafort has offered any testimony about Trump.
“It could be that they think this case is a gateway to other cases,” Butler said, referring to the special counsel prosecutors. “I don’t think Mueller would justify all these resources on this trial but for some nexus that he knows about, but we don’t.”
In the months leading up to the trial, Manafort’s attorneys have worked hard to limit the political dimension of the case. Earlier this month, the defense filed a motion to preclude evidence related to Manafort’s consulting work in Ukraine, and on Thursday, filed a motion requesting the exclusion of 50 exhibits — more than 470 pages of documents — from the government’s case.
Prosecutors, however, argued that “the Trump campaign is Paul Manafort is facing charges arising from probe of of his consulting work in Ukraine. relevant and inextricably intertwined” with one of the bank fraud and conspiracy charges brought against Manafort.
According to the filing, Manafort fraudulently obtained two loans totaling $16 million from a financial institution. The loan applications were approved by a senior executive who sought Manafort’s help in securing a position advising the Trump campaign — and unsuccessfully attempted to get a position in the administration.