Mueller probe nets trial victory
Jury deadlocked on 10 of 18 counts
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Jurors handed special counsel Robert Mueller his first jury trial victory Tuesday against one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
On the fourth day of deliberations, the six men and six women on the jury found Manafort guilty of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose foreign bank accounts. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on 10 other charges after jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on them.
The verdict was part of a one-two punch of bad news for the White House. Minutes before the Manafort verdict, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty in
MANAFORT
New York to five counts of tax fraud, bank fraud and campaign finance violations involving hush-money payments to two women who have claimed to have had sexual relations with President Donald Trump, porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen Mcdougal.
In a federal courthouse in Alexandria, a stoic Manafort, 69, stood with his defense team and heard the verdict, his back to reporters and members of the public sitting in the courtroom. As he left the courtroom, Manafort, who led Trump’s election effort for a short period in 2016, winked at his wife, Kathleen, who was watching from her usual frontrow seat with a friend and an adviser.
“Mr. Manafort is disappointed of not getting acquittals all the way through or a complete hung jury on all counts,” said defense lawyer Kevin Downing. He said Manafort was evaluating all his options.
‘It doesn’t involve me’
On his way to a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, Trump told reporters “Paul Manafort is a good man.”
“It doesn’t involve me, but I still feel, you know, it’s a very sad thing that happened,” Trump added. In his remarks, he again called the special counsel’s probe “a witch hunt.”
In West Virginia, Trump told reporters that Manafort’s conviction “has nothing to do with Russian collusion.”
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez released a statement in which he said, “Donald Trump brought a culture of corruption from his campaign to the White House. The special counsel’s investigation has never been a ‘witch hunt,’ and today’s verdict proves it.”
The trial did not resolve the central question behind Mueller’s investigation — whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia to influence the election. Still, there were occasional references to Manafort’s work on the campaign, including emails showing him lobbying the Trump transition team on behalf of a banker who approved $16 million in loans because he wanted a position in the Trump administration.
Manafort faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison for each count of filing fraudulent tax returns, five years for failing to file a report on foreign bank accounts and 30 years for each of the two bank fraud convictions.
Manafort decided not to call any witnesses or testify himself. Instead, the defense strategy relied on impeaching the credibility of
Rick Gates, who testified against his former associate in exchange for a reduced sentence, and the Office of the Special Counsel, arguing that the Department of Justice rarely stages huge trials for bank or tax fraud.
Gates spent three days on the stand, telling jurors how he committed crimes alongside Manafort for years.
The view outside the beltway
GOP communications guru Mark Corallo, who briefly advised Trump’s legal team, said voters outside the Washington beltway are “not going to like the sleaze aspect of the Manafort case, but they’re also not going to like the optics of a special counsel who is charged with going after Russian meddling in our election coming up with a prosecution that was wholly unrelated to his original mandate.”
To Corallo, Mueller’s big mistake was not handing off the Manafort prosecution as he did with Cohen’s case, which he referred to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. The Cohen case hurts Trump more, Corallo believes, as Cohen alleged “he was directed to break the law by a federal candidate,” presumably Trump.
Manafort’s troubles are not over. Next month, he is scheduled to appear in a federal court in Washington on a different set of charges that involve money laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent and making false and misleading statements.
Corallo said he believes that Trump might pardon Manafort — probably after the D.C. trial and after the midterm elections.
GOP strategist and CNN contributor Alice Stewart spent time watching the trial in the Alexandria courthouse.
“Based on my observation of Manafort in the courtroom, his mild demeanor and his lack of conferring with his counsel, I cannot believe that a pardon is not in the works and imminent,” Stewart said. “He just seemed too calm given the gravity of what was going on.”
Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or at 202-662-7391. Follow @ Debrajsaunders on Twitter. The Associated Press contributed to this report.