The president’s men: Guilty

Jury returns verdict on campaign manager; lawyer reaches plea deal

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted Tuesday in his financial fraud trial, bringing a dramatic end to a politically charged case that riveted the capital.

The verdict was a victory for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, whose prosecutors built a case that Manafort hid millions of dollars in foreign accounts to evade taxes and lied to banks repeatedly to obtain $20 million in loans.

Manafort was convicted of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the remaining 10 counts, and the judge declared a mistrial on those charges.

Kevin Downing, a lawyer for Manafort, said his client was “evaluating all of his options at this point.”

Jason Maloni, Manafort’s spokesman, said, “We expect to appeal.” A spokesperson for Mueller’s office declined to comment.

The verdict was read out in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, only minutes after Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to violating campaign finance law and other charges.

Cohen made the extraordinary admission that he paid a pornographic film actress “at the direction of the candidate,” referring to Trump, to secure her silence about an affair she said she had with Trump.

Manafort’s trial did not touch directly on Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election or on whether Trump has sought to obstruct the investigation. But it was the first test of the special counsel’s ability to prosecute a case in a federal courtroom amid intense criticism from the president and his allies that the inquiry is a biased and unjustified witch hunt.

Before and during the trial, Trump both sought to defend Manafort as a victim of prosecutorial overreach and to distance himself from him, saying that Manafort had worked for him only relatively briefly.

The trial focused on Manafort’s personal finances, in particular the tens of millions of dollars he made advising a political party in Ukraine that backed pro-russia policies.

Defense lawyers had argued that Rick Gates, Manafort’s former right-hand man and the government’s star witness, was the real mastermind of the frauds. Gates had been charged along with Manafort