Jury finds ex-trump campaign chair Manafort guilty on eight counts
Paul Manafort speaks during a Bloomberg Television interview at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio in 2016.
the president will agree to an interview – or face a potential subpoena – in coming months.
The guilty verdict is also politically awkward for Trump, who has repeatedly condemned the Russia investigation as a “hoax” and last week praised Manafort as “a very good person.” He recently complained that Manafort was being treated worse than Al Capone, the Prohibition-era gangster.
Manafort’s defense lawyers chose not to present any witnesses or evidence, gambling instead that the jury would simply reject the government’s case as unreliable or insufficient. Manafort confirmed to the judge that he would not take the stand.
Manafort faces another federal trial on related charges on Sept. 17 in Washington, D.C., and the judge in that case ordered him incarcerated in June after he was accused of attempted witness tampering.
Manafort was the latest reminder of the scandals that have swirled around Trump’s senior staff almost since he took office.
The secretary of Health and Human Services and the head of the Environmental Protection Agency were forced out over ethical controversies, and other senior aides have faced harsh scrutiny. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, pleaded guilty last year to lying to federal investigators, and Trump’s personal lawyer in New York was said to be discussing a plea deal in a federal investigation of alleged bank fraud.
Prosecutors prevailed despite frequent criticism from U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III, a stern jurist who repeatedly questioned prosecution tactics in front of the jury. Ellis sought to limit testimony about Manafort’s work in Ukraine and his opulent tastes, saying the details were not relevant to the legal question of whether he had evaded U.S. taxes.
Mueller’s team twice filed formal motions asking Ellis to retract his comments. He agreed only once, telling the jury last Thursday to disregard an outburst when he had accused prosecutors of improperly allowing an expert witness to sit in the courtroom during testimony.
“This robe doesn’t make me anything other than human and I may have made a mistake,” he said.
On Tuesday – on the fourth day of deliberations – an hourlong flurry of activity before noon seemed to foreshadow a possible winding down of deliberations. The jury sent a note to the judge asking how to proceed “if we cannot come to consensus on a single count” of the 18-count indictment.
Before calling the jurors into the courtroom, Ellis informed counsel for both sides that he would only tell the jury to continue deliberating, but indicated that if they remained deadlocked on one or more counts, there was precedent for accepting a partial verdict.