Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Manafort guilty on eight of 18 counts
Judge orders mistrial on unresolved charges
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A jury found President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort guilty Tuesday after a threeweek trial on tax and bank fraud charges.
The jury convicted Manafort on eight of the 18 counts against him. The jury said it was deadlocked on the other 10 counts. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III declared a mistrial on those other charges.
Manafort was convicted on five counts of filing false tax returns, one count of not filing a required Internal Revenue Service form, and two bank-fraud counts.
The jury deliberated for four days before announcing its verdict.
Manafort, who appeared jovial earlier in the day amid signs that the jury was struggling in its deliberations, focused intently on the jury as the clerk read off the charges. He stared down blankly at the defense table, then looked up, expressionless, as the judge finished thanking the jury.
“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 of his options.
Jason Maloni, Manafort’s spokesman, said, “We expect to appeal.”
The trial did not touch directly on special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election or on whether Trump’s campaign coordinated with the Russians. 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.
The president Tuesday
called the outcome a “disgrace” and said the case “has nothing to do with Russia collusion.”
A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment.
No sentencing date has been set. Prosecutors have until Aug. 29 to decide whether they will seek a retrial on the 10 undecided counts.
Over two weeks of testimony, more than two dozen witnesses, including Manafort’s former right-hand man Rick Gates, as well as his former bookkeeper and accountants, testified against Manafort.
Gates spent three days on the stand, telling jurors how he committed crimes alongside Manafort for years. He admitted to doctoring documents, falsifying information and creating fake loans to lower his former boss’s tax bill, and acknowledged stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars without Manafort’s knowledge by filing fake expense reports.
Manafort’s lawyers had argued that Gates, not Manafort, was the real criminal, pointing to Gates’ admitted lies, theft and infidelity. Gates pleaded guilty in February to lying to the FBI and conspiring against the United States, and he has said he hopes to get a lesser prison sentence by cooperating and testifying against Manafort.
The defense lawyers also suggested that Manafort had been targeted by prosecutors to pressure him into cooperating with Mueller’s inquiry into possible collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia in the 2016 election.
Prosecutors, in turn, told the jury that the most compelling evidence in the case were the dozens of documents, many of them emails, showing that Manafort oversaw the false statements to the IRS and banks.
Manafort, 69, called no witnesses during the trial. His lawyer argued that prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to defraud the government or banks. Manafort’s lawyers repeatedly suggested that their client might not have known the law.
The trial featured heated arguments at times — not between the government and defense lawyers, but between Ellis and prosecutors. The judge repeatedly chided prosecutors in front of the jury, though at the end of the trial he urged the panel not to consider during deliberations any opinions he may have expressed.
After the trial, Ellis complimented lawyers on both sides for “zealous and effective representation.” He also remarked on his surprise at the level of attention the case has received and the criticism he received for his management of the trial.
“We all take brickbats in life,” Ellis said.
Manafort faces a second trial in September in Washington, D.C., on charges that he failed to register as a lobbyist for the Ukraine government and conspired to tamper with witnesses in that case. Manafort has been in jail since June as a result of the witness tampering charges.
On Tuesday morning, the jurors sent a note indicating they were split on at least one count. At that time, Ellis said he might be open to accepting a partial verdict at a later point, but not then.
Downing argued that jurors should be given a new verdict form that would give them the option to be undecided on the charges. The “third option should be hung as to each count,” said Downing, who added that the jury “shouldn’t be misled” into thinking that a hung jury is inappropriate.
Prosecutor Greg Andres objected to that suggestion, saying such a form went against the judge’s instruction for the jury to keep deliberating. The judge agreed, saying that if the jurors still couldn’t reach a consensus after he sent them back to continue deliberating, then he would “ask them to tell me where they stand.”
When the jurors were again summoned into the courtroom, Ellis told them only that if they failed to agree on a verdict, the case would be “left open and undecided,” and that there was no reason another 12 jurors could decide the case “better or more exhaustively” than they could. He told jurors not to yield their beliefs, but asked them to consider whether they stood in the minority, and if so, whether they should change their minds.
Jurors are permitted to return partial verdicts, in which they reach unanimous decisions of conviction or acquittal on some — but not all — of the counts against a defendant. In those circumstances, the acquittal or conviction will stand as the trial outcome for those specific charges, but prosecutors must then decide if they want to retry the defendant on the counts that resulted in a deadlock. During deliberations, judges encourage juries that say they are stuck on part or all of a case to keep trying to reach a unanimous verdict.
Prosecutors charge that from 2010 to 2014, Manafort hid more than $15 million from the IRS — money he made as a political consultant in Ukraine.
When that income ended in 2014, authorities charge that Manafort lied to banks to get millions of dollars more in loans to support his extravagant lifestyle.
On Thursday, the jury asked Ellis to clarify some legal elements in the case that had been raised by the defense team. Since then, the jury had deliberated without asking for further guidance.
The president has repeatedly spoken out publicly in support of Manafort, both at the trial’s outset and during jury deliberations.
On Monday morning, Trump tweeted that Mueller’s investigators “are enjoying ruining people’s lives and REFUSE to look at the real corruption on the Democrat side — the lies, the firings, the deleted Emails and soooo much more! Mueller’s Angry Dems are looking to impact the election. They are a National Disgrace!”