Jury to weigh Manafort’s case

If convicted, Trump’s ex-campaign manager could spend life in prison.

ALEXANDRIA, VA. — Jury members in the trial of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort heard closing arguments Wednesday as they prepared to deliberate on 18 charges of bank fraud and lying to the IRS that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

“When you follow the trail of Mr. Manafort’s money, it is littered with lies,” prosecutor Greg Andres said during closing arguments to the six-woman, six-man jury in Alexandria, Virginia. “Mr. Manafort lied to keep more money when he had it, and he lied to get more money when he didn’t.”

As Andres spoke, slowly and dispassionately, jurors looked at him, occasionally scribbling notes in the black notebooks they have used throughout the trial. Manafort, wearing a blue suit, did not look at Andres or the jury while the prosecutor spoke.

In their final appeal to the jury, Manafort’s lawyers said it defied common sense for Manafort to cheat the IRS or banks when his net worth still exceeded $21 million.

“Given this evidence, how can we say he didn’t have money?” asked Manafort lawyer Richard Westling, who also said it did not make sense for Manafort to involve so many people in a scheme to hide $15 million in income from the IRS.

The jury is set to begin deliberations this morning.

The trial is the first to arise from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, although the charges against the political strategist center on his personal finances.

“The world is watching” the Manafort trial’s outcome, said Ilene Jaroslaw, a former federal prosecutor, because the special counsel’s office “doesn’t speak, except in court.”

An acquittal, she said, would embolden Mueller’s critics “and could put the existence of that office at risk.”

“A conviction would show the special counsel has the tools to find out the truth and bring it to light,” said Jaroslaw, now a partner at the law firm Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney. “It would be enormously important to everyone seeing the threats to the Justice Department and the special counsel to know we can get a measure of justice in the United States.”

During closing arguments, Manafort’s lawyers said the special counsel’s office had gone on a fishing expedition to find evidence of financial crimes.

“Nobody came forward to say we’re concerned about what we’re seeing here, not until the special counsel showed up and started asking questions,” Westling said, suggesting the special counsel “cobbled together” information to “stack up the counts” against Manafort and overwhelm the jury.

“It is not enough that wrong information or false information was given,” Westling said, telling jurors that to convict his client, they had to be convinced Manafort intended to deceive banks and the IRS.

The key witness against Manafort was his former right-hand man, Rick Gates, who provided testimony describing years of deception allegedly orchestrated by Manafort. Gates pleaded guilty in February to lying to the FBI and conspiring against the United States, and is cooperating against his former boss in hopes of getting a lesser prison sentence.

Manafort’s defense has been almost sing u larly focused on discrediting Gates, telling the jury the government’s case rests on the word of an admitted liar and cheat.

Lawyer Kevin Downing launched a blistering attack on Gates’ credibility, urging the jury Wednesday to discount his testimony. “To the very end, he lied to you,” Downing told the jury. “The government, so desperate to make a case against Mr. Manafort, made a deal with Rick Gates.”

Downing said Gates stole millions of dollars from Manafort; Gates testified that he stole several hundred thousand dollars, and admitted he’d engaged in an extramarital affair in London.

Manafort had mistakenly trusted his deputy and applied little oversight to him, Downing argued.

“He did not know the Rick Gates that you saw,” Downing told the jury. “Mr. Gates was orchestrating a multimilliondollar embezzlement scheme” and trying to keep it from the accountants, Downing said.

“If the accountants had picked up the phone, maybe none of us would be here right now,” Downing told the jury before asking them to find Manafort not guilty of all charges.

Andres, the prosecutor, said jurors should believe Gates, but only because the paper trail and other witnesses — including Manafort’s former bookkeeper and accountants — back up his story.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the star witness in this case is the documents,” Andres said. There were “dozens and dozens” of documents, many of them emails, connecting Manafort to the fraud, he said.

While the defense had mocked Gates as someone who “had his hand in the cookie jar,” Andres said it was actually a “huge dumpster” of hidden money.

Andres urged jurors to examine evidence indicating Manafort directed Gates to commit cr i mes, and pointed to one email in which Manafort anointed Gates his “quarterback” in handling a loan application. “Guess who the coach of that team is?” Andres quipped.

Over two weeks of testimony, prosecutors called more than two dozen witnesses, who described how Manafort allegedly lied to his own accountants to hide his secret foreign bank accounts, while simultaneously using those accounts to pay eye-popping amounts for luxury items.

More than $1 million spent on clothes over five years. More than $2 million spent on home entertainment systems. Millions of dollars on homes for himself and his family. And hundreds of thousands of dollars on landscaping, including a bed of red flowers in the shape of an “M” in the backyard of his Hamptons homes.

That testimony angered the judge, who scolded prosecutors for trying to make Manafort’s wealth the focus of the trial.

In his closing argument, Andres said the point was not to show the defendant was rich, but that the defendant controlled the money in those foreign accounts.

“This case is not about Mr. Manafort’s wealth,” said Andres. “We’re in this courtroom because Mr. Manafort filed false tax returns.”