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It’s been a tough week for Paul Manafort-aka Trump’s G. Gordon Liddy. Yesterday his accountant testified that she falsified a loan to reduce his tax burden not at Rick Gates request but at his own.
One of Paul Manafort’s accountants testified Friday that she agreed to falsify his tax records https://t.co/H2kFW9wsjs
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 3, 2018
It’s becoming clearer that a pardon is Manafort’s only hope.
To be sure, it’s been clear for sometime that Manafort is playing for a pardon.
For his part, the Manafort trial is driving Trump deeper over the abyss. He fumes that what Manafort is accused of has nothing to do with him. But if that’s true it sure seems to have him worried.
Trump argues that the trial has proven nothing but that Manafort’s a sleaze. Yet but:
“In other words, if Manafort wins, the trial was incredibly important, but if he loses, it was meaningless. You might argue that Democrats are going to say just the opposite, but that isn’t exactly true. If Manafort is acquitted, they will indeed say that it doesn’t prove much of anything about the broader Russia investigation, because the investigation goes far beyond Manfort. But if Manafort is convicted, they won’t say it proves Trump is guilty, because this trial does indeed not have much to do with the 2016 campaign. And regardless of the outcome, what we’ve learned so far shows that Manafort should never have gotten within a mile of a major party nominee’s campaign, much less been tapped to run it.”
As for the Manafort trial, the big moment everyone is waiting for is Rick Gates’ testimony. Manafort’s entire defense amounts to Rick Gates made me do it. Right, your underling forced you against your will to drastically underreport your income derived from helping Russia linked Ukrainian oligarchs and to, when that sweet gig came to and end in 2014, commit bank fraud to maintain the lifestyle to which you became accustomed-ostrich suits, etc.
Manafort’s doing this Rick Gates made me do it strategy as it’s all he has. He tried pretrial-this is all a witch hunt to bring down ‘President Trump’ and that failed.
But his Rick Gates made me do it strategy is also a loser.
What Manafort is doing is actually criminal defense 101: the nobody likes a rat defense.
“Typically, the best way to penetrate a closed or secretive criminal organization is by flipping somebody on the inside who can act as a guide. And you can’t bring down the mafia or a drug cartel or an insider trading ring with choir boys as witnesses.”
“Not only do people underestimate how common cooperators are, they just don’t like cooperators. It goes back to elementary school. Nobody likes a tattletale. That’s why the list of pejorative terms for cooperating witnesses is so long, including: “rats,” “snitches,” “turncoats.”
But, again, this is not a novel strategy-defendants use it every day-Trump is doing something like this already with Michael Cohen.
“The defense attack: Gates is an admitted criminal. The prosecution response: Yes he is. In fact, he pleaded guilty. That’s part of his deal with us. He admitted all of his crimes. And you know who he committed those crimes for, and with? His boss, the guy who ran the show, the guy who got really rich off all this – Paul Manafort.”
The defense will claim that he cut a sweetheart deal not out of altruism but save his own skin. But the prosecution will point out that the cooperator only gets a potentially reduced sentence if he tells the truth.
“The defense will argue that Gates is a dirtbag and you should hate him. The prosecution response: Maybe. But guess who chose Rick Gates? Not Robert Mueller. Not the prosecution team in the courtroom in Virginia. Paul Manafort chose Rick Gates. He chose Rick Gates when they went into business together, when they made millions together, and when they committed fraud together. And why did he choose Rick Gates? Because he needed someone willing to do his dirty business with him and there’s no question that Gates was willing to do it. Gates has admitted that under oath. It doesn’t matter if you like Rick Gates. All that matters is if you believe him. Just look at all the other evidence—testimony from other witnesses, emails, financial records—that backs him up.”
Looking at this from the 30,000 foot view, it’s important to remember that Mueller’s interest in Gates goes beyond proving Manafort’s financial chicanery-that he’s a tax cheat and fraudster. Back in March, it was reported that prosecutors told Gates they didn’t need his cooperation against Manafort but what he knows about collusion.
Prosecutors told Gates they didn’t need his cooperation against Manafort—they wanted to know what he knows about collusion. https://t.co/NP986NoNYF
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) March 29, 2018
“Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team last year made clear it wanted former Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates’ help, not so much against his former business partner Paul Manafort, but with its central mission: investigating the Trump campaign’s contact with the Russians. New information disclosed in court filings and to CNN this week begin to show how they’re getting it.”
“In a court filing earlier this week, the public saw the first signs of how the Mueller team plans to use information from Gates to tie Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, directly to a Russian intelligence agency. Mueller’s team alleges that Gates was in contact with a close colleague of Manafort’s who worked for a Russian intelligence agency — and that Gates knew of the spy service ties in September and October 2016, while he worked on the Trump campaign. Gates would have to talk about the communication with the man if prosecutors wanted, according to his plea deal.”
The spy services tie in question: Person A, who is believed to be Konstantin Kilimnik:
“The alleged Russian intelligence agent, referred to as “Person A” in the court filing, appears to be Konstantin Kilimnik, a former employee who worked with Manafort’s firm and lived in Kiev and Moscow, according to sources familiar with the investigation. In December, the Mueller prosecutors made a similar unnamed reference to Kilimnik, saying he is “assessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service.” That was related to a Kiev newspaper op-ed that Kilimnik helped edit in consultation with Manafort late last year, which prosecutors said could violate a court-imposed gag order on Manafort.”
During the election Manafort had regular communications with Kilimnik. Soon after he became Trump’s campaign manager in the spring of 2016 he emailed him: how can we get whole? with the sanctioned Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska that Manafort owed millions.
Manafort later offered Deripaska a private briefing.
Then in August, 2016 Manafort and Kilimnik-again, a KGB era spy-sat down over dinner and talked about trivial issues like, you know, the weather, the election, and the hacks of the DNC. Manafort assures us this was just a ‘casual conversation.’
Yes-a casual conversation between Trump’s campaign manager, and a Russian spy about hacks perpetuated by the Russians against Trump’s political opponent and her party. What could be more casual than that?
“A chief criticism from President Donald Trump and his defenders has been that the charges brought so far by the special counsel don’t relate directly to Mueller’s central mission investigating possible illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, which the President and others often shorthand using the term collusion. The accusation related to Kilimnik and ties to Russian intelligence, made in Mueller’s Tuesday filing, begins to answer that criticism, but so far without actually making the charge in Manafort’s case.”
“A lawyer for Manafort declined to comment. Kilimnik didn’t comment. Last year, Kilimnik told The Washington Post he has “no relation to the Russian or any other intelligence service.”
So what does Gates know about all this? As Manafort’s long time aide, a lot. He knows all about Manafort’s conversations with Kilimnik and indeed, had extensive conversations with Kilimnik himself.
He also may know a lot about the Trump Tower #CollusionMeeting. When Trump says Manafort has nothing to do with collusion he conveniently ‘forgets’ that Manafort was one of the three from his campaign at the meeting-downstairs from his own office.
“Gates worked alongside Manafort during the critical summer of 2016 when senior campaign officials, including Manafort, met at Trump Tower in New York with a group of Russians who had promised damaging information on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Was he in the strategy meetings? No. But he was an implementer,” one person said of Gates. So while he may not have participated in the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians, he may still have knowledge of the meeting or whether those Russians were ever introduced to Trump himself.
“He would be the kind of person who would probably know that,” this person said.
Ironically Giuliani seems to have possibly bumbled into revealing that Gates did know, that he was on a previous June 7 pre Trump Tower meeting-at Trump Tower, I know it sounds like a Seinfeld bit…
It’s important to keep in mind Gates was no bit player, no ‘coffee boy’-of course, the original Coffee Boy, George Papadopoulos, is hardly a coffee boy either-indeed his disturbing conversation with Australia’s first diplomat led the beginning of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Gates’ tenure with Trump actually lasted much longer than Manafort’s. After Manafort was forced out due to his embarrassing Russian ties-it was the Politico story about his man in Kiev; the man in question was actually Kilimnik-that was the proximate, immediate cause of Manafort’s demise-Gates stayed on at the request of-Steve Bannon who took over for Manafort.
Gates was also deeply involved with Trump’s inaugural committee.
“Last week, ABC News’s Matthew Mosk and John Santucci reported that several wealthy Russians were “granted unusual access” to Trump inauguration parties back in January 2017 — and that Mueller was seeking to find out why.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of Mueller’s interest in the inauguration. Back in April, CNN reported that the special counsel was investigating “whether wealthy Russians illegally funneled cash donations directly or indirectly into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and inauguration” — and had even questioned some oligarchs directly.
“These reports have broken in the months since former Trump aide Rick Gates agreed to a plea deal with Mueller’s team in exchange for his cooperation. That may not be a coincidence — Gates was heavily involved in planning the inauguration, with a Yahoo News report in 2016calling him the “shadow chair” of the event.”
While Trump’s inauguration, contrary to Sean Spicer, were far from the largest in history, the money his committee took in were the largest, period.
“Yet beyond just Russia, there have long been serious questions about the money behind Trump’s inauguration — and where, exactly, it went. Trump’s inaugural committee raised a truly astonishing $106.7 million, double the previous record set by Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural. But what they did with it isn’t so clear.”
In fact, even after Trump became ‘President’, Gates continued to work with the Trump Russia White House and received payments from Trump donors and these payments continued even while he was being investigated by Mueller.
“Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates was paid tens of thousands of dollars in 2017 by a company headed by a leading Republican fundraiser and a firm headed by Donald Trump’s inaugural committee chairman for help navigating the new administration, even as Gates was under criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, a new report says.”
“The New York Times article raises questions of why the two men, Elliott Broidy and Thomas Barrack, each of whom had close ties to the Republican Party and, in Barrack’s case, to the president himself, were paying a lobbyist like Gates for guidance on how to deal with the new administration. Gates, who did not work in the administration, was a co-founder of pro-Trump group America First Policies.”
Of course, both Barracks and Broidy are major persons of interest for Mueller.
Yes, overall, Rich Gates is doing a lot more than only testifying against Paul Manafort’s tax evasion and bank fraud.
RICK GATES COULD BE MORE DANGEROUS THAN TRUMP’S ALLIES THOUGHT
“New developments suggest Gates isn’t just testifying against Paul Manafort.”
“The indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates last year was ultimately accepted, if not welcomed, by allies of Donald Trump. Yes, the former Trump campaign chairman and his deputy had been charged with a dozen counts, including the ominous-sounding “conspiracy against the United States”—hardly a good look for two men who were instrumental in the president’s election. But the “conspiracy” that Robert Mueller had uncovered—an effort to launder money from consulting work in Ukraine, tax-free—appeared not to have anything to do with Trump, or Russia, or any collusion between the two. When Gates, buried in legal bills and concerned about his family, pleaded guilty in February to financial fraud and lying to investigators, in exchange for a reduced sentence and multiple dropped charges, it was believed that he had cut a deal to testify against Manafort.”
“According to a new CNN report, however, Mueller was more interested in what Gates could share about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia than strengthening the case against Manafort. That revelation—confirmed to CNN by a source familiar with the investigation—first came into focus earlier this week when a court document released by Mueller alleged that Gates had repeated contacts with an individual with ties to Russian intelligence during the final stretch of the presidential campaign. Between September and October 2016, Gates was in frequent conversations with this person, which the Mueller team characterized as “pertinent to the investigation” in the filing. The document also says that Gates told an associate that the individual, identified as “Person A,” “was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the G.R.U.” The New York Times reported that “Person A” is Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked with Manafort in Ukraine and who the F.B.I. believed to have active ties to the Kremlin. (Kilimnik, a Russian army-trained linguist who has previously said he has a background in Russian intelligence, has more recently claimed to have “no relation to the Russian or any other intelligence service.”) The filing was a sentencing memorandum for Russian lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. earlier this year about his contacts with Manafort and Gates. (Manafort has denied any wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty in the Mueller case.)”
No wonder Trump is freaking out.
UPDATE: Manafort would ultimately get 47 months in this Virginia case-a sentence on the low side-Chapter A. As for Gates-Manafort-collusion-it’s now clear that Manafort was integral to collusion-Chapter B.
Gates for his part also told Mueller about the time Trump told him about a coming Wikileaks’ dump.