535

Manafort’s defense attorney’s whole case is Rick Gates made him do it. Certainly the defense’s narrative that this is all about one criminally dishonest rogue employee got a shot in the arm when Gates begun his testimony going into detail his own crimes. He detailed the many crimes that he and Manafort committed together-and knowingly so. The two of them set up 15 foreign accounts knowing full well that it was illegal. 

“Rick Gates, the key prosecution witness in the tax and fraud trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, testified Monday he had committed crimes alongside and at the direction of his former partner — and had also stolen from Manafort himself.”

“In stunning testimony, Gates stated he and Manafort had 15 foreign accounts they did not report to the federal government, and knew it was illegal. Gates said he did not submit the required forms “at Mr. Manafort’s direction.”

“Gates then admitted that he also turned the tables on Manafort — cheating him out of “several hundred thousand” dollars by submitting false expense reports that were paid out of some of the undisclosed foreign bank accounts in Cyprus.”

Well as is said there’s no honor among thieves so this should  not be shocking. No doubt that Gates stole from Manafort himself this is a helpful anecdote for the defense who is claiming that Manafort was Gates’ victim. Though don’t waste tears crying for Manafort who may well have factored that in an neutralized the cost to himself.

Gates also confessed to ripping off other bosses. Again though no honor among thieves and there’s nothing that Gates did that Manafort wouldn’t do himself-and did do, may times over. After all, he hired Gates, he chose to associate with him, nor did he fire or terminate their relationship after Gates ripped him off. Because that was small potatoes next to what he was gaining with Gates’ help.

“Offering evidence against his former partner, Gates described how the two men worked in Ukraine for former pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, and how Yanukovych’s backers moved money from their accounts in Cyprus to Manafort.”

“The defense in the case is likely to subject Gates to an intensive cross-examination after arguing during opening statements that he embezzled millions of dollars from Manafort and then turned against him under pressure from Mueller.”

“Gates told the jury that as part of his plea with prosecutors, he revealed several other crimes that were not previously known and that were not included in the federal indictments against him and Manafort.”

“Aside from admitting to the false expense reports, Gates said he also created a fake letter to an investment company for a different colleague, Steve Brown. He also over-reported his income on mortgage and credit card applications and lied to his own personal tax accountant.

Gates also said he lied in a lawsuit deposition years ago, after Manafort “asked me not to include” certain things in the deposition.”

This request by Manafort was what led him to be charged with witness tampering and be sent straight to jail.

Again, though, while the defense will try to harp on Gates’ own sleaziness, he worked for Manafort at his direction. As noted yesterday, this often happens in such criminal cases-you have bad guys testifying against other bad guys. If Gates were a saint he wouldn’t have been working for Manafort.

https://lastmenandovermen.com/2018/08/06/this-week-maybe-today-rich-gates-testifies-against-manafort-and-despite-appearances-big-picture-is-collusion/

Everyday defense attorneys attempt to put important cooperating witnesses on trail and prosecutors point out that the jury doesn’t have to like the CW they just have to believe him/her.

As Franlin Foer puts it, in his testimony yesterday, Gates described a parallel ethical universe where lying and cheating were as comfortable as a well tailored ostrich suit. 

“To understand just how ingrained their slippery habits had become, consider a defining moment from Monday’s proceedings of the Paul Manafort trial. In the course of turning state’s witness against his old boss, the former lobbyist Rick Gates admitted to the court that he repeatedly defrauded Manafort by inflating the expense reports he submitted to him. It wasn’t a trivial sum that he siphoned. He described his take as amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Or put it this way: Gates defrauded Manafort who was, in turn, allegedly defrauding banks and the United States government (with his potemkin tax returns).”

“Nor was there anything necessarily spiteful about Gates filching a little cash on the sly. Based on everything I’ve ever heard or read in the course of my reporting on Manafort, Gates worshipped his boss. He felt a sense of subservience, love even. And the warmth was mutual and could be described as filial. But that bond was never going to get in the way of bilking Manafort. They had spent nearly a decade in Ukraine, working for oligarchs and politicians. During those years abroad, the pair adopted the business practices of the Ukrainian political elite.”

The business practices of the Ukrainian political elite are something to behold:

“We know how Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were paid—a method that has been revealed in a memo that prosecutors have introduced in the course of the trial. According to court documents, Manafort would ask Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych for a massive sum of money. (The tone of one memo he wrote to Yanukovych is strangely confessional; Manafort described his precarious financial position to the president, even as he thanked him for getting paid millions.)”

The Ukrainian president would then send out a collection plate to his party’s wealthy donors.

“The president would then ask his chief of staff to collect contributions from the financial patrons of his political party. One Manafort associate told me that in the course of passing the hat to oligarchs, the chief of staff would collect more money than the bill required. The chief of staff would pocket some of that surplus cash for himself, a small tax for his efforts. In Ukraine, the rich excel at finding novel ways to exact fees, to skim money, to capture rents. Having participated in the system for so long, it seems Paul Manafort and Rick Gates internalized these techniques themselves.”

“So what? One strand of conventional wisdom holds that the Manafort trial has little to do with Donald Trump, let alone Russian collusion.”

Of course, this CW ignores the fact that Mueller’s interest in Gates is not just to prove Manafort is a tax cheat but even more what he knows about regarding collusion. And it’s important to remember that Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager for 5 very important moments in his campaign and that Gates stayed with the Trump team long after Manafort’s embarrassing connections to Russia forced him out; it was actually his tie to Kilimnik that was the proximate cause-Kilimnik was his man in Kiev. 

We now know Manafort was central to Russian collusion-maybe going back to 2015. See Chapter A

By the way, Gates also knew Kilimnik well and met with him during the campaign.

But Foer gets to the heart of the matter-with their history and ‘Ukranian’ mode of doing business it’d be very surprising if they didn’t do it that way when they ran Trump’s campaign.

“You know what would be surprising? If Rick Gates and Paul Manafort had suddenly suspended their apparently deeply ingrained habits of fraudulence and thievery during the three months that they ran the Trump campaign.”

“Other chapters of their recent history—the chapters bracketing the campaign—include alleged episodes of witness tampering, lying to federal prosecutors, bank and tax fraud, as well as failure to register as agents of a foreign government. Therefore, given all that has emerged about their shared ethical framework, it’s hard to imagine that the public has received the exhaustive account of those months.”

Indeed-my assumption for the Trumpers more generally is that it’s always even worse than we think-based on current knowledge. I always presume that we have yet to receive an exhaustive account; this presumption hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

FN: Despite Margaret Sullivan’s entreaty the MSM learned nothing from their gullibility with Bill Barr’s fake exoneration letter and declared Mueller revealed nothing new in his Congressional testimony despite the fact that he very casually revealed that the FBI is continuing to do a counterintelligence investigation into the question of wether the fake ‘President’ is a real security risk.

So no doubt there remains a great deal we don’t know yet-Adam Schiff’s committee is pushing to see the counterintel.