Trump's ex-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, convicted on eight counts of fraud
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been found guilty of eight financial crime charges in the first trial victory for special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
He was found guilty of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of hiding foreign bank accounts.
A judge declared a mistrial on 10 other counts after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict.
The jury deliberated for four days before announcing the verdict at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.
Prosecutors spent more than two weeks presenting their case as they sought to prove Manafort concealed millions of dollars in offshore accounts from the IRS.
Paul Manafort, the political operative who for months led Donald Trump’s winning presidential campaign, has been found guilty of eight financial crimes.
It is the first trial victory of the special counsel investigation into the president’s associates. A judge declared a mistrial on 10 other counts the jury could not agree on.
The verdict was part a stunning one-two punch of bad news for the White House, coming as the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was pleading guilty in New York as part of a separate deal with prosecutors.
The jury returned the decision after deliberating four days on the charges of tax evasion and bank fraud against the former Trump campaign chairman.
The outcome almost certainly guarantees years of prison for Manafort and established the ability of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team to persuade a jury of average citizens despite months of partisan attacks — including from President Trump — on the investigation’s integrity.
The verdict raised immediate questions of whether the president would seek to pardon Manafort, the lone American charged by Mr Mueller to opt for trial instead of cooperate.
The president has not revealed his thinking but spoke sympathetically throughout the trial of his onetime aide, at one point suggesting he had been treated worse than gangster Al Capone.
Looking back on history, who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and “Public Enemy Number One,” or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement - although convicted of nothing? Where is the Russian Collusion?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2018
The more-than-two-week trial, presided over by US District Judge TS Ellis III, has captured President Trump’s attention as he works to undermine Mr Mueller’s investigation through a constant Twitter barrage and increasingly antagonistic statements from his lawyer-spokesman, Rudy Giuliani.
But President Trump and his campaign were only a small part of Manafort’s trial, as jurors instead heard days of testimony about Manafort’s finances and what prosecutors say was a years-long tax-evasion and fraud scheme.
Manafort decided not to put on any witnesses or testify himself in the trial. His lawyers said he made the decision because he did not believe the government had met its burden of proof.
