Manafort Found Guilty on Eight Charges

Photo from Ukrinform–UATV

Former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, was convicted yesterday on eight counts of financial wrongdoing, Reuters reports.

After almost four days of deliberations, a 12-member jury found Manafort guilty on two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one charge of failing to disclose foreign bank accounts.

The jury could not reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts with which Manafort was charged. Judge T.S. Ellis declared a mistrial on those counts.

On Aug. 8, a week into the trial, FBI accountant Morgan Magionos described document after document showing how Manafort controlled a web of overseas bank accounts that wired $16 million in untaxed income to American businesses ranging from landscapers to the clothier in Manhattan that sold him the ostrich jacket.

Prosecutors said Manafort collected $65 million in foreign bank accounts from 2010 to 2014 and spent more than $15 million on luxury purchases in the same period, including high-end clothing, real estate, landscaping and other big-ticket items.

Prosecutors entered 388 exhibits into evidence and offered testimony from 27 witnesses who painted a picture of Manafort as a tax cheat, who used offshore accounts to hide a significant portion of the more than $60 million he earned working for pro-Russian politicans in Ukraine, and lied to banks to obtain loans when his political work dried up in 2014, and he needed cash.

Manafort, 69, has been in jail since June after his bail was revoked following new charges of witness tampering against him.

He still faces a second set of criminal charges in a Washington D.C.’s federal court: failure to register his foreign lobbying and money laundering conspiracy related to the same Ukrainian political work that was central to the first case.