Paul Manafort Guilty of 8 Felonies; Another Trial Next Month

After 12 days of trial testimony and 4 days of deliberation, a 12 person jury of his peers found Paul Manafort guilty in 8 out of 18 felony charges.  The 10 charges that the jury could not agree upon were declared a mistrial by Judge T.S. Ellis, and prosecutors have until 29 August to decide if they wish to try Manafort on those 10 counts again, with a different jury.  In the meantime, Manafort also has a trial set to begin in September in Washington, D.C. for 7 felony charges involving money laundering and lobbying for a foreign government without registering as a lobbyist, along with new charges of witness tampering while he was under house-arrest.
   Manafort was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts, and two counts of bank fraud.  He faces a maximum sentence of 80 years in prison.
   It was shown that Paul Manafort had collected $65 million in foreign bank accounts between 2010 and 2014, and had spent more than $15 million on luxury purchases during those years.  He lied to US banks in order to take out more than $20 million in loans once he was no longer receiving money from his sources in Ukraine and Russia in 2015. 
   "Mr Manafort lied to keep more money when he had it, and he lied to get more money when he didn't," prosecutor Greg Andres told the jurors during closing arguments.  "This is a case about lies."
   Since the witness tampering charges came to light in June, Paul Manafort has been in jail.
   And it's interesting to see that the charges the jury found him guilty of were charges that did not involve a conspiracy charge along with Rick Gates, Manafort's partner, who had already plead guilty to the charges against him.  He was a witness for the prosecution, but it seems that the defense was able to convince the jury to view Gates as a suspect witness.
   The 45th President said, after the guilty verdict, that the charges Manafort, his 2018 Campaign Chairman, was convicted on have "nothing to do with Russian collusion" and that it was "very sad."