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."
 

The Meeting - 9 June 2016

Who the heck wasn't at the Trump Tower meeting on 9 June 2016, one floor below the Republican Presidential nominee's "home" office?  It has been, what, ten days since the first news of this meeting was released?
    In the released "original" e-mails received and sent by the Cheeto-head's Junior son, the letters plainly say that the meeting is provide information from a meeting between "the Crown Prosecutor of Russia" and Aras Agalarov and, after, "their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.
    This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump - helped along by Aras and Emin."
    First, there is no such person with the title of Crown Prosecutor of Russia, but the person writing the letter is a British subject.  It is suspected that the man he is referring to is Russian Attorney General Yuri Chaika.  Aras Agalarov is a Russian real estate mogul and oligarch, with years of ties to the Trumps.  The son Emin Agalarov is a Russian pop singer, who adores our current elected President.  The person who started this chain of letters on 3 June 2016 which ended with the meeting in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016, was Rob Goldstone, a British publicist for Emin Agalarov, and a former tabloid news writer.
    Originally it was reported that only four people were present for the 9 June meeting - Don Junior, brother-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign manager Paul Manafort, and a female Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya.  Then reports started saying other people were in the meeting.  The lawyer, Velselnitskaya, had an interpreter - who has never yet been identified; Rob Goldstone, the publicist, was there; and one, or possibly two more people.  Ms Veselnitskaya claims that she was sent by her government only to discuss US sanctions against Russian adoptions, and that she has no ties to the Kremlin, or the Russian government.  Her husband is a Russian intelligence agent.  She dines frequently with top-level Russian officials.  She takes personal instructions from Yuri Chaika and from Vladimir Putin.  - Of course, she has no ties to the Kremlin.
     Yesterday, it was reported that Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-born lobbyist, who has spoken openly of his past as a Soviet military counter-intelligence officer, and who was once accused of hacking an American company's computer system, was also present at the meeting.  Akhmetshin, who says he is now retired, was a skilled practitioner in the rough Russian version of opposition research.  From his base in Washington, DC he has been hired by an ever-changing roster of clients, often Russian, to burnish their image and blacken those of their rivals.  He has been referred to as a master of the dark arts of  "kompromat" - the collection of compromising information by the Soviet KGB.
     This morning, Scott Balber, an attorney who has represented both of the Agalarovs, father Aras and son Emin, and has also represented the President in two lawsuits, announced that his client Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, was also at that meeting.  Who is Ike?  In 2000, Congressional investigators were looking into money laundering, and kept finding Ike Kaveladze's name.  He was an obscure Soviet-born financier who offered special services to his Russian clients.  He had opened 2,000 shell companies in the state of Delaware and opened more than 100 bank accounts for Russian clients who moved more than $1.4 billion through those accounts to overseas destinations.  The attorney, Mr Balber, stated that Ike Kaveladze was there to observe what happened for the Agalarov family.
   I want to know the name of the interpreter.  I want to know if there were any other people present.  Natalia Veselnistskaya states that the only thing discussed were US sanctions and the Magnitsky Act.  Others there state that a pile of documents were left in the room for the Republican campaign people to discover, digest, and divulge.
    In a reply e-mail to Rob Goldstone, Don Junior states that he "loves it" and that he wants the information to come out later in the summer.  And - voila!  Just before the Democratic Convention, WikiLeaks starts releasing documents from the DNC and from Hilary Clinton's campaign manager.  Seems too much for coincidence to me....