Mueller v. Manafort: Is It about Gates — or a Mountain of Documents?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
August 16, 2018 6:30 AM
The prosecution wants the jury to focus on Manafort’s document trail.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, the star witness in this case is the documents.†That is the theme prosecutor Greg Andres hammered home in his summation at Paul Manafort’s bank- and tax-fraud trial in an Alexandria, Va., federal court.
It is a theme that much of the media coverage has glossed over, though it is unlikely to have been overlooked by the jury of six men and six women that sat through the case presented by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
So will jurors stay focused on the documents — the financial records that prove tens of millions of dollars in income that Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, stashed in overseas accounts, failing to report the accounts or the income to the IRS?
The defense, of course, has a strategy to help the jury overlook the documents. The strategy even has a name: Rick Gates. The idea is to portray Mueller’s case as rising or falling on Manafort’s longtime business partner and accomplice.
Gates was the trial’s most prominent witness, and he is a scoundrel. Indeed, the only fraud that has been proved so far is Gates’s prodigious embezzlement from Manafort — during the time prosecutors allege that they were both cheating the government. According to the defense, embezzlement just scratches the surface of Gates’s loathsomeness, which also includes extramarital flings and other betrayals. Gates, then, is the star witness, according to Richard Westling, the lawyer who summed up on Manafort’s behalf. If the jury sees him as a fallen star, he just might take the prosecution’s case down with him.
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/paul-manafort-trial-mueller-team-focuses-on-documents/
