dagblog - Comments for "The Manafort trial: Testimony begins"

Paul Manafort trial Day 3:

artappraiser — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 18:57:12 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

Paul Manafort trial Day 3: Bookkeeper testifies she did not know of Manafort’s offshore accounts

@ WaPo by three reporters, August 2 at 2:19 PM

CNN is still providing continual updates from the courtroom at the same link as the top of the thread, currently they've got it titled

The Manafort trial: Testimony continues on Day 3

with four reporters covering it, Updated 56 min ago

and they have the bookkeeper stuff (14 offshore accounts!) and after that "lunch break" and after that Manafort spent millions on audio-video home installations and $10,000 on a karaoke system

Dana Millbank @ WaPo did an

artappraiser — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 01:13:24 +0000

In reply to Funny, could Mueller's first

Dana Millbank @ WaPo did an op-ed today on Devine's admissions, I've excerpted the main part

The deep cynicism of Bernie Sanders’s chief strategist

[.....] Yanukovych’s fraudulent election in 2004 as Ukraine’s president was invalidated, but not before his opponent was poisoned by dioxin. Yet testimony in the Manafort trial and documents released by Manafort’s lawyers show Devine helped Manafort on Yanukovych’s comeback as prime minister in 2006 and successful presidential run in 2010. Devine produced a memo of advice for Yanukovych’s party in 2012, even though by then Yanukovych had thrown the leading opposition politician in jail and had built a $100 million mansion — complete with zoo, helipad, golf course and replica galleon on an artificial lake — while his people were, in Devine’s own words, struggling with “joblessness, hunger and the general despair.”

Yanukovych was ousted in 2014 after he halted Ukraine’s movement toward the European Union, yet Devine offered to help Manafort’s efforts in the 2014 Ukraine election — for a price. “We are ready to take on this project,” he wrote to Manafort partner Rick Gates, for $100,000 per month (payable in advance), $25,000 per week of runoff, a $50,000 “success fee” and expenses including first-class airfare. In June 2014 — even as talks about the Sanders presidential run were getting underway — Devine went to Ukraine to help remnants of Yanukovych’s party reforming under a new name. “My rate for something like this would be $10,000/day, including travel days,” he wrote to Gates.

As Sanders likes to say, let me be clear: Manafort is the one on trial for money laundering and other crimes. Devine is a witness for the prosecution; as prosecutors pointed out when he testified Tuesday, he wasn’t the one with a bank account in Cyprus. There is no hint Devine did anything illegal — only cynical.

Manafort, who worked for the world’s sleazebags, made no pretense of scruples. But Devine was the guy molding the Sanders campaign as a righteous, everyman’s insurgency against the corrupt, wealthy establishment. Devine, who had worked on Sanders’s first campaign for the Senate in 2006 (the same year he plotted Yanukovych’s comeback), earned more than $5 million for his firm from the populist Sanders presidential campaign and at least $10 million in commissions split with another firm, according to a Slate tally.

Devine, through an employee, declined to comment Wednesday [....]

Here's How the Government

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 09:35:44 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

Here's How the Government Plans to Take Down Paul Manafort

By NATASHA BERTRAND @ TheAtlantic.com, July 31

The fraud case against President Trump’s former campaign chairman is highly complex. But prosecutors are sending a simple message to jurors: “Manafort lied.”

A scorched-earth prosecutor

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 09:11:13 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

A scorched-earth prosecutor and not a mention of Trump

In a packed courtroom in Alexandria, Va., special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team made its public debut.

By Marc Fisher @ WashingtonPost.com, July 31

A courtroom sketch depicts Paul Manafort, seated second
from right, with his lawyers, the jury, seated at left, and
U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III listening to
Assistant U.S. Attorney Uzo Asonye’s
opening statement. (Dana Verkouteren/AP)

[....] The nation’s inaugural look at special counsel Mueller’s team in action started with a bang. Assistant U.S. Attorney Uzo Asonye, brought onto the special counsel’s staff from the Alexandria federal prosecutor’s office for this case, faced the jury and declared: “A man in this courtroom believed the law did not apply to him.”

But Asonye’s effort to deliver a classically simple, prosecutor’s zinger of an opening got tripped up as U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III interrupted Asonye twice in his first minute, first admonishing him to steer away from bold assertions and only tell the jury what the evidence would show, then halting the prosecutor’s description of Manafort’s lavish lifestyle.

“It isn’t a crime to be profligate in your spending,” Ellis said.

With more than a dozen of his colleagues from the federal investigation alongside and behind him, Asonye recovered quickly, keeping jurors riveted through a 26-minute opening statement that portrayed Manafort as someone who lied about his taxes, his income, his business and a litany of other topics.

Mueller’s prosecutors, nearly all in dark navy-blue suits, had entered the courtroom with a studied determination. They wheeled in 10 boxes of documents on two carts. They sat among themselves before the proceedings began, trading stories about scary judges and their first year in law school.

They looked, in contrast with Manafort’s defense team, like Alexandria, the diverse Potomac riverfront suburb where the trial is being held because Manafort lives nearby. The prosecution table included Asonye, who is African American; two younger white men; and a female FBI agent [....]

This Is So Much Bigger Than

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 02:12:58 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

Two big picture thinkers chime in

This Is So Much Bigger Than Paul Manafort

By FRANKLIN FOER @ TheAtlantic.com, July 31, 4:51 PM ET

With Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman on trial, America is reckoning with its very serious kleptocracy problem.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Swamp Chronicles: What Paul Manafort’s Trial Could Tell Us About the Mueller Investigation

By Adam Davidson @ NewYorker.com, July 31, 9:05 PM ET

The first trial of Trump’s former campaign chair raises troubling questions.

The government has released

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 01:17:02 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

The government has released the exhibits admitted into evidence today— they intend to do so at the end of each court day, per Mueller spox Peter Carr https://t.co/frpvPqOhCO
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) July 31, 2018

Lawfare blog: Paul Manafort’s

artappraiser — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 00:21:28 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

Lawfare blog: Paul Manafort’s Virginia Trial: The Charges and the Stakes for Trump

By Autumn Brewington Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 9:11 AM

"Collusion" and "Russians" are not supposed to be mentioned at trial focused on financial fraud allegations

Funny, could Mueller's first

PeraclesPlease — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 22:43:45 +0000

In reply to WaPo current headlines:

Funny, could Mueller's first up be as much at this point to have Manafort's team introducing evidence to discredit Tad Devine? That could produce some interesting revelations.

WaPo current headlines:

artappraiser — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 21:41:52 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

WaPo current headlines:

Prosecutors call first witness in Manafort trial

First to the stand is Tad Devine, the architect of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, who also worked closely with President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort as a political consultant in Ukraine.

By Rachel Weiner, Justin Jouvenal, Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky

Jury consists of 6 men and 6 women

Six things you need to know about Manafort’s trial

The fraud case against Trump’s onetime campaign chairman is the first trial involving the special counsel probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

By Rachel Weiner

The spectacular rise and fall of Paul Manafort

Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort was an adviser to a Ukrainian strongman. After what happened in Kiev, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

By Dalton Bennett, Jon Gerberg and Jesse Mesner-Hage

Manafort's lawyer actually

artappraiser — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 20:56:36 +0000

In reply to The Manafort trial: Testimony begins

Manafort's lawyer actually argued that his work for Yanukovych was to “bring the country closer to Western democracies after decades of Soviet rule."
— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) July 31, 2018

The defense says Manafort is an upstanding citizen who justifiably made a lot of money for his work, and he made the mistake of trusting Rick Gates to handle the company's finances.
— Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian) July 31, 2018