In the final hours of the bank and tax fraud trial of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, the prosecution's closing argument boiled down to one key point.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the star witness in this case is the documents,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Andres told the 12 jurors seated in the Alexandria, Virginia, federal courthouse.
Prosecutors sought to downplay the importance of Manafort's former deputy Rick Gates—who conspired with Manafort to commit crimes—by making clear that their case rested not on Gates but rather the cache of documents showing Manafort stashed $60 million in foreign accounts he sought to hide from the government.
Andres spent most of the two hour allotted to the government walking through the documents in detail, demonstrating how the type of fraud Manafort committed changed depending on his own financial needs.
"Mr. Manafort lied to keep more money when he had it, and he lied to get more money when he didn't," Andres told the jury.
The defense argued that government prosecutors had "selectively" pulled a trove of documents together that didn't actually prove Manafort had committed any crimes beyond a reasonable doubt. Politico writes:
“They’ve done a good job of selectively pulling information together. But it’s been a selection,” said Richard Westling, a member of Manafort’s five-man legal team.
Westling portrayed Mueller’s team as if it had been fishing for a crime that never existed and said the indictments against Manafort didn’t happen until “the special counsel showed up and started asking questions.”
(Prosecutors later objected to his idea of selective targeting from the special counsel, saying it violated the terms set out by Judge T.S. Ellis III. Ellis quickly declared the objection "quite correct" and said he would tell jurors to ignore it during his jury instruction.)
Westling also advanced the idea that Manafort couldn't possibly have been trying to engage in criminal behavior because he let so many people know about what he was doing.
“That’s not consistent with someone attempting to commit a fraud,” he said.
And as expected, defense attorney Kevin Downing mercilessly skewered Gates as an untrustworthy thief who was "orchestrating a multimillion dollar embezzlement scheme” and could not be believed. The Washington Post writes:
Downing asserted that Gates was deceptive with jurors even on the witness stand. “To the very end, he lied to you,” Downing said. And he lambasted Gates’s plea agreement with prosecutors, which allows Gates’s defense attorneys to argue for a sentence of probation.
“The government, so desperate to make a case against Mr. Manafort, made a deal with Rick Gates,” Downing said. He added later: “How he was able to get the deal he got, I have no idea.”
When it came time for the prosecution's rebuttal, Andres put the focus back on the “dozens and dozens” of documents and emails showing Manafort was complicit in the crimes he and Gates committed.
He displayed a few examples for jurors, including one in October 2011 in which an accountant asked Manafort if he had any foreign accounts. Manafort said he did not. He showed another in which Manafort referred to a foreign account using the personal pronoun “my.”
Andres said they weren't asking jurors to like Gates. Manafort was the one who chose Gates and, by design, “He didn’t choose a Boy Scout,” Andres noted. What jurors should focus on, he said, was whether what Gates said was consistent with the testimony of other witnesses and the paper trail they had seen.
Everything else the defense offered was a misdirection, Andres concluded: "The defense is asking you to ignore your own common sense."
When it came time for jury instruction, Judge Ellis made several key points, summarized by the Post:
• Ellis told the jury that they were to ignore any Department of Justice “motive or lack thereof” when making its decision.
• Ellis reminded the jury they should not construe comments or questions he made from the bench as opinions to be considered in their deliberations.
• In order to convict Manafort, jurors must find that he acted willfully, knowingly and intentionally.
In the end, their decision needs to be unanimous, Ellis said, and their ultimate charge was "to seek the truth in the case.”
Jury deliberation begins Thursday.