Paul Manafort was in desperate financial straights when he signed up to work as Donald Trump's campaign chair supposedly for free (nothing’s ever free in politics). That's what Heather Washkuhn, Manafort's bookkeeper since 2011, told jurors Thursday. Politico writes:
As his work as a political consultant with the Ukraine dried up, Manafort’s international lobbying company was going into the red. Washkuhn testified that the firm lost $630,000 in 2015 and $1.1. million in 2016, the same year Manafort linked up with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Washkuhn also said she had no knowledge of Manafort's dozen-plus offshore bank accounts. As prosecutors led her through a paper trail of financial documents and emails, she said Manafort had provided some of them to the bank behind her back and that some did not properly reflect her understanding of his finances. For instance, a 2016 document Manafort had sent to First Savings Bank to apply for a loan inflated his wealth by $4 million, according to her records.
Plus, far from Manafort being at arm's length from the bookkeeping, Washkuhn called him meticulous and "detail oriented."
“He approved every penny of everything we paid,” she explained.
This was the jury's introduction to the bank fraud case the government will make in the next several days. The government's final witness of the day was Manafort's accountant, James Philip Ayliff, of Kositzka, Wicks and Co., or KWC, in Richmond.
Ayliff also testified that he didn't know about Manafort's offshore accounts. "We had asked the question, and the response was, 'No,'" he told jurors. Manafort's tax returns reflected the same.
Tax returns from 2011 to 2015 shown to the jury were all signed by Manafort. One of the questions on the return was "Did you have signatory authority in an account in a foreign country?" The response on the tax form signed by Manafort was "No."
We'll likely hear more from Ayliff on Friday as he was on the stand for under an hour.
Friday will also feature birthday cake for one of the jurors, whose big day will be spent at the courthouse. It’s apparently a good sign for prosecutors that there's enough camaraderie among the jurists that they requested permission from the judge to celebrate a birthday among them.
"A happy jury is a good jury for the government," former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah told MSNBC Thursday. That's because you need the agreement of all twelve jurors to either convict or acquit. Acquittal isn't an issue in this situation, Rocah said, because the government’s case is so strong.
"What you worry about is the one or two lone-wolf jurors who doesn't want to go along with the program, and you get a hung jury," she explained. But if you have a jury that's celebrating and "bonding," she added, "that's a good thing going into deliberations when that time comes."