Since asking a quartet of questions last Thursday, the jury in Paul Manafort’s first trial has been all but silent. Manafort’s lawyers have been spreading the word that the fact that the jury did not come back immediately was a good sign for their client. But the last two days of jury silence are a better sign that this quiet jury is going to make some noise very soon. Perhaps as soon as Tuesday. The reason for this is that the jury is not wearing out a path between the jury room and Judge Ellis. That’s good evidence that this jury is not snared on hooks of legal uncertainties, isn’t about to engage in some convoluted act of nullification, and hasn’t broken down around groups of Trump supporters mumbling “witch hunt” under their breath.
All of those things might still happen. But the way in which this jury has behaved—asking some pretty big questions up front, then settling down behind closed doors—suggests that they are working about as well as any group of ordinary citizens asked to deal with a complex, high-profile set of financial crimes could be expected to work. They are slogging through the evidence, knocking off the long list of charges. Treating it all very seriously.
That’s by no means a guarantee that Manafort will be found guilty on all, or even most of the charges. And a not guilty verdict also doesn’t require any duplicitous red-hatted intent on the part of the jurors. Questions such as the one the jurors asked on the first day, concerning Manafort’s responsibility to report accounts that he split fifty-fifty with his wife, show the jury trying to come to grips with the difference between legal terminology and a plain reading of the text. They could easily decide Manafort is not guilty of some of these charges.
However, it seems extremely unlikely that any jury will absolve Manafort of all the charges. By most accounts, the prosecutors did a fine job of walking the court through Manafort’s tax evasion. Despite Judge Ellis’s snide remarks concerning Rick Gates, it seems unlikely the jury will give those hidden millions a pass.
Sometime in the next two days, it’s highly likely that the jury will return to inform Donald Trump’s campaign chair just how many charges they’re putting in his cart. And that’s when things could get interesting.
Though Trump will continue to hurl various versions of “nothing to do with me” at the Manafort verdict, there’s more to this case than just Manafort’s one-man war on the ostrich. There’s a reason why it’s Manafort. A reason why these charges. And it’s more than just the special counsel finding this crime on his way to another.
Because the charges and the conviction that Robert Mueller’s team will very likely land on Manafort are likely to also be aimed at Michael Cohen. And both Manafort and Cohen are pikers when it comes to money laundering, tax evasion, bank fraud, and failing to report foreign assets. Donald Trump was rescued from bankruptcy almost entirely by Russian mobsters who used Trump’s collapsing real estate business to move hundreds of millions, if not billions, into the United States.
Before they wanted Mueller to not ask anything about obstruction, Trump’s legal team first asked Mueller to not talk about Trump’s business. Because the potential crimes there are almost unlimited, and compared to even the sartorially flamboyant Manafort, Trump has been very sloppy about burying the bodies.
In talking about Manafort, Donald Trump mentioned the relative treatment of Al Capone. The reasons for Trump to be having Capone-y thoughts is more than just worry over whether “good person” Manafort has a comfy mattress. Capone, despite all his other crimes, went to jail over tax fraud.
Far from having “nothing to do with Trump,” the charges against Manafort have everything to do with the charges that may be in Mueller’s report. As much as Republicans May want to argue that collusion is not collusion and obstruction is Trump’s right, they’re going to have a harder time explaining why Trump should get away with tax fraud on a massive scale.
