Day 6 in the trial of former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort featured a tense cross-examination by the defense of the prosecution's star witness, former Manafort business partner Rick Gates. The defense chipped away at Gates's credibility Tuesday on two fronts, questioning both the morality of his personal life and whether he was testifying on principle or simply for personal gain.
Under the framing of "the secret life of Rick Gates," defense attorney Kevin Downing questioned Gates about a flat he kept in London and whether he used it for an extramarital affair.
"I admitted to a previous relationship," Gates said, adding that he maintained a flat for about two months. The affair occurred about 10 years ago.
Downing drilled down on $120,000 he embezzled from Manafort through a wire transfer to a company Gates set up and questioned whether it was used for his "secret life." Gates rejected that suggestion and later said that his wife knew about it. Rather, he said, "In essence, I was living beyond my means.”
Downing and Gates also clashed over his motivation for pleading guilty to his crimes and cooperating with the government. One tense moment came when Downing questioned whether the jury could take Gates at this word, and Gates asserted that he was owning up to his crimes while Manafort continues to fight them.
“I’m here to tell the truth. I'm here to take responsibility,” Gates said. “Mr. Manafort had the same path. I'm here."
At one point during the cross, Downing leveled a pointed question at Gates about the money he stole from Manafort: “Why can’t you say embezzlement?”
Gates finally responded, “It was embezzlement from Mr. Manafort."
Overall, a lot of action unfolded on Tuesday. Here's several other notable revelations:
- Gates has met with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team fully 20 times since he struck his plea deal in February. Sounds like there's been plenty to discuss.
- The work of Gates and Manafort for the Trump campaign arose for the first time during the trial and was quickly muted. Earlier in the trial, their political work for Trump had only been referenced generically as work for a presidential campaign. The prosecution and U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis have sought to keep politics out of the court room. When Downing asked Gates about his work on Trump's campaign, the prosecution objected, the judge recessed, and upon the jury's return, the Trump campaign never surfaced again.
- Manafort used his role in the Trump campaign and his ties to Gates during the transition to try to secure a Trump administration job for a Chicago banker, Stephen Calk of Federal Savings Bank, from whom he got $16 million worth of loans. "We need to discuss Steve Calk for Sec(retary) of the Army," Manafort wrote to Gates in the email dated Nov. 24, 2016.
- Gates told jurors that Manafort didn't just help pro-Russian Ukrainian Viktor Yanukovych get elected, he also upped his fee to $4 million and his company provided advice on policy and governing. It seems this could have implications for Mueller's Russia probe in terms of establishing Manafort's deep ties to oligarchs and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine.
- Gates walked the jury through documents demonstrating that Manafort systematically misled both the IRS and certain banks about his finances. At one point, the prosecution revealed an email exchange between Gates and Manafort in which Manafort was presented with what he might owe in taxes in 2014 and, he responded:
Rick,
I just saw this.
WTF?
How could I be blindsided like this. You told me you were on top of this.
We need to discuss options. This is a disaster
When am I supposed to write this check?
It was following that exchange that Gates told Manafort's bookkeeper the payment from a Ukrainian oligarch was a loan, rather than income.
Both Gates and Manafort suffered some blows Tuesday. Right from the start, Gates stumbled in admitting that he originally lied to federal prosecutors—something to which he had already pleaded guilty. Still Gates made the financial schemes the two used to deceive banks and the IRS come alive. And overall, the most damning evidence still came from the paper trail, which established that Manafort was well aware of what he and Gates were doing.
The defense will get one more crack at Gates again on Wednesday and that should be interesting—presumably they have saved their best stuff for last. But whatever they say, it can't erase the documentation thus far and the testimony of other witnesses who dealt mostly, or even exclusively, with Manafort and said he deceived them.
Bottom line: Neither Gates nor Manafort are particularly endearing characters. They both willingly and intentionally committed many crimes. But only one of them is on trial now while the other one must tell the truth on the stand in order to keep his plea agreement in tact.
Speaking of which, here's one final tidbit.
Downing also emphasized that if they are satisfied with Gates’s cooperation, prosecutors will not object to his lawyer’s request for a probationary sentence.
The defense floated that to illustrate Gates's incentive for giving prosecutors what they want. But the other side of that suggests just how valuable the prosecution must believe Gates is to their investigation.
