Today, Explained - Manafort, day in court

Episode Date: July 30, 2018

The first trial of the Mueller investigation begins tomorrow. Vox’s Andrew Prokop runs through the many, many charges Paul Manafort is facing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices....com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello? Mom! Yes, Sean? You'll never believe it, but this is the last week of Uber ads for a good while, Mom. Wow! I wanted to kind of call all my Uber friends and touch base and see how their lives have changed since we started talking about Uber. Oh! I did take a Uber... Well, before you get into it, though, I just want to remind you that Uber is moving forward,
Starting point is 00:00:22 and you can find out how the company is adding new features to the app at uber.com slash moving forward. Moving forward. The very first trial to come out of the Robert Mueller investigation begins tomorrow in Alexandria, Virginia. And it's a bit of a doozy. Five counts of filing false income tax returns. Four counts of failing to report foreign bank accounts. Four counts of bank fraud charges. And five counts of bank fraud conspiracy. Paul Manafort is facing the music and Andrew Prokop has been following along for Vox. So Manafort has been kind of a legendary figure in Republican consulting and lobbyist circles for decades. He worked on several presidential campaigns and then he started this mega lobbying business that just raked in cash from all sorts of shady clients abroad. The most money he made, it seems, was doing work
Starting point is 00:01:28 for the government of Ukraine. Amounting to over $12 million given to Manafort over five years. In 2016, he joined Donald Trump's presidential campaign and was the campaign chairman for several months. Today, the resignation of the embattled campaign chairman Paul Manafort amid a wave of bad headlines and growing questions about Manafort's connections to Russia. Now he's come under Robert Mueller's scrutiny. So what's the trial about? It sounds like a lot of financial crime. It's a little complicated because he's actually facing two trials. The one this week in Virginia, the first trial, it's basically a set of charges that are all related to his finances, how he made tons of money from his work in Ukraine, parked the money in a set of offshore accounts, and used it to buy luxury goods and services for himself in the US and real estate without ever paying goods and services for himself in the U.S.
Starting point is 00:02:25 and real estate without ever paying taxes on it or declaring it as income. They are showing his spending like his home putting green, high priced Yankees tickets, a $21,000 watch, designer clothes, oriental rugs. Then there are another set of charges about what he tried to do for cash afterwards, doctoring his company's profit and loss forms to get these big hefty loans that would give him some more liquid cash. In addition to these 18 charges Paul Manafort is facing in Virginia for all this money laundering and bank fraud, there's this whole other trial that's going to begin in September in D.C.? Yes. So he's charged with seven other counts, conspiracy to defraud the United States,
Starting point is 00:03:09 conspiracy to launder money, acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, making false and misleading Foreign Agent Registration Act statements, another false statements charge, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. So this sounds more like the juicy conspiratorial stuff that the Mueller investigation sort of has as a stock and trade. It is more about foreign influence, but there's still nothing that directly alleges that Manafort worked with the Russian government to interfere with the 2016 campaign. Okay, tell me a bit more about these financial crimes at issue in this first trial that starts tomorrow in Virginia.
Starting point is 00:03:53 Around 2005, Manafort started working for the pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and its leader, Viktor Yanukovych. They were out of power at the time, and Manafort put together a campaign strategy to put them back in power. He redid his look, his physical appearance, the suits he wore, the way he did his hair, and then put together like really a top-notch American-style political campaign. Yanukovych became president. He ruled for four years and kept paying Manafort in that time. Manafort's name is scrawled 22 times in a handwritten list of cash payments that's known in Ukraine as the Black Ledger. While that was going on,
Starting point is 00:04:46 Manafort set up these offshore bank accounts, and Mueller says that about $75 million passed through them from Ukraine in this period. Manafort would basically use that money directly to buy things for himself in the U.S. He would wire the money from his foreign offshore accounts to a home improvement company in the Hamptons or an antique rug store in Alexandria, Virginia, or a men's clothing store in New York. And several cars are involved too, three different Range Rovers, a Mercedes.
Starting point is 00:05:23 Basically, Manafort was living the high life and he spent about $12 million directly from these offshore accounts without ever mentioning it in his tax returns as income. Mueller essentially argues that this violated the law in two ways. One is that he didn't report any of this money on his income tax returns or pay taxes on it. So then in early 2014, Yanukovych was deposed. A leader backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and so deeply unpopular for his rampant corruption that he was chased out of his multi-billion dollar palace and into exile in Russia. Manafort stopped getting those big payments. So there's a second set of charges about what he supposedly tried to do to get cash then, which was basically a constant series of
Starting point is 00:06:16 alleged misstatements or outright lies on documents he'd submit to banks to try to get loans on the properties he owned. Has the president commented on these trials? Does he view this as a great injustice or is he on board with this aspect of the Mueller investigation? Trump has interestingly been a little reticent to weigh in on Manafort. I think that's because the charges against Manafort are very serious and very strong. Like, you know, it's not like just money. He's accused of essentially laundering $30 million unfair because, you know, Democrats do similar things and they don't get prosecuted, which is pretty ridiculous. I haven't heard of a
Starting point is 00:07:11 Democrat being accused of laundering $30 million and not being prosecuted for it. But that's where we are. Lately, Trump has been complaining that Manafort was sent to jail. Let me pull up the tweets. Let me pull up the tweets. Evergreen statement. Let me pull up the tweets. Let me pull up the tweets. Evergreen statement. Let me pull up the tweets. Didn't know Manafort was the head of the mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all the others? Very unfair.
Starting point is 00:07:37 What kind of argument is that? What? Yeah, I guess, you know. What about Comey? What about James Comey? Sure. God. Is anyone testifying against him from like the Trump campaign or anywhere else in either of these two trials? So the star witness against Manafort is his protege, Rick Gates, who worked with him in Ukraine, worked with him on the Trump campaign, was charged with him by Mueller last October.
Starting point is 00:08:05 And in February, Gates cut a plea deal in exchange for his cooperation. So he's expected to take the stand in both the Virginia and D.C. trials to make the case for why his former boss is a criminal. How did it take the Mueller investigation to crack open insane amounts of bank fraud and money laundering? Wouldn't that be something that someone else would catch on to sooner? He was actually under investigation for this back in 2014. The FBI was looking into him, but for whatever reason, they didn't decide to move forward with it then. Only after he got this high-level role on the Trump campaign and then allegations of potentially being involved in collusion with Russia, here we are. He's charged with all of these offenses related to his finances, his foreign lobbying, but still not yet anything directly related to
Starting point is 00:09:07 interfering with the 2016 election. How much time might he get if he's convicted on these charges specifically related to bank fraud and money laundering? There is one estimate that he would face 305 years in prison, so basically life. And does it look pretty likely that he's going to get convicted in either the Virginia trial or the D.C. trial? This sort of case, especially in the Virginia trial, is very much just about financial documents, not filling out forms he was supposed to fill out legally, and where he spent his money. It's what some people call a paper case.
Starting point is 00:09:53 It's really more about just what happened on paper and not really about, you know, hinging on witness credibility or anything like that. So most observers think that his chances of being convicted are pretty high. Anything can happen at trial. But in general, people think that the evidence against Manafort looks pretty strong and he's pretty likely to get convicted. In a minute, these charges may not have anything to do with the Mueller investigation, but they are totally and completely related to the Mueller investigation.
Starting point is 00:10:36 This is Today Explained. Okay, tell me about your life. Oh, my life? It's very hot in Southern California. No, no, I mean your life since finding out about Uber.com slash moving forward. Oh, Uber. Okay. Well, week before last, I had to go somewhere in the night, late night. So I did take Uber, and it was a good ride, I guess. Oh, nice. Did you use pickup notes to describe yourself?
Starting point is 00:11:20 Did you say, like, I'm the lady who rated and reviewed Today Explained on Apple Podcasts? Because that kind of thing actually does really help the show? No, I didn't give them any pickup notes. No, I didn't. Okay. Fair enough. Have you ever listened to the Reveal podcast, mom? Reveal? No. It's seriously one of
Starting point is 00:11:37 the best shows in existence. It's from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX and, you know, as you'd expect, it has a lot of great investigative storytelling. I will listen to it. Yeah, the newest episode's about this American war crime from World War II that's sort of been lost to history. It's about how American soldiers opened fire
Starting point is 00:11:56 on a bunch of German soldiers who were prisoners of war and unarmed at the time. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, they get this 93-year-old veteran to talk about this secret that he's been keeping for more than 70 years. Wow. Anyway, yeah, you can find it on Apple Podcasts. Apple Podcasts?
Starting point is 00:12:14 Okay. All right. All right, darling. You take care. You too. Bye. Andrew Prokop, none of the charges in the D.C. trial or the Virginia trial have anything to do with the Trump campaign and collusion with Russia. So why should people care about this? So Mueller has been going about this investigation very purposefully.
Starting point is 00:12:41 And he's had his eye on Manafort from the very start. And that's for good reason. I mean, if you're investigating whether Donald Trump's presidential campaign of 2016 worked with the Russian government to interfere with the election, then maybe the guy who has a history of working for pro-Russian interests in the region and who happened to be heavily in debt to a Russian oligarch at the time is pretty clearly someone who you should be investigating. And there are a couple of things we know publicly that Manafort did during the campaign that have raised some questions. Manafort attended the infamous meeting at Trump Tower that Donald Trump Jr. set up with a Russian lawyer. Then there are a series of interesting emails that Manafort sent during the campaign that have come to light.
Starting point is 00:13:43 These emails involve two people. One is Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who Manafort used to work for and was in a whole lot of debt to. The AP reports Manafort told Deripaska in 2005 he was pushing policies, quote, at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the White House, Capitol Hill, and the State Department. According to the documents and according Capitol Hill, and the State Department. According to the documents and according to the report, Manafort wrote in his memo, we are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success, end quote. And then there was Konstantin Kilimnik, who used to work for Manafort in Ukraine, and Mueller says that he is tied to Russian intelligence.
Starting point is 00:14:30 Manafort and Kilimnik emailed each other, basically talking about connecting his Trump campaign work to satisfying his debt to Oleg Deripaska in some way. At the end of July 2016, Kilimnik writes that he had met with, quote, the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar. I have several important messages from him to you. Like actual caviar? Money. Caviar being code for money. It's really good code. I've always thought this is a really big loose end from the 2016 campaign. We don't know what this was really about, what Manafort might have offered or actually done for Oleg Deripaska, as clearly seems to be discussed in these emails. Most people think that all of these charges against Manafort are essentially being brought against him to pressure him to flip on Trump.
Starting point is 00:15:26 And yet he hasn't been flipping. Why hasn't he flipped? The most likely explanation is that he's just waiting for a pardon. If he keeps his mouth shut and doesn't tell Mueller anything, President Donald Trump will get him out of prison and he'll skate away. Was there a time in Paul Manafort's political career where he wasn't involved in shady dealings? Maybe like the earliest in the 1970s. And what was he doing then? He was involved in young Republican circles. He worked on Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign and then formed this big lobbying business right after Ronald Reagan won the presidency. So, you know, this has deep roots.
Starting point is 00:16:17 And then how long before he gets involved in foreign elections. It was already in the 1980s when Manafort was reaching out to do business to some of the shadier authoritarian regimes or violent opposition movements around the world. He had the Marcos regime in the Philippines was one of his big clients in the 80s. He ruled under martial law for most of his 20 years in power. His dictatorial regime is accused of widespread human rights abuses, including killing 3,000 opponents and torturing tens of thousands of others. The right-wing guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi of Angola, he did a whole PR campaign for him in D. DC, even though his troops were accused of all sorts of crimes. All of that basically seems to have really given Manafort a taste for making a lot
Starting point is 00:17:14 of money. That's why he eventually reached out to the former Soviet Union, where these massive fortunes had just been made by oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska from Russia or Ukrainian oligarchs too who funded Manafort's work. And what about an individual like this would have looked most appealing to the Trump campaign when it hired him as a campaign manager in 2016? Trump had done well in a couple of the early states in February 2016, but he had a problem in that to actually get the nomination, you need to get the delegates to vote for you at the Republican convention. And his campaign team at the time, which was a pretty small crew, didn't really have any experience
Starting point is 00:18:08 in doing that. And Manafort had a ton of experience with that. He had worked at Republican presidential conventions, 1976, Gerald Ford, 1980, Ronald Reagan, and 1996, Bob Dole. And he knew how to put together a strategy to actually lock down the delegates and make sure that they vote for Donald Trump. He was brought in first to just do this delegate wrangling job and then within a couple months had taken over the whole campaign. I just wonder, you know, thinking about this guy who has been involved in foreign elections for over 30 years and has supported all sorts of sort of foreign strongmen, what even made him a viable political actor in the United States after all of that shady business abroad. He really wasn't viable. He hadn't worked in American politics really for many years. The only reason that Trump turned to him specifically
Starting point is 00:19:14 is he so distrusted the rest of the Republican establishment. And also Manafort happened to own a property in Trump Tower. Oh, is that right? That's a good thing to bond about with your new boss. lacking connections with the existing mainstream Republican establishment would pluck out this shady figure who had been focusing almost entirely on shady regimes abroad and then say, this is the guy I want to run my presidential campaign. Andrew Prokop reports on politics for Vox. I'm Sean Ramos from This Is Today Explained. Support for our show today comes from Uber. Uber is moving forward and adding new features to its app to take the stress out of pickup.
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