Paul Manafort has been found guilty on eight felony charges. Here’s what happens now.
In a moment so stunning you couldn’t have gotten away with scripting it in a movie, a jury announced that Paul Manafort was guilty on eight felony charges while Michael Cohen was in a different courtroom pleading guilty to eight other felony charges. The real news of the day is that Donald Trump couldn’t be more screwed, as these are both nightmare scenarios for him. But there has been a lot of focus on the fact that Manafort was only convicted on eight of the eighteen charges. So what does this really mean?
First, this is a reminder of why prosecutors make the seemingly redundant move of bringing eighteen different but similar felony charges against a guy in the same trial – even when the evidence is a slam dunk, and the defendant has no defense. It sounds like some of the jurors understood all of the charges, and other jurors only stood the less complicated charges (or were thrown off by the judge’s wacky meddling), and so they unanimously convicted Manafort on the charges they all agreed on. These eight charges alone are probably enough to put Manafort, who is sixty-nine years old, in prison for the rest of his natural life.
Robert Mueller can retry Paul Manafort on the ten deadlocked charges, in front of a new judge and new jury. It’s not clear if Mueller will pursue that avenue, or if he’ll instead choose to focus solely on the new batch of charges that Manafort has long been scheduled to face at his September trial. In any case, Mueller has already gotten what he needed: the felony conviction of one of the key targets of his Trump-Russia investigation, which means that he is on firmly solid ground when it comes to his next big moves.
Based on what’s leaked out about grand jury proceedings, Robert Mueller is very close to indicting and arresting Roger Stone on a combination of Trump-Russia charges and financial fraud charges. Mueller will likely take the same tack against the biggest fish in the Trump-Russia scandal. Today sent a clear message to people like Stone that they cannot expect to beat the financial fraud charges at trial, even if they hire fancy lawyers.
