Manafort verdict strengthens Mueller’s hand for round two

Source: The Hill | August 26, 2018 | Lydia Wheeler

It could be déjà vu when Paul Manafort suits up for his second court battle next month.

Legal experts say that federal prosecutors, fresh off a victory this past week in Virginia, stand a good chance of securing a second conviction in Washington, D.C., with more evidence and more damning charges against Trump’s former campaign chairman brought by special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team.

Manafort is facing seven criminal charges, including conspiracy to launder money and failing to register as a foreign lobbyist in the trial slated to start Sept. 17.

He’s also accused of witness tampering, which observers say is unlikely to sit well with jurors.

“You can say you’ve been wrongly accused, but once you try to tamper with witnesses testifying against you, jurors are generally much more inclined to believe you’re guilty of the underlying crimes,” said Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Mueller in the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. “Given the strength of the evidence together with the allegation of witness tampering, I expect we’ll see guilty verdicts in the D.C. case as well.”

Prosecutors have provided Manafort’s defense team with more than 1,000 pieces of evidence — almost three times the number of documents submitted in the Virginia trial that resulted in a guilty verdict on eight counts of bank and tax fraud.

But there are still challenges ahead for both sides.

Experts say the highly publicized Virginia trial will make it much harder for the defense to find an unbiased jury.

Though Trump tweeted his support for Manafort throughout the trial, D.C. is considered more liberal than Northern Virginia, where the first trial was held. Trump secured about 4 percent of the vote in D.C. in 2016.

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