I think most white collar defendants eventually see the light, perhaps after long discussions with their wife and/or adult children. However, Manafort’s conduct was blindingly brazen. His income tax evasion was blatant, and when he ran out of money he decided to live on LOANS – who does that? And then, he lied constantly to get the loans, and in my view, eventually conspired with the head cheese at the bank to overlook the lies and deception that others at the bank began suspecting, in order to reward or at least offer to reward head cheese, flattering his ego and deceiving him about his own influence. Oh yeah, Congress would approve some random bank executive to be Secretary of the Army. WTF? When I think about defendants I have known who rolled the dice and went to trial for conduct that was pretty blatant, you see this same pattern of believing that they can talk their way out of it by assigning other people blame, and besides, everyone knows that wealthy people like themselves are not what we mean when we utter the word “criminal.”