Hush your mouth!
And don’t tell me, “I’m just talkin’ about Shaft.”
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Something just occurred to me. It may have been obvious to everyone else. Namely, manafort’s opulent lifestyle may not have been so much about wanting all that stuff (though he did at least somewhat). It may have been in part about just what things he could buy with dirty money without raising too-obvious red flags with the treasury or the IRS. He couldn’t bank his gains domestically. There’s a limit to how many houses a guy can have before someone notices. He didn’t want to keep it all overseas in banks where the oligarchs could just make a phone call and claw it back. So what’s a blood-money grifter to do?
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We will know the night of this November’s election if Trump will serve all four years as president.
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Bespoke Suit
Off-the-Rack Soul
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Seconds soul
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and you can see why 45* hired him
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$1.6 million to be exact.
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I like the idea of his soul on the rack…
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Vulgarians like to show off their bling. As TRUssia says, it makes them feel “classy”.
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Did I not read also that there were some questions on a few of the invoices? As in fake invoices? I thought I saw a hint of that in the WP reporting.
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I hope that there are enough charges that can be proved on paper alone to put this traitor away for life with no parole. I hope that the states can take over on the state charges.
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This is turning out to be a dry run for the prosecution of Trump family’s financial crimes, which could be an accounting nightmare. Manafort fortunately is a relatively easy case; he had little legitimate or reported income and spent his ill-gotten gains with the same abandon as Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels in their signature cooperation Dumb and Dumber. In contrast, the Trumps commingle their money and other people’s money with little concern about source or tracing, and target trophy acquisitions. It’s going to be like deconstructing a milkshake.
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Mueller doesn’t need to attend the trial. He’s got the best of the best on his team and any of them can handle a complicated federal trial.
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Yes, they & the case they’ve presented are the ''crusher" he sealed.
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Absolutely.
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It kind of explains how he put his head in the sand about his crimes.
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I wouldn’t expect that he would.
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One of the bigger reveals, it seems to me, were the fake invoices made to look like they were from one of Manafort’s actual legitimate vendors to one of the Manafort shell companies. Apparently, actual legitimate bills sent to Manafort were converted to fake ones and then sent to a Manafort controlled shell company. This would appear to be a way that Manafort moved money from his foreign entities into the US under the cover of a fake invoice (i.e., money laundering and tax evasion).
All or part of those fake invoiced amounts may have gone to pay the expenses incurred by Manafort from a legitimate vendor. The money used to pay for that expense was income from Manafort’s Ukraine activities that was not declared as income and for which Manafort did not pay taxes. That’s a crime. It’s also possible that the amount fake invoices was greater than the amount shown on the legitimate invoice, so Manafort could’ve both paid off a bill and padded his US bank account through money laundering from foreign income sources for which Manafort did not report/pay taxes.
The first details on the apparent forgeries came from the manager of a luxury men’s clothing boutique Manafort frequented, Alan Couture in New York. Seeking to establish just how expensive Manafort’s tastes were, Mueller’s team got Maximillian Katzman — the store’s ex-manager and son of its owner — to certify that Manafort ran up bills of more than $900,000 between 2010 and 2014.
Unlike the real invoices, the invoice Andres showed did not contain any direct reference to Manafort. Instead, it appeared to be intended to show direct billing to a company linked to Manafort, Global Endeavor LLC. That was one of the companies used to wire funds to pay Manafort’s bills.
Katzman said he knew the invoice was not authentic. “We have never billed to Global Endeavor, nor had a client named Global Endeavor,” he said.
Prosecutors didn’t say why someone might have forged the invoices, but they have accused Manafort’s former partner and aide RIck Gates of conspiring with Manafort to forge financial records in connection with loan applications. A forged invoice might have been useful in persuading bookkeepers or tax preparers that the payments to Alan Couture were some sort of business-to-business transaction rather than a way to cover Manafort’s personal bills.
This pattern repeated with other vendors. Manafort appears to have pulled the same stunt with Stephen Jacobson, a Long Island based contractor:
The contractor verified many of the invoices prosecutors presented, but was eventually presented with a $130,000 invoice made out to one of the same companies connected to the Alan Couture payments: Global Endeavor.
“That’s not a bill from my company,” Jacobsen said. “I see a faint imprint on it of my company logo.”
The bill was for “architecture” on “allocated space,” but Jacobsen said he didn’t provide whatever services those were. “For that kind of money, I’d like to,” he quipped.
So today the prosecution introduced clear evidence of fraud and concealment on the part of Manafort for the purpose of moving money to satisfy his bills and also to take advantage of money earned abroad that had not been reported and for which taxes had not been paid.
This would be the type of situation that the prosecution could bring Gates in to admit on the stand that he helped Manafort do such fake transactions at Manafort’s direction.
The former manager of a clothing boutique that Paul Manafort frequented revealed an intriguing development: someone apparently forged invoices from the store https://t.co/8lFhmOmP7t
— POLITICO (@politico) August 1, 2018
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Manafort put himself into expensive suits, tailored perfectly to his body, didn’t hide the fact that he was paunchy, graying and an inveterate liar.
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And the clothes are the “laundering” part.
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