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Wonder if Emperor Trump will pardon Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort?

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Michael Cohen Says He Arranged Payments to Women at Trump’s Direction

Aug. 21, 2018

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, made the extraordinary admission in court on Tuesday that Mr. Trump had directed him to arrange payments to two women during the 2016 campaign to keep them from speaking publicly about affairs they said they had with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cohen acknowledged the illegal payments while pleading guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and other charges, a litany of crimes that revealed both his shadowy involvement in Mr. Trump’s circle and his own corrupt business dealings.

He told a judge in United States District Court in Manhattan that the payments to the women were made “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” implicating the president in a federal crime.

“I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016, Mr. Cohen said.

The plea represented a pivotal moment in the investigation into the president, and the scene in the Manhattan courtroom was striking. Mr. Cohen, a longtime lawyer for Mr. Trump — and loyal confidant — described in plain-spoken language how Mr. Trump worked with him to cover up a potential sex scandal that Mr. Trump feared would endanger his rising candidacy.

Mr. Cohen also pleaded guilty to multiple counts of tax evasion and a single count of bank fraud, capping a monthslong investigation by Manhattan federal prosecutors who examined his personal business dealings and his role in helping to arrange the financial deals with women connected to Mr. Trump.

The plea came shortly before another blow to the president: His former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was convicted in his financial fraud trial in Virginia. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had built a case that Mr. Manafort hid millions of dollars in foreign accounts to evade taxes and lied to banks to obtain millions of dollars in loans.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers have, for months, said privately that they considered Mr. Cohen’s case to be potentially more problematic for the president than the investigation by the special counsel.

But Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, said in a statement after Mr. Cohen’s plea, “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen.”

In federal court in Manhattan, Mr. Cohen made the admission about Mr. Trump’s role in the payments to the women — an adult film actress and a former Playboy playmate — as he pleaded guilty to two campaign finance crimes.

One of those charges stemmed from a $130,000 payment he made to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Cohen’s Plea Deal and Charges

The plea agreement between Michael D. Cohen and prosecutors along with the charges to which Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty.

Prosecutors said that Trump Organization executives were involved in reimbursing Mr. Cohen for that payment, accepting his phony invoices that listed it as a legal expense. The other charge concerned a complicated arrangement in which a tabloid bought the rights to the story about the former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, then killed it.

Mr. Cohen’s plea was announced by Robert Khuzami, the deputy United States attorney, along with senior officials from the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service. Addressing reporters outside the courthouse, Mr. Khuzami said that Mr. Cohen had “decided that he was above the law, and for that, he is going to pay a very, very serious price.”

The plea agreement does not call for Mr. Cohen to cooperate with federal prosecutors in Manhattan. Still, it does not preclude him from providing information to them later or to the special counsel, who is examining the Trump campaign’s possible involvement in Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign.

If Mr. Cohen were to substantially assist the special counsel’s investigation, Mr. Mueller could recommend a reduction in his sentence.

Mr. Cohen had been the president’s longtime fixer, handling some of his most sensitive personal matters over a decade at the Trump Organization. He once said he would take a bullet for Mr. Trump.

As Mr. Cohen addressed the judge, admitting to the crimes he had committed, the packed courtroom remained silent. Even when Mr. Cohen made obvious references to Mr. Trump, referring to him as “the candidate” and “a candidate for federal office,” spectators seemed to listen raptly, with no gasps or audible reactions.

Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to five counts of tax evasion for concealing more than $4 million in personal income from 2012 to 2016 and to one count of bank fraud, for failing to disclose $14 million in debts in an application for a $500,000 home equity line of credit — the source of his payment to Ms. Clifford.

He also pleaded guilty to making an excessive campaign contribution and causing an unlawful corporate contribution during the 2016 election cycle.

He will be sentenced on Dec. 12 before Judge William H. Pauley III. Though Mr. Cohen faces a maximum of 65 years in prison, the plea agreement provides for a far more lenient sentence: The government calculated the sentencing guidelines at from 51 to 63 months and the defense put them at 46 to 57 months. A final guidelines determination will be made by the Probation Department, but the ultimate sentence will be determined by Judge Pauley.

Mr. Cohen’s attorney, Lanny J. Davis, said Mr. Cohen had put his family and country ahead of his loyalty to Mr. Trump.

“He stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Mr. Davis said. “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

Here’s Everything Trump’s Team Has Said About the Payment to Stormy Daniels

From complete denial to acknowledging involvement, what President Trump and his lawyers said about the $130,000 paid to the pornographic film actress.

May 3, 2018

Looming over the negotiations between prosecutors and Mr. Cohen has been the possibility of a presidential pardon. Mr. Trump reached out to Mr. Cohen by phone a few days after the F.B.I. raids, and they had dinner together a month earlier in March, at Mr. Trump’s private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

Mr. Cohen’s lawyer had loosely raised the issue of a pardon with an attorney for Mr. Trump several months ago, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations.

By striking a deal with Mr. Cohen that includes prison time, federal authorities were aware of the risk that the president might pardon him, said another person briefed on the matter. But it is also possible that Mr. Cohen could eventually cooperate.

Prosecutors charged that Mr. Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Ms. Clifford was effectively a donation to Mr. Trump’s campaign, because by securing her silence it improved his electoral fortunes, and thus violated 2016 campaign finance law prohibitions against donations of more than $2,700 in a general election.

Mr. Cohen also pleaded guilty to “causing” an illegal corporate donation to Mr. Trump through his involvement in a $150,000 payment American Media Inc. made to Ms. McDougal in late summer 2016 to buy the rights to her story, effectively securing her silence for the remainder of the campaign.

Corporations are prohibited from coordinating political spending with candidates or their representatives. Mr. Cohen signed papers a month later to purchase the rights to her agreement from A.M.I., but the publisher backed out of the deal at the last minute.

The prosecutors filled in several blanks in a story that has been unfolding for months about the lengths to which Mr. Cohen went during the campaign to help his boss stave off embarrassing news about alleged affairs ahead of Election Day.

And the charges confirmed that what might have seemed on the surface to have been only tawdry allegations involving an adult entertainment star and a former Playboy model may actually carry legal and political implications for a sitting president.

Prosecutors left little doubt that A.M.I. Inc., owner of The National Enquirer, became a de facto campaign proxy for Mr. Cohen in his efforts on behalf of Mr. Trump.

According to court papers, the publisher agreed in August 2015, months before the first primaries, to look out for damaging stories about Mr. Trump and his alleged affairs with women during talks with Mr. Cohen and “one or more” members of Mr. Trump’s campaign.

The tabloid company agreed to identify those stories “so they could be purchased and their publication avoided,” the prosecutors said on Tuesday — an inverted role for a tabloid scandal sheet such as The Enquirer, which went on to savage Mr. Trump’s opponents while promoting and protecting him.

That deal led to the arrangement with Ms. McDougal, which was struck in August 2016. It only came together, prosecutors said, after Mr. Cohen promised A.M.I. it would be reimbursed for the McDougal payment.

But prosecutors also reported for the first time that A.M.I. was intimately involved in the arrangement with Ms. Clifford. The tabloid connected Mr. Cohen with the lawyer who had negotiated the McDougal contract, Keith Davidson. Mr. Davidson also had Ms. Clifford as a client and later hashed out the agreement for Ms. Clifford’s silence.

Prosecutors said in court papers that when Mr. Cohen initially failed to finalize the deal, an editor at A.M.I. — a likely reference to Dylan Howard, the company’s chief content officer — alerted Mr. Cohen that there was a risk that Ms. Clifford would sell her story to another media company, one that would publish it.

Mr. Cohen’s admission that he broke the law by paying off Ms. Clifford was a remarkable turnaround from the legal and publicity battle that he and his lawyers had waged against her. Ms. Clifford and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, have hounded Mr. Cohen since May, taunting him on social media and predicting his indictment.

Mr. Cohen’s lawyers frequently fired back, accusing Mr. Avenatti of “fanning a media storm” and of “smearing” Mr. Cohen in a relentless series of televised appearances.

“I predicted this a long time ago before the warrants were even executed,” Mr. Avenatti said on Tuesday. “We feel extremely vindicated.”

Mr. Cohen’s plea culminates a long-running inquiry that became publicly known in April when F.B.I. agents armed with search warrants raided his office, apartment and hotel room, hauling away reams of documents, including pieces of paper salvaged from a shredder, and millions of electronic files contained on a series of cellphones, iPads and computers.

Lawyers for Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump spent the next four months working with a court-appointed special master to review the documents and data files to determine whether any of the materials were subject to attorney-client privilege and should not be made available to the government.

The special master, Barbara S. Jones, who completed her review last week, issued a series of reports in recent months, finding that only a fraction of the materials were privileged and the rest could be provided to prosecutors for their investigation.

On Monday, the judge overseeing the review, Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court in Manhattan, issued an order adopting Ms. Jones’s findings and ending the review process.

It was unclear on Tuesday what role the materials that Ms. Jones reviewed, which were made available to prosecutors on a rolling basis, may have had in the charges against Mr. Cohen.

One collateral effect of Mr. Cohen’s plea agreement is that it may allow Mr. Avenatti, Ms. Clifford’s lawyer, to proceed with a deposition of Mr. Trump in a lawsuit that Ms. Clifford filed accusing the president of breaking a nondisclosure agreement concerning their affair.

The lawsuit had been stayed by a judge pending the resolution of Mr. Cohen’s criminal case. Mr. Avenatti wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that he would now seek to force Mr. Trump to testify “under oath about what he knew, when he knew it and what he did about it.”

Benjamin Weiser and Alan Feuer contributed reporting.

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A One-Two Punch Puts Trump Back on His Heels Image

By Mark Landler, Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman

Aug. 21, 2018

WASHINGTON — In two courtrooms 200 miles apart on Tuesday, President Trump’s almost daily attempts to dismiss the criminal investigations that have engulfed his White House all but collapsed.

Mr. Trump has long mocked the investigations as “rigged witch hunts,” pursued by Democrats and abetted by a dishonest news media. But even the president’s staunchest defenders acknowledged privately that the legal setbacks he suffered within minutes of each other could open fissures among Republicans on Capitol Hill and expose Mr. Trump to the possibility of impeachment.

In Manhattan, Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, admitted in court that Mr. Trump directed him to break campaign finance laws by paying off two women who said they had sexual relationships with Mr. Trump. And in Alexandria, Va., a jury found Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, guilty of eight counts of tax and bank fraud — the most significant victory yet for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

A president who has labored under the cloud of investigations from almost the moment he took office, Mr. Trump now faces an increasingly grim legal and political landscape. Mr. Mueller is methodically investigating whether Mr. Trump and members of his campaign conspired with a foreign power to win the election — and whether the president tried to obstruct the investigation from the White House. And the president is months away from congressional elections that could hobble the second half of his presidency.

Democrats seized on the judgments against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Cohen — they both face years in prison — to argue that Mr. Trump was suffused by a culture of graft and corruption, an argument that could prove powerful for an already galvanized party in the midterm contests.

Inside the West Wing, aides to Mr. Trump — numbed and desensitized by breathless news cycles blaring headlines about the president’s behavior — said privately on Tuesday afternoon that they were having trouble assessing how devastating the day’s legal events might be.

Mr. Trump’s advisers spent hours working on a statement that was attributed to his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, but privately, several said that they could not come up with something to explain away Mr. Cohen’s admissions beyond calling him a liar.

As he landed in Charleston, W.Va., for a rally with supporters on Tuesday night, a grim-faced Mr. Trump sidestepped questions about Mr. Cohen. He defended Mr. Manafort as a “good man” who had been ensnared in an investigation that ranged far beyond its original mandate.

“It had nothing to do with Russian collusion,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “We continue the witch hunt.”

Later, the president largely ignored the dramatic courtroom events during a raucous rally in which his fervent supporters cheered Mr. Trump’s usual rants about trade, illegal immigration, Democratic obstruction and the news media.

“Where is the collusion? Find some collusion,” he said before shifting topics to declare that illegal immigration is “the beating heart” of the coming elections.

The effect of Mr. Manafort’s conviction and Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea on the investigation itself was unpredictable, according to legal experts. But Democrats said it put the lie to Mr. Trump’s argument that Mr. Mueller was engaged in a political investigation.

“It shows that Mueller and prosecutors in New York are conducting a professional investigation, following the facts where they lead, and obtaining serious felony convictions,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “They also dramatically increase the likelihood that both men cooperate with the government.”

Mr. Schiff said Mr. Cohen’s admission that he violated campaign finance laws in paying hush money to two women “adds to the president’s legal jeopardy,” though Mr. Trump’s advisers played down the likelihood that a sitting president would be indicted for such violations.

“There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the president in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen,” said Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in a statement. “It is clear that, as the prosecutor noted, Mr. Cohen’s actions reflect a pattern of lies and dishonesty over a significant period of time.”

Still, Mr. Cohen was blunt about the president’s culpability as he stood in court and admitted his guilt: “In coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office,” Mr. Cohen said he conspired with a media company to keep secret Mr. Trump’s affair with Stephanie Clifford, a pornographic film actress known as Stormy Daniels.

“Mr. Cohen, when you took all of these acts that you’ve described, did you know that what you were doing was wrong and illegal?” the judge asked. Mr. Cohen answered, “Yes, your honor.”

The startling charge directed at Mr. Trump carried echoes of President Richard M. Nixon, who was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the special prosecutor’s investigation of Watergate.

And it raised the prospect that Mr. Trump’s presidency could be at risk by impeachment in Congress even if the sprawling Russia investigation never definitively concludes that there was collusion or obstruction of justice.

Mr. Cohen worked for decades as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer. He was privy to the innermost details of the president’s business dealings and personal life — once saying that he would take a bullet for Mr. Trump.

While Mr. Mueller’s investigation grinds on — reaching into the murky depths of Russian money laundering or Russia’s shadowy efforts to hack the 2016 election — Mr. Cohen’s case throws a white-hot spotlight on the behavior of Mr. Trump and his closest confidants.

It also makes it harder for Mr. Trump or his aides to distance themselves from Mr. Cohen’s wrongdoing. Though he also pleaded guilty to tax and bank fraud, related to his ownership of New York City taxi medallions, the heart of the case against Mr. Cohen is the payments to women he made on behalf — and at the behest of — his most celebrated client.

With Mr. Cohen’s plea, five associates of the president have either pleaded guilty to or been convicted of crimes since Mr. Trump took office. In addition to Mr. Cohen and Mr. Manafort, they include Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, Rick Gates, the former deputy campaign chairman, and George Papadopoulos, who advised the campaign on foreign policy issues.

The former personal lawyer to President Trump pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, as well as multiple counts of tax evasion and bank fraud.Published OnAug. 21, 2018CreditImage by Andres Kudacki for The New York Times Mr. Trump’s mood tracked a tumultuous day. In the morning, he was chipper, monitoring Fox News and commenting to aides on the headlines he saw, according to people who spoke with him. But Mr. Trump was already snappish with aides in the West Wing before the Manafort verdict was announced and before Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty, according to people familiar with his conversations.

By then, it had become clear that Mr. Cohen was likely to plead guilty to several crimes. The president’s churlish mood had not lightened by the time he boarded Air Force One for the rally in West Virginia, and learned the details of his plea.

The president’s team quickly tried to paint Mr. Cohen as a liar, and noted that prosecutors had not targeted Mr. Trump.

People close to Mr. Trump privately acknowledged that the declarations from Mr. Cohen, made under oath in open court, could have significant political ramifications.

While impeachment discussions have always been treated as having a potential positive effect to turn out Republican voters, the statements that Mr. Cohen made were stark and took it out of the realm of the theoretical.

One former confidant entered a guilty plea. Another received a guilty verdict. Both events may have significant consequences for President Trump.

“I think impeachment is now squarely going to define the midterms,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who has been critical of Mr. Trump. “It’s inescapable now that Democrats can legitimately raise that issue.”

He added, “There’s a lot of Republican members of Congress sitting in tough districts that are going to have to really think hard about how they’re going to finesse this in the days ahead.”

What makes it harder for Republicans, he said, is that this did not emerge from the Mueller inquiry. “This isn’t something from the deep state,” he said. “This is a classic B-team type of bumbling screw-up of covering up mistresses.”

And, he added, “It’ll be very hard to distance the president. You would assume that there’s legitimate evidence that the president was aware that those invoices were not for services rendered. You already have the one tape.”

Brian Walsh, a former spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that it was too early to say whether this would damage the president, but he noted he is already suffering with suburban voters.

“I think the president’s most ardent supporters will continue to defend him with blinders on, but to any neutral observer watching this, it’s impossible to believe that Cohen would engage in this conduct without his client signing off on it or at least being aware of it,” he said.

“I think many will take a wait-and-see attitude,” he added. “What it does is serve as another tremendous distraction for Republicans running for re-election and already facing tough political headwinds. Every day that Republicans are being asked about legal questions surrounding the president is a day they’re not delivering the message they want to be delivering on the campaign trail.”

Mark Landler and Michael D. Shear reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.

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Paul Manafort, Trump’s Former Campaign Chairman, Guilty of 8 Counts

By Sharon LaFraniere

Aug. 21, 2018

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted on Tuesday in his financial fraud trial, bringing a dramatic end to a politically charged case that riveted the capital.

The verdict was a victory for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, whose prosecutors introduced extensive evidence that Mr. Manafort hid millions of dollars in foreign accounts to evade taxes and lied to banks repeatedly to obtain millions of dollars in loans.

Mr. Manafort was convicted of five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the remaining 10 counts, and the judge declared a mistrial on those charges.

Kevin Downing, a lawyer for Mr. Manafort, said the defense was “disappointed” by the verdict and that his client was “evaluating all of his options at this point.”

Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mr. Mueller’s office, declined to comment.

The verdict was read out in United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., only minutes after Michael D. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former fixer, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to violating campaign finance law and other charges.

Mr. Manafort’s trial did not touch directly on Mr. Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election or on whether Mr. Trump has sought to obstruct the investigation.

But it was the first test of the special counsel’s ability to prosecute a case in a federal courtroom amid intense criticism from the president and his allies that the inquiry is a biased and unjustified witch hunt. And the outcome had substantial political implications, if only in denying Mr. Trump more ammunition for his campaign to discredit Mr. Mueller.

Thirty-three people have faced criminal charges that stem from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Aug. 21, 2018

Before and during the trial, Mr. Trump both sought to defend Mr. Manafort as a victim of prosecutorial overreach and to distance himself from him, saying that Mr. Manafort had worked for him only relatively briefly.

After the verdict was announced, Mr. Trump said he felt “very badly” for Mr. Manafort and continued to maintain that the prosecution had been politically motivated.

“It doesn’t involve me,” Mr. Trump told reporters after landing in West Virginia for a rally on Tuesday evening. “It had nothing to do with Russian collusion.”

The trial focused on Mr. Manafort’s personal finances, in particular the tens of millions of dollars he made advising a political party in Ukraine that backed pro-Russia policies.

Defense lawyers had argued that Rick Gates, Mr. Manafort’s former right-hand man and the government’s star witness, was the real mastermind of the frauds. Mr. Gates had been charged along with Mr. Manafort in the case, but pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Mr. Manafort in exchange for the dismissal of a host of other charges and the possibility of a more lenient sentence.

The defense lawyers also suggested that Mr. Manafort had been targeted by prosecutors to pressure him into cooperating with Mr. Mueller’s inquiry into possible collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia in the 2016 election.

In his summation on Wednesday, Greg D. Andres, the lead prosecutor, told the jurors that the essence of the scheme was not complicated. “Mr. Manafort lied to keep more money when he had it, and lied to get more money when he didn’t,” he said.

Mr. Manafort faces a second criminal trial next month in Washington on seven other charges brought by the special counsel, including obstruction of justice, failure to register as a foreign agent and conspiracy to launder money.

The trial in Alexandria drew lines of spectators that wound around the courthouse and was punctuated by moments of high drama. It examined in some detail Mr. Manafort’s sumptuous lifestyle, including his $15,000 ostrich-skin jacket and $1,500 dress shirts, and the meticulously landscaped flower bed in the shape of a giant “M” at his 10-bedroom Hamptons estate in New York.

Mr. Gates, who was on the stand far longer than any other witness, appeared confident when questioned by prosecutors. But his credibility came under assault during cross-examination by defense lawyers, who questioned him about his “secret life” with a paramour in a London flat.

Mr. Andres and Judge T. S. Ellis III, who presided over the trial, butted heads repeatedly. Mr. Andres complained that the judge interrupted every time the prosecution questioned a witness. Judge Ellis responded that Mr. Andres was so frustrated that he appeared on the verge of tears, which Mr. Andres denied.

As the prosecution wound up its case last week, the proceedings suddenly ground to a mysterious halt, raising hopes among Mr. Manafort’s allies that the judge might declare a mistrial. But after hours of secret discussions between the judge and the lawyers for both sides, the trial resumed.

Mr. Andres argued that the evidence of Mr. Manafort’s guilt was contained in documents that he himself wrote or signed and sent to his accountants, to loan officers and to Mr. Gates. While Mr. Gates was “no Boy Scout,” Mr. Andres said, his account was buttressed by other witnesses, including Mr. Manafort’s tax accountant.

Testifying under a grant of immunity, the accountant, Cynthia Laporta, said that she forwarded documents from Mr. Manafort to bank loan officers even though she believed they were false.

The defense said that Mr. Manafort had foolishly trusted Mr. Gates to handle his personal and business finances, and had relied on a phalanx of accountants and loan officers to flag serious mistakes in his financial filings.

Only after investigators from the special counsel’s office began “going through each piece of paper and finding anything that doesn’t match up to add to the weight of evidence against Mr. Manafort” did the discrepancies come to light, said Richard Westling, one of Mr. Manafort’s five lawyers.

Using multicolored flow charts in an attempt to simplify complex transactions, prosecutors tried to show that Mr. Manafort concealed more than $60 million in income in 31 foreign bank accounts opened in the names of shell companies.

The money came from Ukrainian oligarchs who paid Mr. Manafort to boost the political career of Viktor F. Yanukovych, a pro-Russian politician who, with Mr. Manafort’s help was elected president of Ukraine in 2010.

Financial analysts for the F.B.I. and the Internal Revenue Service testified that Mr. Manafort transferred more than $15 million from those accounts to pay for landscaping, clothing, rugs, home renovations and entertainment systems. In 2012 alone, he wired enough money from the hidden accounts to purchase a loft in SoHo, a brownstone in Brooklyn and a residence in Arlington, Va., they said. Mr. Manafort also disguised some of his income as loans to avoid taxes, witnesses testified.

Prosecutors claimed that Mr. Manafort initiated another scheme after Mr. Yanukovych was forced out of office in 2014.

Defense lawyers acknowledged that Mr. Manafort had no income by the time the Trump campaign hired him in March 2016 as a volunteer, first to manage delegates to the Republican National Convention, then as campaign chairman. Still, he bought his annual season tickets to the New York Yankees, charging $210,600 to his American Express card that went unpaid for nearly a year.

In order to persuade three banks to loan him a total of $20 million, prosecutors said, Mr. Manafort added millions of dollars in fake income to his financial statements. Defense lawyers contended that the banks were well aware of Mr. Manafort’s overall financial situation, and gave him loans because he had a net worth of $21.2 million and valuable real estate as collateral.

Out of the jury’s earshot, Mr. Andres complained repeatedly to Judge Ellis that he was erecting unfair obstacles for the prosecution, interjecting when they tried to examine their witnesses on the stand. “The court interrupts every single one of the government’s directs, every single one,” he said.

The judge had criticized independent counsels this year, apparently conflating them with special counsels like Mr. Mueller, who operates under the supervision of the Justice Department. By the midpoint of the trial, he was markedly more polite to the prosecutors. He agreed to apologize to the jury for wrongly accusing them of making a courtroom mistake with a key witness.

Mr. Manafort’s lawyers said the prosecutors were engaging in overkill. “They had already thrown the kitchen sink at him,” one of them, Thomas Zehnle, told the judge at one point. “Now they are throwing the plumbing and the pipes.”

Without directly accusing the prosecutors of selective prosecution, they tried throughout the trial to sow doubt about their intentions. At the government’s request, Judge Ellis instructed the jury to “ignore any argument about the Justice Department’s motive or lack of motive,” a last-minute warning that might only have underscored the question.

Emily Cochrane and Emily Baumgaertner contributed reporting from Alexandria, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis from Charleston, W.Va

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All the President’s Crooks One of them, Mr. Trump’s own lawyer, has now implicated him in a crime.

By The Editorial Board

Aug. 21, 2018

From the start of the Russia investigation, President Trump has been working to discredit the work and the integrity of the special counsel, Robert Mueller; praising men who are blatant grifters, cons and crooks; insisting that he’s personally done nothing wrong; and reminding us that he hires only the best people.

On Tuesday afternoon, the American public was treated to an astonishing split-screen moment involving two of those people, as Mr. Trump’s former campaign chief was convicted by a federal jury in Virginia of multiple crimes carrying years in prison at the same time that his longtime personal lawyer pleaded guilty in federal court in New York to his own lengthy trail of criminality, and confessed that he had committed at least some of the crimes “at the direction of” Mr. Trump himself.

Let that sink in: Mr. Trump’s own lawyer has now accused him, under oath, of committing a felony.

Only a complete fantasist — that is, only President Trump and his cult — could continue to claim that this investigation of foreign subversion of an American election, which has already yielded dozens of other indictments and several guilty pleas, is a “hoax” or “scam” or “rigged witch hunt.”

The conviction of Paul Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign for three months in 2016, was a win for prosecutors even though jurors were unable to reach a verdict on 10 of the 18 counts against him. On the other eight, which included bank fraud, tax fraud and a failure to report a foreign bank account, the jury agreed unanimously that Mr. Manafort was guilty. He is scheduled to go on trial in a separate case next month in Washington, D.C., on charges including money laundering, witness tampering, lying to authorities and failing to register as a foreign agent. Mr. Manafort faces many decades behind bars, although he will probably serve less than that under federal sentencing guidelines.

A few hundred miles to the north, in New York City, Michael “I’m going to mess your life up” Cohen stood before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to multiple counts of bank and tax fraud as well as federal campaign-finance violations involving hush-money payments he made to women who said they’d had sex with Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen, who spent years as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer and “fix-it guy” (his own words), was under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, to whom Mr. Mueller referred his case. In April, F.B.I. agents raided Mr. Cohen’s office, home and hotel room looking for evidence of criminality on a number of fronts. Apparently they found it.

Mr. Cohen didn’t agree at Tuesday’s hearing to cooperate with prosecutors, but if he eventually chooses to, that could spell even bigger trouble for Mr. Trump. Mr. Cohen has been involved in many of Mr. Trump’s dealings with Russia, including his aborted effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and could shed light on connections between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian officials involved in the 2016 election interference.

But back to Tuesday’s news. Mr. Manafort was not an original target of the inquiry by Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May of last year to look into possible ties between the Trump campaign and efforts by Russian government officials to interfere in the election. But Mr. Mueller’s mandate authorized him to investigate any other crimes that arose in the course of his work. It didn’t take long. As soon as he and his lawyers started sniffing around, the stench of Mr. Manafort’s illegality was overpowering.

As a longtime lobbyist and political consultant who worked for multiple Republican candidates and presidents, Mr. Manafort had a habit of lying to banks to get multimillion-dollar loans and hiding his cash in offshore accounts when tax time rolled round. In at least one case, he falsely characterized $1.5 million as a loan to avoid paying taxes on it, then later told banks that the loan had been “forgiven” so he could get another loan.

He also enriched himself by working for some of the world’s most notorious thugs and autocrats, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Mobutu Sese Seko of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He helped elect the pro-Kremlin Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine, a job that earned him millions until Mr. Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.

Despite this mercenary history — or perhaps, more disturbingly, because of it — Donald Trump, while running on promises to clean up Washington, hired Mr. Manafort to run his presidential campaign, a job he may well have kept but for news reports that he was receiving and hiding millions of dollars from his work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych.

What does it tell you about Mr. Trump that he would choose to lead his campaign someone like Mr. Manafort, whom even on Tuesday he called a “good man”? It tells you that Mr. Trump is consistent, and consistently contemptuous of honesty and ethics, because he has surrounded himself with people of weak, if not criminal, character throughout his career.