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Jury Finds Paul Manafort Guilty in Federal Tax And Bank Fraud Trial
By: Ryan Lucas | Barbara Sprunt | NPR
Posted on:
Updated at 4:55 p.m. ET
A federal jury on Tuesday found Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, guilty on 8 of the 18 charges he faced in his tax and bank fraud trial.
Judge T.S. Ellis III declared a mistrial in the other 10 counts.
Jurors had been deliberating since Thursday and had sent a few notes to Ellis asking questions about their work. He had urged them to continue to try to reach consensus on all the charges but that did not appear to be the case by Tuesday afternoon.
The judge also allowed lawyers for the government and Manafort to read the note sent into court by the jury.
The deliberations followed two weeks’ worth of evidence and testimony in the trial.
The government charges that Manafort hid income from foreign consulting from the IRS and then, when that work dried up, lied to banks to qualify for loans to sustain his lavish lifestyle.
Manafort’s defense attorneys say he didn’t pay close enough attention to his personal finances in order to have deliberately broken the law and sought to damage the credibility of the star witness in the case, former Manafort protégé Rick Gates.
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