Things aren’t going well for former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and it’s clearly making Donald Trump nervous just judging from his tweets over the last few days.
Manafort’s trial began just a few days ago and there have already been several bombshells, like Special Counsel Robert Mueller finding two forged documents, which were collected during the FBI’s raid of Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia residence.
Yesterday, several vendors were asked about the business they’d done with Manafort, as well as the business entities he’d used for non-business related payments. Mueller and his team scoured through documents in order to show the international wire transfers that had been used to fund Manafort’s lifestyle — and discovered one forged invoice from vendor Maximillian Katzman, who is associated with luxe apparel brand Alan Couture.
In that invoice (which contained Cyrillic that no one could make any sense of), it was clear that the form was fake. The main giveaways were the misspelling of Alan Couture’s name (it was spelled “Alan Corture”), the zip code was off, and Katzman could not recall the client on the invoice, which was “Global Endeavor LLC.”
There was another forged document that contained Cyrillic, and something similar was found. The seventh witness in Manafort’s trial yesterday, Stephen Jacobson, was a retired contractor and former owner of SP&C Home Improvement who had worked on several of Manafort’s properties, totaling over $3 million in 5 years for work done. Many of those payments were done with international wire transfers.
However, in the documents, Mueller came across a forged invoice by SP&C, which was also addressed to Global Endeavor. Jacobson couldn’t recall the company and stated that his company’s logo on the invoice was fake. He also couldn’t remember receiving the payment on the invoice and stated his company had never performed the “design and architecture” services that were on the invoice.
As DC Tribune pointed out yesterday, the forged invoices could be used to falsify loan applications to banks, making the documents look like standard business-to-business money transfers that would indicate a liquidity and ability to pay back a loan that Manafort otherwise would not have been able to show.
This is really bad news for Manafort, but it’s also pretty bad for Trump. Trump has been whining about how Manafort’s trials have nothing to do with his involvement in the Trump campaign. However, it’s clear that Trump has a track record for hiring corrupt people. This makes an even more solid case that something wildly unethical went on in the Trump campaign, and Mueller is getting very close to finding out.
Featured image via screen capture
