Despite the effort on the right to paint the prosecution in the trial of Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort as some sort of fishing expedition, out to convict the longtime lobbyist simply of being rich, the scene inside the courthouse where the trial is being held got more than a little strange today.
A witness for the defense, Maximillian Katzman, was called to testify as to Mr. Manafort’s expensive tastes — as the ex-manager and son of the owner of Alan Couture in New York, a luxury boutique Manafort frequented — in order to establish that large expenditures were not out of the ordinary for the former Trump assistant.
If that seems like a strange defense for someone on trial for financial crimes, consider that Katzman testified Manafort had racked up bills of nearly a million dollars over the course of four short years. In fact, Katzman noted, Manafort was “ranked in the top five” of only about 40 customers that the boutique catered to, and the only one who paid with international bank wires from foreign businesses.
Again, all of this testimony was intended to establish that Manafort’s behavior was not strange in any way — that he spent exorbitant amounts of money on luxury items and paid with foreign funds all the time.
Then the prosecution stunned the court when they pointed to a screen displaying an invoice for “Alan Corture LLC.” Upon cross-examining the witness, prosecutor Greg Andres grilled Katzman about the invoice and its validity. The ex-manager quickly admitted:
It’s off by a letter. The zip code is incorrect.”
As we say in the world of political journalism, Dun-dun-DUNNNNN. Fake invoices!
The phony receipt showed billing to a company Manafort has been connected to, Global Endeavor LLC. Katzman testified that his shop had never sent any bill to any company by that name. If you’re not quite rich enough to understand why Manafort might have forged invoices to a clothing store listed as billing from one of his own businesses, that’s because you’ve never tried to fraudulently take out a loan with paperwork that makes fashion shopping look like legitimate business-to-business money transfers, indicating financial liquidity and ability to pay back the loan.
Day two of the Manafort trial, and already prosecutors have caught the defense in a major lie. Things don’t look good for the man in the expensive suit.
Featured image via screen capture
