https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... -and-gates
More than 30 new charges, involving millions of dollars of bank and tax fraud, were filed on Thursday against Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his business partner.
The 32 new charges were filed by Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor looking into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and a Russian intelligence operation to skew the 2016 presidential election.
The move marks the latest step in ratcheting up pressure on Manafort, and Rick Gates, his business partner who was deputy chairman of the Trump campaign. Gates has been reported to be negotiating a cooperation deal with Mueller’s office, which is in turn likely to significantly increase the pressure on Manafort to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation into collusion.
A few, thirty-two; who's really counting?
Manafort's spokesperson was kind enough to offer this:
In a statement, Manafort’s spokesman reiterated his client’s innocence, adding: “The new allegations against Mr Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion. Mr Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied.”
Right you are! No 2016 election interference/collusion with Russia - just a bunch of financial horseplay/locker-room accounting.
The new charge sheet portrays the two men as resorting to increasingly desperate efforts to keep money flowing to finance extravagant lifestyles, when contracts from their main clients, pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, dried up after 2014, when the Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia.
Oh, c'mon - who hasn't racked-up a few bills here and there, been stiffed by a no-good, dirty, rotten scoundrel (who knew?), and then found themselves, briefly, in charge of an eventually successful US presidential campaign where your only achievement was changing the GOP platform on only one little, tiny, minor detail, about material support of Ukrainian, anti-Russian forces?