In the ongoing trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the latter’s defense team has a two-track strategy to win acquittal. That being to substantially degrade the credibility of the prosecution’s witnesses and to frustrate the prosecution’s effort to show Manafort engaged in financial criminality.
Yet, those strategies operate in common cause. After all, to frustrate the notion that Manafort evaded taxes, laundered money, hid his foreign client relationships, and so on, the defense must shift the blame for those activities onto Rick Gates. A prosecution witness who is cooperating with the government in return for a reduced sentence, Gates is the pivot on which the defense is likely to prevail or fail. And that’s why we’ve seen the defense’s current cross-examination of Gates take such an aggressive edge.
[Related: Here’s a full wrap of Gates’ testimony in Manafort trial]
The defense team wants the jury to look at Gates and see a man who was responsible for that conspiracy and is only serving the prosecution to save his own skin — a man who has affairs and lies without limit.
Remember, the defense doesn’t need to persuade jurors that Gates was responsible or even likely to have been unilaterally responsible for the crimes Manafort is charged with. They simply need to show that Gates “may have been responsible.” That’s because the jurors — as with all jurors in criminal cases — have been instructed that they can only find Manafort guilty if they believe beyond any reasonable doubt that he is guilty. So, if the defense team can produce even a doubt in the jurors’ minds that Gates may have been responsible (and not Manafort) for the crimes, they have produced grounds for an acquittal.
And remember something else: All of this takes place in the broader context of Manafort being charged with financial crimes that are hard for jurors to confidently understand. And if the jurors sitting in judgment cannot confidently understand the evidence that prosecutors have presented, they cannot convict Manafort beyond all reasonable doubt.
In the end, the challenge for prosecutors is to thus keep the delivery of evidence simple and precise. They can show how Manafort benefited from the crimes he is alleged to have committed, but it is far harder for them to show that he committed crimes that led to the benefits. That’s why they want to use the courtroom pageantry of the accouterments of that Manafort is alleged to have bought with his allegedly ill-gotten gains. But the prosecutors also need Gates to be the reliable voice from inside Manafort’s secret castle: the honest man who knew everything and how Manafort was culpable.
The question is, will the jury believe Gates with sufficient confidence?
