ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A federal judge on Monday delayed the financial crimes trial of Paul Manafort for six days to allow Mr. Manafort’s lawyers more time to review a trove of documents that they said could be crucial to his defense. The decision by the judge, T. S. Ellis III of the United States District Court in Alexandria, pushed the start of the trial back to next Tuesday. It is the first of two faced by Mr. Manafort, the veteran Republican lobbyist and former campaign chairman for President Trump. Mr. Manafort has been charged with money laundering and tax evasion in a case that arose from the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into efforts by Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors have said they do not intend to raise the issue of collusion with Russia during the trial, and Judge Ellis warned lawyers on Monday not to stray into areas that could prejudice the jurors. He advised the defense not to attack the prosecutors’ motives, despite the fact that Judge Ellis has previously said in court that he believes Mr. Mueller is pursuing a case against Mr. Manafort as a way of pressuring him to help build a case against Mr. Trump.<doc-sep>ALEXANDRIA, Va.— Paul Manafort is now set to face a jury next week in the first trial from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, after a federal judge agreed to push the trial back several days so the defense team could finish going through evidence. “There are equities and good reasons on both sides of this motion,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis said in moving the trial of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman to July 31 from its previously scheduled Wednesday start. Mr. Manafort’s team said it only received access to thousands of pages of records from Mr. Manafort’s bookkeeper earlier this month, calling the documents part of “the heart of the case” that required more time to review. Prosecutors said most of the remaining records recently turned over consisted of less-relevant images from digital devices belonging to Mr. Manafort’s former deputy. They also said Mr. Manafort’s prior legal team had earlier reviewed the bookkeeper documents, so they hadn’t expected Mr. Manafort would require prosecutors to provide them. Mr. Manafort sat quietly through the first part of the hearing in a green prison jumpsuit, turning to blow a kiss to his wife sitting behind him. He didn’t stay for Judge Ellis’s ruling. Mr. Mueller’s 14-month-long inquiry has resulted in charges against 32 people, including 25 Russians. The special counsel’s team is investigating allegations of widespread Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election, but prosecutors in next week’s trial will focus heavily on Mr. Manafort’s finances. Mr. Manafort faces charges of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to file reports on foreign bank accounts. Mr. Manafort has pleaded not guilty and denies all charges. The trial is expected to delve deeply into Mr. Manafort’s work for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine in the early 2010s and whether he hid, as prosecutors alleged, $30 million in related income from tax authorities. Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8<doc-sep>ALEXANDRIA, Va. (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Monday delayed the criminal trial of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort until next week, and made public the identity of five witnesses granted immunity to testify. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III also said the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller must provide a list of about 30 witnesses to lawyers for Manafort, who had sought a delay in his trial that had been scheduled to start on Wednesday on bank and tax fraud charges. Manafort, a longtime Republican operative and businessman, appeared in court for the hearing in a green prison jumpsuit. He has pleaded not guilty to 18 counts of bank and tax fraud and failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. It will be the first trial to originate in the special counsel’s investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election. Ellis said the trial delay until July 31 would give Manafort’s attorneys more time to review material recently submitted by prosecutors, but he warned it would not be a lengthy process. “I’m not going to allow this trial to drag on,” Ellis said, adding he would not let it turn into political theater. “I’m not in the theater business.” According to court filings unsealed by Ellis on Monday, Mueller had requested immunity for Dennis Raico, Cindy Laporta, Conor O’Brien, Donna Duggan and James Brennan. They are all financial professionals who may have gained some knowledge of Manafort’s business dealings. Prosecutors said on Monday the only references to Manafort’s role in the campaign during the trial would involve a banker who agreed to lend Manafort money in exchange for a role in Trump’s campaign. The banker was not named in open court. In court on Monday, Ellis asked prosecutors if the banker who lent Manafort money in exchange for a campaign role knew the documents to support the loan were inaccurate. “He did,” prosecutor Greg Andres replied. The Manafort charges largely predate the five months Manafort worked on the Trump team in 2016, some of them as campaign chairman. None of the charges relate to possible coordination with Russian officials by members of the Trump campaign, which is part of Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the election, and Andres said on Monday the topic of alleged collusion would not be discussed in the trial. The Kremlin denies election interference and Trump denies collusion. FILE PHOTO: Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort arrives for arraignment on a third superseding indictment against him by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on charges of witness tampering, at U.S. District Court in Washington, U.S. June 15, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst MULTIPLE INDICTMENTS Manafort faces a second criminal trial in Washington in September on related charges, including witness tampering, in connection with lobbying work he performed for the former pro-Russia Ukrainian government. His lawyers have argued they need more time to prepare for both cases. Mueller’s probe has led to multiple indictments and several guilty pleas from other Trump associates, including Rick Gates, a former Trump deputy campaign chairman who worked with Manafort. Alex Van der Zwaan, a lawyer who once worked closely with Manafort and Gates, has also pleaded guilty and has been sentenced. Although the charges did not reference the Trump campaign or the 2016 election, legal experts have said they put more pressure on former Trump aides to cooperate with Mueller as he looks into whether Russia tried to influence the election in favor of Trump by hacking the emails of leading Democrats and distributing disinformation and propaganda online. Ellis has questioned Mueller’s probe and said Manafort’s indictment appeared aimed at leveraging him to provide information on Trump. Mueller’s team has outlined an extensive list of evidence to present at the Virginia trial, submitting a 21-page list detailing more than 400 exhibits that include scores of bank records, emails and photographs, among other documents. Manafort’s lawyers have sought to exclude some of the exhibits, arguing they are irrelevant and would prejudice the jurors, but Mueller’s office said the documents were pertinent. Manafort’s lawyers also complained on Monday that the prosecution had turned over 120,000 additional pages of discovery without giving them ample time to review the records before trial, an argument the judge agreed with in issuing the delay. Among the records turned over earlier in July included 20,000 accounting records from Manafort’s bookkeeping company, as well as voluminous images taken off electronic devices belonging to Gates, Manafort’s former business partner.<doc-sep>Former Trump campaign head Paul Manafort won a small victory in court Monday when the judge in his Virginia criminal case delayed the trial a week. Manafort is is facing over a dozen criminal charges in Virginia, accused of tax evasion and bank fraud among other things. In September, he will face separate but related criminal charges in D.C. on charges of money laundering and failing to register as a lobbyist for the pro-Russia Ukraine government. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases. On Monday afternoon, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III agreed to postpone the trial until next Tuesday, a shorter delay than Manafort’s lawyers had requested, but their first victory. Manafort’s lawyers hoped to delay the trial until after the D.C. case in September, citing the difficulty of working with Manafort while he was in jail and the recent production of legal documents by the prosecution. At the hearing today, Kevin Downing, Manafort’s lead attorney, argued that the team needed more time to pore over Mueller’s documents. He noted that he had received 120,000 new pages since July 6. Legal experts say this is a pretty standard request for a defense team. “It’s not uncommon for a defense attorney, especially in a complicated case of great significance like this, to try to have more time to prepare,” said Joshua Dressler, a law professor at Ohio State University. Lisa Griffin, a professor at Duke’s law school, agreed. “It’s very, very common for trials to be continued, or delayed. … And sometimes it’s because one side claims the need to review discovery materials or evidence.” Most of the documents in question are from the iPad, iPhone and laptops of Rick Gates, Manafort’s longtime partner, who pleaded guilty to financial fraud and lying to investigators earlier this year and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Manafort’s team also claimed that they had not yet seen an additional collection of around 20,000 documents from Manafort’s accounting firm, NKSFB. Prosecutors argued that many of the Gates files are just printouts of digital images. “I’m just not sure what looking at pictures is going to do for their case,” said Uzo Asonye, a lawyer on Mueller’s team. Asonye also argued that Manafort already had access to the documents through his former law firm, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. This is not the first time Manafort’s team has argued to delay or change the trial, in some way — in fact, it’s one of many failed past attempts. Both the Virginia and D.C. judges have rejected Manafort’s attempts to challenge the purview of Mueller’s investigation, to suppress evidence seized by authorities and to move his trial farther away from Washington. “I think it’s the desperation strategy,” said Professor Jens David Ohlin, vice dean of Cornell Law School. “I think he doesn’t have a lot of options available to him, so his lawyers are doing whatever they can to score a win. From their perspective, that’s the only strategy they have. A lot of these are low probability arguments, but they’re doing the best they can.” Earlier this summer, his team attempted to postpone the trial by arguing that Manafort’s imprisonment in a rural facility created logistical barriers for preparation — since he was located in Warsaw, more than 100 miles from D.C. When Ellis ordered that Manafort be moved closer to D.C., his attorneys backtracked, asking that their client remain at his current jail for “his safety,” among other reasons. Ellis wrote that “it is surprising and confusing when the counsel identifies a problem and then opposes the most logical solution to that problem.” Dressler called Manafort’s defensive strategy the “dartboard philosophy.” “You throw as many darts as the dartboard as you possibly can, make as many motions on everything that you can, in the hopes that one of them hits the bullseye, even when they’ve been failing in the past,” he said. So why did they hit the target this time? Jeffrey Cramer, a former federal prosecutor who is currently the managing director at Berkeley Research Group, speculated that Ellis may be trying to “avoid an appellate issue.” If Manafort is ultimately convicted, his team could appeal it on the grounds that they weren’t prepared for the trial to start, he explained. “If you’re a court trial judge, you’re not looking for that kind of appellate issue when you could just give them a few weeks and probably neutralize it.” However, some legal experts noted that it is can be unusual for defense teams with a client in custody to continue seeking delays, since it prolongs the time their client is in jail. In Manafort’s case, they believe his defense has adopted this strategy because the evidence against him is very strong. “Manafort might want to delay because he’s hoping that either the political pressure on the Russia investigation or the Justice Department will ramp up and that will pose problems for the prosecution,” said Ohlin. “He might also be hoping for a pardon from the president, so he wants to keep delaying things and delaying things with the hope that Trump pardons him.” A one-week delay isn’t even much of a victory for Manafort, experts note. The Virginia court has a reputation for being speedy — originally known as a “rocket docket,” according to Ohlin. The case will likely move quickly once it goes to trial. But for now, Manafort’s team will take what they can get. “It’s a 70-year-old man who is looking at over a dozen years in jail if he’s convicted,” noted Cramer. “Nothing good is going to happen to Mr. Manafort if this case goes to trial now. You push it off and hope for something — hope for a pardon, hope that witnesses change their mind — who knows what you’re hoping for. But the corollary is certainly not something to look forward to, because it’s a pretty strong case, not just in documents but also in witnesses.” Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address.<doc-sep>
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia—Paul Manafort’s trial was delayed until next week by Judge T. S. Ellis on Monday. The first major trial in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian election interference and links between Trump campaign officials and Russia—a tax and bank fraud case against Trump’s former campaign chairman—had been scheduled to begin on Wednesday. Manafort’s legal team argued on Monday that it needed more time to review tens of thousands of pages of files retrieved by the government from the electronic devices of his former deputy Rick Gates. Uzo Asonye, an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, argued for the government that those files were mostly photos and thus not relevant to the case for the government’s purposes. Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, argued that because Gates’ testimony would be “at the heart of the government case,” his legal team needed more time to review those files for something potentially exculpatory. Manafort’s team had been seeking a longer continuance that might push the trial date past that of a separate case against Manafort in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, which is currently scheduled for September. Ellis split the baby and postponed the trial six days until next Tuesday, July 31. The judge also ordered that the government provide the defense with a full witness list. Judge Ellis maintained scheduled voir dire questionnaire dispersal for this Tuesday, but jury selection itself won’t begin until next week, when the trial is scheduled to begin. Ellis ruled earlier in the day that the names of five witnesses whom prosecutors had sought to keep under seal should be revealed, and he also granted them immunity that was requested by the government. Talking Points Memo reported that those names were: James Brennan, Donna Duggan, Conor O’Brien, Cindy Laporta, and Dennis Raico. For jury selection, the judge rejected an apparent request by the defense for jurors to be asked who they voted for in the election. “We are not going to inquire into how people voted,” Ellis said. He offered that each side would seek to strike jurors based on their voting patterns and that he trusted jurors to be “fair and impartial,” whoever they voted for. The trial has been a political lightning rod. Manafort is being charged with crimes related to allegedly unregistered lobbying work he did on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Mueller had been tasked with investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any possible links or coordination between Russians and members of President Donald Trump’s campaign. Earlier on Monday, Trump tweeted twice directly about Mueller’s investigation, calling it the “conflicted and discredited Mueller Witch Hunt!” and saying that it should be “dropped.” Mueller has won indictments and plea deals against dozens of people so far, including 12 Russian intelligence officers who are alleged to have participated in election interference, including hacks of the Democratic National Committee. Ellis made very clear that this case—which covers tax and bank fraud charges against Manafort—was supposed to stick to those charges alone. “I’m not going to allow this trial to drag on,” he told the courtroom on Monday. “I’m not in the theater business. You have to be better-looking for that.”* Manafort, who is being detained in Alexandria while he awaits trial, was in the courtroom in the morning, but not in the afternoon. *Correction, July 23, 2018: This post originally misquoted Judge T.S. Ellis as having said “I’m in the theater business.” The quote has been fixed.