Lawyers for former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort concluded their case on Tuesday without calling any witnesses, opening the way for closing arguments and for judge TS Ellis III to turn the case over to jurors.
Manafort’s legal team elected not to call him as a witness in his own defense. He faces charges of tax fraud, bank fraud and failure to report foreign bank accounts in federal court in Virginia.
The trial is the first to arise in the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller of ties between Trump and Russia and related matters. If convicted, Manafort, 69, could spend the rest of his life in prison.
Prosecutors allege Manafort knowingly misled banks about his income in order to secure personal loans he needed to fund a lavish lifestyle and to service debts including hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on baseball tickets.
Prosecutors also allege Manafort sought to conceal from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) millions of dollars in income from his political consulting work in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Manafort’s defense team argued that the prosecution failed to demonstrate that banks had made loans based on fraudulent representations by Manafort.
The defense also attacked the prosecution’s key witness, Manafort’s former protégé Rick Gates, who testified that he and Manafort falsified documents presented to banks and the IRS.
Manafort’s attorneys accused Gates of lying to federal agents and attacked him as untrustworthy.
Ellis, who urged prosecutors to hasten their case and appeared sympathetic to the defense arguments about bank fraud, was expected to hand the case over to the jury in short order.
