Photo illustration by The Daily Beast
Nabbing Paul Manafort and Rick Gates for far-off financial felonies shows that if anyone in Trump’s orbit committed a crime… well, watch out.
By Betsy Woodruff
When the first indictments against President Donald Trump’s aides
were made public on Monday, the White House and its allies crowed. No
biggie, they argued: the charges aimed at former campaign chairman Paul
Manafort and his erstwhile business partner Rick Gates don’t involve
anything that happened during the 2016 campaign. They didn’t even tie
together Team Trump and the Kremlin, at least not directly.
Instead,
Mueller’s investigators dug into the not-too-distant past, dredging up
allegations of tax evasion, money laundering, and lobbying done in
secret.
“NO COLLUSION!” the president tweeted.
But seasoned observers quickly saw that the charges were more ominous for the White House than they at first appeared. The Manafort and Gates
indictments made clear that Mueller is perfectly comfortable bringing
charges related to activity that happened years before Trump took his
historic escalator ride.
For special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of seasoned federal prosecutors,
not much is off limits. And that could spell all kinds of trouble for a
president who has sought to keep his finances private, surrounded by
top aides who have all kinds of interesting financial entanglements of
their own.
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Source: The Daily Beast
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