The Special Counsel’s Office has almost three times the number of exhibits it wants to show a jury in Paul Manafort’s next criminal trial compared with what it used in his Virginia case.
The evidence for the two trials largely doesn’t overlap, according to a court filing Thursday from Manafort’s legal team.
The two criminal cases that President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager faces do overlap in how they hinge on his alleged political consulting work in Ukraine. But the filing on Thursday shows just how expansive an investigation Robert Mueller’s team has conducted on Manafort, and how the next trial could be just as revelatory as the first.
In Manafort’s Virginia trial, which began on July 31, prosecutors presented nearly 400 financial records, emails and other documents to the jury. Manafort’s team says the prosecutors have “well over” 1,000 pieces of evidence lined up for the DC federal case, set to go to trial in September. The judge in DC told the prosecutors on Thursday to “review” their evidence collection “with an eye towards streamlining the presentation of its case.”
The reveal of the amount of evidence prosecutors are preparing came in a court filing Thursday.
For the past three weeks, Manafort’s lawyers have been arguing in a Virginia federal courtroom for his innocence on alleged tax and bank fraud crimes. The jury began deliberating Thursday morning and there had not yet been a verdict as of Thursday night.
Manafort’s next trial, on foreign lobbying and money laundering charges, is set to begin Sept. 17 in DC federal court and last several weeks longer.
His lawyers wrote to the DC federal district judge that the trial in Virginia has hampered their ability to meet a coming filing deadline. The defense team asked the judge on Thursday to push that deadline back.
The trial in Virginia “has not allowed defense counsel sufficient time to confer with the Special Counsel’s Office” on their plans for the September trial, the defense lawyers said.
“Review of these materials will be time-consuming,” the lawyers wrote. “This task simply cannot be accomplished while Mr. Manafort’s legal team is engaged in trial before Judge (T.S.) Ellis.”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed to give them four additional days.
This is the second time Manafort’s team has asked to move the deadline back.
The Special Counsel’s Office opposed the requests for deadline extensions, because Manafort has known the DC trial date for almost half a year and chose to split his criminal charges into the two separate trials.
