On Friday afternoon, the 24th and 25th shoes dropped on Paul Manafort.
Earlier this week, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III filed court documents alleging that Manafort and an unnamed individual had tried to tamper with a potential witness in the case. Then, a superseding indictment: Manafort and a longtime aide, Konstantin Kilimnik, were each indicted on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of obstruction of justice.
That brings the investigation by Mueller — derided regularly by President Trump as an unwarranted and unfair “witch hunt” — to a total of 20 individuals and three businesses that have either been indicted or admitted guilt and a total of 75 charges filed by the year-old probe.
One-third of the counts included in Mueller’s indictments, 25 of them, target Manafort, once Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman. The charges include conspiracy and financial crimes, and they span a period from 2006 to the present.
Manafort’s longtime business partner Rick Gates, who also served as deputy chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign, once faced a slew of charges similar to Manafort’s. The original indictment, in fact, identified both Gates and Manafort as conspirators in a number of the charges Manafort now faces. In late February, though, Gates agreed to work with prosecutors, pleading guilty to two charges in exchange for the rest being dropped. (If you include those dropped charges, the total number of charges filed by Mueller hits 98.)
