Saturday, February 17, 2018

And while we were fixated on the Russian indictments...

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has told a federal judge it has found evidence that Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, committed bank fraud not addressed by the indictment last October in which he was charged with money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent.

As legal wrangling continues over a $10 million bail package for Manafort, prosecutors this week accused him of submitting false information to a bank in connection with one of his mortgages.

  Politico
Perhaps they were informed by Rick Gates, who is apparently now cooperating with Mueller's investigation.
No criminal charges are known to have been filed over the alleged fraud, and Mueller’s office does not say in the filing whether it intends to bring any.

The filing by Mueller’s office says Manafort obtained a mortgage using “doctored profit and loss statements” overstating “by millions of dollars” the income for his consulting company, DMP International. Prosecutors appear to be referring to a $9.5 million mortgage that Federal Savings Bank of Chicago extended in late 2016 to a Manafort-linked firm, Summerbreeze LLC.
Gee, who else do we know who regularly overstates his income and secured a huge loan after being turned down by Deutsche Bank, not from a different bank, but from a different department of Deutsche Bank? 
Prosecutors’ references to “conspiracies” suggest that someone beyond Manafort was involved in the alleged fraud, but no further details were given.

[...]

A report in The Wall Street Journal last year said investigators from the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman were examining loans that Manafort obtained in connection with various real estate transactions, including mortgages issued by Federal Savings Bank. That and other articles also noted that the bank’s chairman, Stephen Calk, was an economic adviser to the Trump campaign.
If you're interested, here's a post from last summer about Mr. Calk, Federal Savings Bank, and Paul Manafort.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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