In America, corporations are people and those corporate people can take the rap for you sometimes, according to Manafort’s defense team. The prosecution rested Monday, but before the defense called its first witness, it gave a sneak preview of its closing argument for why Manafort shouldn’t go down for failing to tell the government about his foreign bank accounts: It wasn’t Paul’s problem. His company should’ve done that.
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The government rests: The sneak preview came courtesy of arguments before Judge Thomas Ellis about whether the prosecution should be allowed to call its final witness, Treasury Department Special Agent Paula Liss, to tell the jury about whether Manafort ever told the government about his foreign bank accounts. Manafort, as the court later learned, had not, but defense attorney Thomas Zehnle said the jury shouldn’t hear that because it wasn’t Manafort’s job to tell the IRS about the many bank accounts in Cyprus; it was the responsibility of DMP International, his company.