The Atlantic re Manafort: "Federal prosecutors take witness tampering very seriously"

[emulatorloo]

What Is Paul Manafort Doing?
Trump’s former campaign manager is living dangerously by allegedly attempting to contact potential witnesses while under indictment.

NATASHA BERTRAND
JUN 5, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/what-is-paul-manafort-doing/562118/

When the news broke that Paul Manafort, under indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, repeatedly tried to contact witnesses in the case against him despite round-the-clock electronic surveillance, many asked the same question: What was he thinking?

“As counsel, you are repeatedly advising a client to steer clear of witness tampering,” says Jacob Frenkel, a white-collar-criminal-defense attorney. “But the client has to listen. This will be the poster-child case that lawyers will use to highlight the risk of communicating with witnesses pretrial.”

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Despite the risk of being jailed until trial, “this kind of behavior is surprisingly typical when high-powered individuals have their first encounter with the federal criminal-justice system,” says Caroline Polisi, a criminal-defense attorney who handles federal and white-collar cases. “They can’t get it through their heads that they are not above the law and that the government is constantly monitoring them. They also can’t come to terms with the fact that they are no longer in control.” Manafort was indicted as part of a wide-reaching inquiry into whether Donald Trump’s campaign aided a Russian effort to swing the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor, and whether the president attempted to obstruct that investigation.


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The best option for Manafort’s attorneys now, according to legal experts, is to try to convince them that Manafort was not trying to suborn perjury when he attempted to contact the witnesses. “The best line of defense is always that the nature of the communications has been misconstrued, and there has been no attempt to influence testimony,” Frenkel says. Still, Caroline Polisi says, “federal prosecutors take witness tampering of this nature extremely seriously, and it is actually one of the most frequent reasons some of my clients get their bail revoked—they simply can’t help themselves.”

Much more at link