Friday, February 23, 2018

Paul Manafort got $16 million in loans after the election. Mueller finds that very interesting.

The loans came from a Trump adviser’s bank that specialized in affordable mortgages for military veterans.

By Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.com  Feb 21, 2018, 2:00pm EST

Last October, special counsel Robert Mueller indicted Paul Manafort on nine counts, all related to his past work for Ukrainian politicians and the millions of dollars he got from that work. (He’s pleaded not guilty.)

But Mueller may not be stopping there. His investigators have also been scrutinizing some $16 million in loans Manafort got after the 2016 election — and are looking into whether Manafort promised his lender a Trump administration job in return, according to a report Wednesday by NBC News’s Tom Winter and Hallie Jackson.

Mueller alluded to the loans in a court filing Friday, during deliberations over Manafort’s bail package. He wrote that he’d learned of “additional criminal conduct” from Manafort, including “a series of bank frauds and bank fraud conspiracies.” And he wrote that Manafort had gotten those particular loans “through a series of false and fraudulent representations.”

Additionally, Politico’s Josh Gerstein reported Wednesday that Mueller has filed new, sealed charges in the case against Manafort and Rick Gates. This new charging document isn’t yet public, and it’s not clear whom or what it’s about. But these loans seem one obvious possibility.

Manafort got $16 million in loans from a bank headed by a Trump adviser after the election
Manafort’s post-election loans have long seemed curious. An excellent report by the New York Times’s Mike McIntire from nearly a year ago laid out the timeline:

On August 19, 2016, Manafort left the Trump campaign, after being pushed out.
That same day, Manafort filed papers to create a new shell company: Summerbreeze LLC.
In September 2016, Summerbreeze got a $3.5 million loan from Spruce Capital, a New York investment firm whose co-founder has developed Trump hotel projects and that is financially backed by a Ukrainian billionaire. (Manafort’s home in the Hamptons was the collateral.)
After Trump won the election, in late 2016, Summerbeeze got another $9.5 million loan from the Federal Savings Bank of Chicago. And in January 2017, that same bank loaned Manafort $6.5 million more. (All these were, again, collateralized by Manafort’s properties.)

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