In the end, it's our own mistakes that bring us down.
Former Trump advisers Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are learning that lesson first hand. Apparently, prosecutors have evidence of the pair's fraud thanks to a paper trail caused by Manafort's inability to turn a PDF into a Word doc and vice versa.
SEE ALSO:Paul Manafort's favorite password is even dumber than you'd thinkOn Thursday, federal prosecutors issued a new set of indictments on former Trump campaign advisers Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, including tax and bank fraud.
One damning passage, spotted by DC attorney Susan Simpson, shows that prosecutors have evidence of the fraud because Manafort has the exact (lack of) computer skills you expect him to.
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In order to get a bank loan, Manafort and Gates had to show that they were still making money. So they endeavored to doctor a 2016 "profit and loss statement" (P&L) to show they were profitable in 2015.
The problem was that their original P&L had a deficit of more than $600,000. And good ol' Paul couldn't figure out how to edit his PDF. Who hasn't been there, amirite?
So he sent it on over to Gates, who worked his file converting magic. Then, Gates sent the Word doc back to Manafort. Who, with a few keystrokes, turned that deficit into a gain of $4 million — adding more than $3.5 million in fake profits. Voila, fraud!
But Manafort still needed a little help from his literal partner in crime. He sent it back to Gates, who then transformed the magically profitable Word doc back into a PDF, who then sent it right back to Manafort in this little game of financial fraud ping pong.
Here's the passage in full (DMI is the name of their company). Plus, here's a hot tip: searching "PDF" in the indictment reveals even more blatant instructions over email to doctor PDFs.
MANAFORT and GATES made numerous false and fraudulent representations to secure the loans. For example, MANAFORT provided the bank with doctored P&Ls for DMI for both 2015 and 2016, overstating its income by millions of dollars. The doctored 2015 DMI P&L submitted to Lender D was the same false statement previously submitted to Lender C, which overstated DMI’s income by more than $4 million. The doctored 2016 DMI P&L was inflated by MANAFORT by more than $3.5 million. To create the false 2016 P&L, on or about October 21, 2016, MANAFORT emailed GATES a .pdf version of the real 2016 DMI P&L, which showed a loss of more than $600,000. GATES converted that .pdf into a “Word” document so that it could be edited, which GATES sent back to MANAFORT. MANAFORT altered that “Word” document by adding more than $3.5 million in income. He then sent this falsified P&L to GATES and asked that the “Word” document be converted back to a .pdf, which GATES did and returned to MANAFORT. MANAFORT then sent the falsified 2016 DMI P&L .pdf to Lender D.
Now that's how you create a paper trail, ladies and germs!
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