A federal grand jury in Virginia approved a new set of charges from special counsel Robert Mueller against former Trump campaign aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates Thursday afternoon.
Mueller had indicted Manafort and Gates on a combined 12 counts last October in Washington, DC, but he has now assembled a “superseding indictment” with a combined 32 counts of tax, financial, and bank fraud charges against the two men — in Virginia rather than Washington.
Mueller is actually overseeing various grand juries because the scope and size of the investigation into Russia's attack on our 2016 Elections covers a lot of literal ground.
If you want to take a look at the actual paperwork filed, Vox provided a PDF link here.
For Mueller and for the investigation overall, this is further confirmation that there was - IS - a lot of corruption in trump's business world. It'd be nice to see when/if any of that sticks to trump.
I'm kind of surprised Gates bailed on the deal, if he knew in some way Mueller had more of these charges filed away for this moment. Unless Mueller was offering something that involved jail time, or taking away something Gates viewed as personally valuable, all Gates has done from reneging on the deal has been making it more likely a court will find him guilty on something among all the money laundering and fraud he's getting accused of.
There may be only one reason Gates would back off: if he really thinks trump will come in and shut this all down. Scary consideration, which is the only reason why I don't put this in the Schadenfreude column yet.
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