obstruction report. there will be overwhelming audience. so this is a death spiral day by day, i think, for donald trump. i promise you, we ll let you talk now. so garrett, you ve been waiting patiently. one of the jurors spoke to fox moments ago. here s what they said about the star witness, rick gates. here it is. some of us had a problem with accepting his testimony because he took plea. so we agreed to throw out his testimony and look at the paperwork chflt his name was all over. did you find him to be credible? no. i think he would have done anything that he could to preserve himself. that s just obvious, and the fact that he flipped on manafort. so she admits that they threw out gates trust because they didn t trust him. what do you make of that?
the court house, can you give us a quick refresher on who rick gates is, what his background is, and how this might go on the stand for him. what are the stakes, how much preparation have prosecutors put him through? reporter: one can only imagine that he is incredibly well prepared because he s such an important witness. rick gates was paul manafort s prote protege. he was working for manafort for many years, but he also, when manafort went to the trump campaign, rick gates went to the trmp c trump campaign as a deputy chairman and he stayed on after manafort left, so gates remained in trump world longer than manafort and he may have some information about meetings and things that happened that manafort doesn t. we re not going to hear about that at this trial, but he s been thoroughly debriefed by the fbi about that. also, gates is not nearly as rich as manafort and it became clear that he was under crushing financial burden, because he was
they could have some evidence to the contrary. what might that look like? well, gates was a partner, he was a protege of manafort. he clearly had a lot of authority within the firm an he was dealing personally with this accountant, cindy laporta and giving her instructions on how to perform certain tasks and account for things. downing was just making the point that often the accountant is the last to know if there was fraud. the person giving the accountant the information has a lot of power to misrepresent what the numbers say. it looks like that s what their argument is going to be. but every single witness has been asked was paul manafort involved in this transaction, was he calling the shots and they all answered yes, including cindy laporta. she just said that mr. manafort was deeply involved in all aspects of the finances and transactions. so it will be interesting to see what the defense can come up with here. ken, before you run back into
jury to buy. it most certainly is and prosecutors will hammer one concept, follow the money. in these fraud trials, if you follow the money trail, that will lead you to the conclusion that you will finding when in the prosecution s mind is guilt. they ll see readily paul manafort made exponentially bigger amounts. he set up the business and the shell companies. so it s a very tough sell for the defense team to say it s the lower level, the subordinate who s in position to take orders from the man above that s the true mastermind. follow the money and that will lead you to the promised land for the prosecution. if i were rick gates, i would have taken a larger cut for myself, which he apparently did. joining us now, ken dilanian. ken, we were just speculating about this last night about when this might happen and it sounds like it s a little quicker than we might have thought and that we are going to hear from gates
very soon? reporter: that s right, kasie. i ll just relate to you what happened in the courtroom. cindy laporta, the accountant, was on the stand being cross examined by the defense and manafort s lawyer, kevin downing, was asking her about very complicated tax matters and he said would it change your answer if you knew rick gates had embezzled billions of dollars from paul manafort. then there was an objection from the prosecution and downing answered, well, mr. gates has that evidence, he s up next and about 30 reporters scrambled out of the courtroom including you, thankfully. reporter: yes. not as fast as i should have been but cindy laporta is still on the stand. there s some redirect by the prosecution. she s the accountant who acknowledged submitting information on manafort s taxes that she wasn t sure was accurate and turned out to be inaccurate and caused what prosecutors say is tax fraud. the same with a bank loan. she testified under grant of