lifestyle. is he going to face potentially more jail time if convicted on those fraud charges as well? he is because the amounts are bigger, so when you re talking about stealing $4 million, it s a much bigger deal than stealing $300,000, but as you point out, these cases have a lot of jury appeal, if you re the government, and none if you re michael avenatti. juries don t like people who steal from paraplegics to fund their lavish lifestyle. he s got to try to get a resolution in these cases. in other words, plea. for sure. the extortion case in new york, he could try to make some arguments there. this is the one with nike. they have to prove he threatened nike, that he doesn t have a business reason for asking what he s asking for, you could see trying to roll the dice on that. the other two cases are basically paper cases. they re provable by the documents, he really really has no defense here. he s a fighter. he s a lawyer.
saying they want guidance on being hung on one count. theoretically, they could be having some dissension on other counts too. paul, one more quick question here. as a former prosecutor, if you re robert mueller and you know you have another manafort trial, you re under constant attack by the president of the united states, you have to decide what to do with the papadopoulos sentencing, the michael flynn sentencing. you know the other evidence you have or don t have, are still looking for. how important is it to win the first one out of the gate when you re not only in a complicated legal situation but an incredibly complicated political mess? it is very important, john, to win that first one because, you know, mueller has been under constant attack bit president. the president has got a new derogatory nickname for mueller every week. there s a new one that s added to the list. so his credibility is on the line here, and that is so important in an investigation like this and in tri
these are financial crimes. if i m not a financial expert or a legal expert, it might take me a while to go through all of the charges and all the documents and all the evidence to make sure i m the dog those i s and crossing those ts. tax cases are paper cases, so they re really not terribly complicated. it seems daunting because of the amount of paper and the numbers and the complexity of the numbers. but ultimately where we talk about rick gates being the focal point of this case, this really is a paper case and it s really about did you disclose it, did you know you were supposed to disclose it, and if you didn t, you broke the law. let s not spend time talking about destroying rick gates credibility unless you want to believe mr. manafort was actually victimized by mr. gates and it was actually mr. gates that did all these terrible things and mr. manaforts didn t know anything about it. that s going to be, i think, a
case. i think jeff and phil asked the right question which is what is the defense, particularly where there s a cooperator that will say that was manafort s account. this strikes me as an incredible difficult case for manafort to beat, and when you talk about paper cases, you follow the money and the trail and you have a criminal prosecution that more often than not is successful. as to the time, i mean, each count can be up to 30 years. he is looking at a lot of exposure in federal prison for a conviction. by the way, it is in alexandria known as the rocket docket. they say it will take three weeks. bet it will take two rather than three. things go very fast in that courthouse. and this is focused on tax and bank fraud, things that occurred before he was campaign chairman for president trump, but it puts the focus back on the special counsel and investigation and robert mueller, that will be played out on television which we know the
travelled to syria and leb bonn. when they looked at his computer they found he had pictures of hamas rallies because he was studying islam. he had all kind of things that would indicate a terroris connection. so they then searched his computer and turned up nothing there. makes it sound more reasonable. you re both reasonable about the reasonable suspicion wrong about the reasonable suspicion. there is to quantifier for a warrant. you have don t have to have a warrant. you have to have some suspicion that something is wrong other than i don t like your mutual ties. that s what the law says. it s not what the current law says. on the ipad, you continue to ew you had an ipad. i got it somewhere here. paper cases. there has been a congressional movement to amend the law and protect the privac rights because the ninth circuit a other federal courts have been lax in protecting the privacyts rights. there has to be some suspic -ion. at this point w do you account f