Paul Manafort is a longtime political
fixer, and was for a relatively short time
Donald Trump's
campaign manager.
At this writing, he is, as well, a
jail resident awaiting
trial for a boatload of financial
crimes (though, it must fairly be noted, not campaign crimes). Here are a few handy tips about how not to get caught committing crimes, taken from Manafort's examples.
1. Don't send incriminating documents via unencrypted emails. Manafort was caught crime-ing in the first place after sending incriminating information to a colleague in a
Microsoft Word doc, because Manafort
didn't know how to convert it to a PDF. I might add, learn how to convert Word docs to PDF. This itself is rarely going to trip you up so much as being casual in the emailing of details of your illegal deeds. But it's not hard.
2. If you're going to send illegal text messages to people through one of those "disappearing" text message programs, don't select the option to
permanently back the messages up to the cloud. Manafort used such a texting service to try to get some of the people he'd worked with in certain European political fixes to phony up their story to sync with his own. This is called "
witness tampering," and is illegal all on its own. And once his back-ups of the messages were discovered resting in the cloud, he went from
house arrest to
jail.
3. If, while in jail, you figure out ways to continue sending messages to people--ways which violate jailhouse rules--don't
boast of your deeds on the prison
telephone. One would think his lawyers had told him that those calls are always recorded. But boast he did. The
judge will be seeing him about that sometime over the next few days.
297