The fashion police have come for President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Manafort is on trial for bank and tax fraud and federal prosecutors outlined his purchases on Wednesday to build a case about Manafort’s income. That’s how people learned he once spent more than $400,000 in a single year on his own personal wardrobe, paying handsomely for it with it through international wire transfers from foreign bank accounts, according to witnesses and prosecutors.
A former employee of New York City’s Alan Couture boutique testified that he bought “an unusual number of suits.”
Some of the items he bought at a Manhattan tailor were tailor-made for internet humor.
Style selections like his “custom $15,000 jacket made from an ostrich,” a “$9,500 vest made from ostrich,” a “$18,500 jacket made from python skin,” and a”waterproof silk blouson,” were just some of the splurges prosecutors illuminated in the courtroom on the second day of his trial.
In his defense, Manafort’s legal team has argued that he left the details of his spending to others, saying that his involvement with longtime associate Rick Gates led to accounting errors.
Prosecutors showed so many photographs of his pricy threads that Judge T. S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. eventually scolded prosecutors. “Let’s move on, enough is enough,” Ellis said during the trial. “We don’t convict people because they have a lot of money and throw it around.”
But the jurors on the internet do not adhere to such principles. Manafort’s critics continue to make a meal out of his taste in finer things.
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See a sampling of the internet responses below.
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