After the FBI Raid, Paul Manafort Changes Lawyers

As the federal investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller digs deeper into the business dealings of Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for Donald Trump is changing his legal team.

“Mr. Manafort is in the process of retaining his former counsel, Miller & Chevalier, to represent him in the office of special counsel investigation,” said Manafort’s spokesman, Jason Maloni. “As of today, WilmerHale no longer represents Mr. Manafort.”

Maloni says Manafort did not fire his counsel from WilmerHale, whose large Washington office has extensive congressional experience. Instead, Miller is a smaller firm with a specialty in international tax law. I’m told that as interest in Manafort has shifted from the congressional investigations into Russian collusion to Mueller’s special counsel probe, there had been discussion about changing his legal strategy. That shift is also commensurate with where Mueller appears to be taking his investigation: toward Manafort’s international business dealings and tax records.

This new focus would explain why the FBI raided Manafort’s home in Alexandria, Virginia, last month to retrieve documents. The New York Times reported the search warrant was for “tax documents and foreign banking records.”

On Thursday the lead private counsel for President Trump criticized the special counsel’s office for the raid. “This extraordinary invasive tool was employed for its shock value to try to intimidate Mr. Manafort and bring him to his needs [sic],” said John Dowd, Trump’s lawyer, in an email to the Wall Street Journal. Dowd called it a “gross abuse” of the legal system and said such methods were “normally found and employed in Russia not America.”