Paul Manafort had just been convicted on eight felony counts of tax and bank fraud. His lead defense lawyer walked up to a bouquet of microphones outside a Virginia federal courthouse and spoke with studied calm and world-class understatement: “Mr. Manafort will be evaluating all of his options at this point.”

He sure will, and quickly. Never mind the spin that Manafort was found guilty on fewer than half of the charges—Tuesday afternoon’s guilty verdicts mean that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager could be sentenced to a maximum of 80 years in prison. “These are all significant felony convictions,” says Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor in New York. “It’s a big win for the special counsel.” That’s not simply because prosecutors were forced to explain complicated financial documents or overcome the admitted thievery of their star witness, former Manafort aide Rick Gates; or because Judge T.S. Ellis III seemed to delight in hectoring them. The case was the first courtroom test of Robert Mueller’s work in the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation, and it took place under extraordinary political and media pressure. “It’s important in a symbolic way, too,” Rocah says. “Some people who right now think that Trump is ruining all these institutions will get some faith back that he can’t corrupt everything.”

“I don’t want to overstate the impact, given the news cycle and the way in which the Trump administration has been very good at finding new ways of refocusing the press,” says Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago. “But this verdict cuts against Trump’s narrative that there is nothing to what Mueller has been doing—that it’s all phony, a witch hunt. Rudy Giuliani recently said that Mueller needs to ‘put up or shut up.’ Well, Mueller is putting up, right? He’s going to court and getting convictions.”

And the special counsel will be back in court very soon, facing off against the very same defendant. This time, though, Manafort is charged with crimes that are closer to the heart of Mueller’s larger probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Virginia trial was about how Manafort tried to dodge paying taxes on more than $60 million in income from dubious sources; the trial beginning September 17 in Washington, D.C., relates to where Manafort’s money came from, particularly his lucrative work for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. He is accused of money laundering, failure to register as a foreign agent, and witness tampering. The venue will also be much less promising than what Manafort found in Virginia: presiding over the D.C. case will be Amy Berman Jackson. She’s the judge who sent Manafort to jail for violating the terms of his bail.

“It’s not unusual for prosecutors to try the same defendant in different jurisdictions,” says Sam Buell, a former federal prosecutor who helped steer the government’s case against Enron. “What’s unusual here is how quickly the next trial is scheduled.” The tight timeline may give Manafort an opening to stall: his defense lawyers could argue that prejudicial publicity in the aftermath of their client’s conviction in Virginia makes it impossible to select an unbiased jury so soon in D.C.

A spokesman says Manafort expects to appeal the Virginia convictions. He could also use the time between now and the Washington trial to consider cutting his losses, either pleading guilty to the D.C. charges outright, or bargaining with Mueller to consolidate the pending charges with the eight guilty verdicts in Virginia, in exchange for cooperating with the special counsel’s probe. But Manafort has shown no sign of caving, instead insisting on his innocence and appearing to believe that Trump will eventually pardon him if necessary.

The president, of course, remains the enormous, extra-legal wild card in this drama, especially after an afternoon in which his former campaign manager was convicted on eight felony counts and his former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to eight felony counts and implicated Trump in the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, a possible violation of campaign-finance laws. “Mueller and his team have stayed laser-focused on what’s been happening in court. And I think they genuinely don’t care what Trump has to say. He has already used every dirty word you can use about a prosecutor, and about their boss, the attorney general of the United States,” Buell says. “But whether they like it or not, their effort is taking place in this hurricane of media and politics. Up to this point, Trump’s calculus seems to be that doing something really drastic to the special counsel’s office is not worth the cost. Does what happened today with Manafort and Cohen change that calculus? That’s not something that can be gamed out.”