The first trial of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation will kick off Tuesday, when former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort faces a litany of charges related to financial crimes and money laundering in Virginia.

These alleged financial crimes are quite spectacular and could end up sending Manafort to prison for the rest of his life. But in a sense, they’re a sideshow. What’s really looming over all this is Mueller’s larger investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia.

Manafort’s Virginia trial — which is separate from another trial he will face in Washington, DC, in September — is about the enormous amount of money he made from years of work for Ukraine’s government and political leaders, and later hefty loans he got from US banks.

Mueller has alleged a years-long scheme of astonishing scope: that Manafort first laundered $30 million from a web of undeclared offshore accounts into the US without paying taxes on it, and then (after the Ukrainian money stopped coming in) defrauded several US banks to get more than $20 million in loans. Manafort has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

However, many observers — including the judge for the trial, T.S. Ellis III — think all this is really about something else. It’s widely believed that Mueller’s primary aim in charging Manafort is to put pressure on him so he’ll “flip” on President Donald Trump and provide information about Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

Mueller has not confirmed any such strategy. But he has confirmed he’s been investigating Manafort regarding collusion, and Manafort’s past work for the Ukrainian political faction aligned with Russia (and other Russian ties) seems obviously relevant.

So as jurors hear arguments over Manafort’s offshore accounts, tax filings, and loan applications, the political world will wait with bated breath to see what the verdict could mean for the larger Russia investigation — and the future of Trump’s presidency.

Who is Paul Manafort?

Manafort is something of a legendary figure in Republican operative circles; you can think of his career in three major phases:

1) Decades of Republican campaign and lobbying work: Manafort rose to fame in the party through his work for Ford’s 1976 and Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaigns. After Reagan won, Manafort decided to cash in by starting a lobbying, consulting, and PR firm (alongside his campaign colleague Roger Stone).

The firm became infamous for representing controversial authoritarian regimes or opposition leaders abroad — clients like President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi of Angola. Manafort also occasionally jumped back into US politics, such as to manage the Republican convention in 1996.

2) The Ukraine period: By around 2004, Manafort sought even grander paydays abroad, by advising fantastically rich oligarchs in the former Soviet Union on how to master tumultuous democratic politics. He advised a Russian billionaire, Oleg Deripaska, but eventually his efforts focused on Ukraine — where he landed a hefty contract to advise the country’s pro-Russian political party.

When Manafort got the gig, the Party of Regions and its leader Viktor Yanukovych were unpopular, and in the opposition. But over the next few years, he’d orchestrate the party’s return to power and Yanukovych’s 2010 election as president. Once Yanukovych was in office, Manafort became an enormously influential adviser to the regime — the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer writes that Manafort had “walk-in” privileges, and billed “outrageous amounts” while advising on both domestic politics and lobbying in the US. (Mueller claims Manafort earned more than $60 million in these years.)

But it all fell apart in 2014, when demonstrators forced Yanukovych out of power and he fled to Russia. Manafort and Deripaska, meanwhile, had a falling-out that ended in a lawsuit, with Deripaska claiming Manafort cheated him of millions. He’d lost his biggest client and had serious cash flow problems, and the FBI was now looking into his Ukrainian money.

3) The Trump campaign and afterward: Yet Manafort saw opportunity in the outsider presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. Trump needed someone with the expertise on party and convention rules who could lock down delegates for him. And two longtime Manafort associates who had Trump’s ear — Roger Stone, and wealthy real estate investor Tom Barrack — pitched Manafort for the job.

On March 28, 2016, Trump announced he’d hired Manafort. At first, Manafort’s job was merely to lead a delegate-wrangling operation, but his portfolio gradually expanded until he was effectively running the campaign. He was officially named campaign chair and chief strategist in May and ran the effort through the last few primaries and the Republican convention. (He worked for free.)

But by mid-August, Trump had sunk in the polls, and Manafort was dogged by damaging news reports questioning the legality of his Ukrainian payments. So Trump brought in Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to take over, and Manafort was forced out. Then, as 2017 progressed, Manafort came under scrutiny in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, leading to his indictment last October (and more charges being added in February, and again in June).

What is Paul Manafort on trial for this week?

Manafort’s trial in Virginia is about his money. The full indictment is at this link. He’s facing 18 counts, but we can think of them as part of two main batches.

The first set of charges, which Mueller calls “the tax scheme,” relate to Manafort’s flush years, when the Ukrainian money was pouring in to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Mueller says Manafort set up a complex web of offshore shell companies and then spent $30 million of that offshore cash in the US between 2008 and 2014.

About $12 million of that cash was allegedly spent on “personal items” for Manafort and his family, spread across more than 200 different transactions. This included about $5.4 million to a home improvement company in the Hamptons, $1.3 million tied to an antique rug store in Virginia, $849,000 or so to a men’s clothing store in New York, $819,000 on landscaping, and payments related to several Range Rovers and a Mercedes-Benz.

Then another $6.4 million was allegedly wired from offshore for three real estate payments: $1.5 million for a condo in New York City, $3 million for a brownstone in Brooklyn, and $1.9 million for a house in Virginia. On top of that, Manafort allegedly sent another $13 million as “loans” to US companies he controlled — but the government calls these loans “shams” designed to fraudulently reduce his taxable income.

All this violated the law in two ways, Mueller says:

False income tax returns (5 counts): Manafort did not report any of this money on his income tax returns, or pay taxes on it. He also falsely said, on those tax returns, that he had no authority over any financial accounts in foreign countries. He faces one count for each tax year from 2010 to 2014.

Manafort did not report any of this money on his income tax returns, or pay taxes on it. He also falsely said, on those tax returns, that he had no authority over any financial accounts in foreign countries. He faces one count for each tax year from 2010 to 2014. Failure to report foreign bank or financial assets (four counts): Manafort also didn’t report any of his foreign accounts to the Treasury Department by filing what’s known as an FBAR form — a legally required disclosure. He faces one count for each year from 2011 to 2014.

Next, there’s a second set of charges that Mueller calls “the financial institution scheme.” Mueller says that after Yanukovych was deposed and the Ukrainian money stopped pouring in, Manafort was desperate for cash, and made a series of fraudulent declarations to banks to try to get hefty mortgage loans — “to have the benefits of liquid income without paying taxes on it.”

All the charges here are either bank fraud (four counts) or bank fraud conspiracy (five counts), relating to several different loans or attempts to get loans from 2015 through January 2017. The allegations are:

To get a $3.4 million loan on a New York City condo, Manafort falsely told a lender that the property was a second home when it was a rental property, failed to disclose previous mortgage debt, and, after the lender discovered that debt, falsely claimed it was forgiven.

In search of another loan, Manafort submitted a doctored profit and loss form to a different potential lender that overstated his consulting firm’s income by more than $4 million.

To get a $5.5 million loan on a Brooklyn brownstone, Manafort didn’t disclose that he already had a loan on that property, and got an associate to submit a form overstating his firm’s income by $2 million.

To get loans of $9.5 million and $6.5 million on two properties, Manafort again submitted doctored profit and loss forms overstating his firm’s income by millions. He also falsely claimed he had a $300,000 debt on his American Express card only because he had lent it to his former aide Rick Gates.

What should we expect to see at Manafort’s trial?

The Virginia trial is expected to last about two to three weeks. The government’s evidence exhibit list and witness list are both public, which gives us a pretty good idea of the prosecution’s plans. Mueller’s team will present a plethora of financial documents, emails, photos, and other evidence to document Manafort’s spending from offshore accounts and alleged false bank loan submissions.

As for witnesses, Mueller’s team will potentially call up to 35 people to testify, but they’re generally not big names — this is a case about money, so expect to hear from a lot of accountants, financial institution employees, and little-known former employees of Manafort’s firm.

However, there are two exceptions. First, the government’s star witness will likely be Rick Gates, Manafort’s longtime right-hand man who worked with him in Ukraine and then the Trump campaign. Gates was charged alongside Manafort in Mueller’s probe last October, but struck a plea deal with the special counsel in February. He was Manafort’s closest business associate through this period, so his testimony about what Manafort was saying or thinking could be important.

The only other big name on the government’s witness list is Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant most famous for advising Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. Before that, though, Devine had done work alongside Manafort in Ukraine.

As for Manafort’s strategy, that’s more of a mystery at this point — beyond publicly claiming to be innocent, his lawyers have given little indication about how they’ll argue the case at trial.

Judge Ellis has already said publicly that given “the apparent weight of the evidence against him,” Manafort “faces the very real possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison.” Indeed, many of the charges against him are considered “paper charges” — as in, they’re more about documented financial transactions and false filings or non-filings by Manafort than they are about proving his state of mind or anything like that. Anything can happen, though, and it’s always possible he’ll get lucky with the jury.

What’s Paul Manafort’s other trial about?

As sprawling as this all seems, it’s actually only the start of Manafort’s legal woes — because Mueller has indicted him on another seven charges in Washington, DC, for a trial scheduled to start after this one concludes, in September.

In general, the DC trial will focus more on Manafort’s actual work for Ukraine, rather than his finances. The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States and making false Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) statements.

Additionally, just last month, Mueller brought two new charges related to attempted witness tampering. He said that earlier this year, Manafort and a Russian associate contacted witnesses and urged them to give a false story. After these new charges, Judge Amy Berman Jackson in DC sent Manafort to jail to await trial, arguing that he’d “abused the trust” placed in him by the court system.

Wait, why are there two Manafort trials, anyway?

Mueller originally indicted Manafort in Washington last October. But for unclear reasons, he wasn’t ready to bring the tax and bank fraud charges against Manafort at that time (perhaps because of a bureaucratic holdup, or perhaps because his team was still assembling evidence there).

By February of this year, Mueller was ready to file those tax and bank fraud charges. But there was a catch. The law required some of those counts to be charged where Manafort actually lived (Alexandria, Virginia) — unless Manafort specifically gave Mueller permission to charge him in DC.

This posed an interesting dilemma for Manafort. On the one hand, it’s easier and less expensive for the defendant to just prepare for one trial rather than two. Also, two separate trials would give the prosecution two separate opportunities, before different judges and different juries, to convict him — making it less likely a lucky break would get him off the hook entirely.

On the other hand, DC’s population is far more liberal and far more nonwhite than that of the Eastern District of Virginia — meaning Manafort likely thought he had a better chance of an acquittal in the latter venue. Furthermore, the specific charges that would be brought against him in Virginia likely played into his thinking. As compared to the DC charges, there are more of them, they’re generally viewed as tougher to beat, and they would mean a longer prison sentence — so why not get them before a Virginia jury rather than a DC one?

So Manafort did not give Mueller permission to file the new charges in DC, which meant two separate trials. But Manafort appears to have miscalculated. His team hoped that of the two trials, the Washington one would be first, since those charges were filed months earlier. But as Josh Gerstein has written, this Virginia district is known as a “rocket docket” for its speed in bringing cases to trial. So here we are.

But what about Trump and Russian collusion?

None of these many, many charges against Manafort have anything to do with the Russian government interfering in the 2016 election, the main thing Mueller is investigating.

But Manafort has long been a central figure in that aspect of the probe, for some pretty obvious reasons — he spent years working for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine and was in debt to a Russian oligarch.

As far as specific allegations, there are two curious happenings during the campaign that Manafort has been tied to.

First, he attended Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer and other Russia-tied figures in June 2016. Attendees have claimed that even though the meeting was set up with the promise of dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government, nothing much of importance happened there.

Second, there’s a set of surreptitious contacts Manafort had with two Russian nationals during the campaign. There’s the aforementioned oligarch and former client he was indebted to, Oleg Deripaska. Then there’s Konstantin Kilimnik, a former employee of Manafort’s who worked with him in Ukraine, and who Mueller has said is tied to Russian intelligence. (Kilimnik was indicted alongside Manafort for alleged witness tampering in June, but he remains in Russia and likely won’t face trial.)

Manafort and Kilimnik exchanged a series of cryptic emails during the campaign about Deripaska and, apparently, money. “How do we use to get whole. Has OVD operation seen?” Manafort asked in April. “He will be most likely looking for ways to reach out to you pretty soon,” Kilimnik wrote in July. “If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort answered. At the end of the month, Kilimnik wrote that he had met with “the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar” and that “I have several important messages from him to you.” (Investigators reportedly believe “black caviar” is a reference to money.)

What exactly was going on here remains unknown. Was this where the action on Trump-Russia collusion happened? Or was Manafort just going rogue in an effort to get himself paid (while in theory working for Trump’s campaign for free)? It remains a loose end.

But Mueller has made clear that he was specifically investigating Manafort for collusion-related crimes, as he revealed in a court filing:

No charges, however, have yet resulted from that part of the investigation, and the current status of it is unclear.

Big picture, what’s really going on here?

Publicly, more of the special counsel’s activity has been focused on Manafort than on any other single person involved in the Russia investigation, even though none of the 25 charges brought against him so far are about interference with the election.

The most common proposed explanation is that Mueller believes Manafort has important information for the collusion probe — and that he’s brought so many other charges against Manafort to put pressure on him, in hopes he’ll “flip” and spill what he knows.

Mueller has been tight-lipped about his true intentions, and it’s also possible that he’s trying to send Manafort to prison for what he views as repeated violations of the law and doesn’t much care whether he flips or not.

Still, given how Mueller charged Rick Gates with past Ukraine-related crimes and withdrew nearly all of those charges as soon as he agreed to cooperate, it would make sense if he’s pursuing a similar strategy with Manafort.

If he is, though, it hasn’t worked. Even though Manafort is facing 25 charges that could easily put him in prison for the rest of his life — and even though the evidence for many if not most of these charges appears quite strong — he’s pleaded not guilty to everything, and has given no public indication he’s considering flipping.

Why? One possible explanation is he just has nothing to flip with. Either he wasn’t involved in collusion or he has nothing on Trump or anybody else Mueller cares about. Alternatively, maybe Manafort is just holding out hope that he can beat the charges. A darker possibility is that, given an apparent series of Russia-linked assassinations in the West, Manafort fears violent reprisals against himself or his family should he give information implicating Russians.

But perhaps most likely is that Manafort is just holding out for Trump to pardon him. The New York Times has reported that last year, Trump’s then-lawyer John Dowd discussed a possible presidential pardon with Manafort’s lawyer. Rudy Giuliani has more recently floated the idea too.

Yet even a pardon may not entirely be a get-out-of-jail-free card. There are a host of complications involved, from potential state charges against him (the president can’t pardon state charges) to the prospect that Manafort would no longer be able to avoid testimony by pleading the Fifth Amendment on certain matters.

That all lies ahead, though. For now, Manafort will have his day in court.