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Mueller’s Pit Bull

November 2, 2017

Vector illustration of guard dogs.

The lead lawyer on the case against Paul Manafort is a former general counsel at the FBI and  “a bookish, legal pit bull with two Ivy League degrees, a weakness for gin martinis and classical music and a list of past enemies that includes professional killers and white-collar criminals,” says a profile in The New York Times. Andrew Weissmann made his reputation in the late 90s as a federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, where he brought down the head of the Genovese crime family, and a few years later on the federal investigation of Enron. His expertise, says reporter Matt Flegenheimer, “is converting defendants into collaborators – with either tactical brilliance or overzealousness, depending on one’s perspective.” During the Enron investigation, he is said to have stunned the bigwigs of Houston when he brought tax fraud charges against the wife of one of the key executives. Yet some defense lawyers and liberal watchdogs praise his decision, as FBI attorney, to reopen hundreds of old cases when a pattern of shoddy forensic testimony came to light. “If there’s something to find, he’ll find it,” said a former colleague. “If there’s nothing there, he’s not going to cook something up.

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