Mueller Caught Manafort’s Witness Tampering When Encrypted Messages Backed Up To His iCloud Account

Vice News reports:

Tech pro tip to Paul Manafort: Encrypting messages doesn’t mean much if your iCloud is backing them up. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager may now be going to jail for witness tampering, after Robert Mueller’s team accessed his iCloud account and found evidence he was trying to shape the testimony of two witnesses in his bank fraud and money laundering case.

Manafort, one of the key figures in Mueller’s investigation, may have thought he was being pretty sneaky when he allegedly used encrypted messaging services to coordinate the testimony with witnesses, but he let his phone send his data to the cloud, and prosecutors snuck in and got his WhatsApp and Telegram messages.

Law & Crime reports:



MSNBC host Ari Melber had some fun with this on The Beat Tuesday evening, likening it to putting a private diary in a locked safe, only to make copies of it and leave them around in public. To further illustrate the point, Melber told viewers that he considered bringing on an encryption expert, but because such a blatant gaffe didn’t need expert analysis, he went with stand-up comic Chuck Nice.

From there, Melber and Nice basically took turns roasting Manafort. “Paul Manafort, I got one thing to say to you my friend, and that is ‘You’re old,’” Nice said. “I do sketchy stuff online all the time, but I got two teenagers, and I got the sense to say come in here, is Daddy hiding this right?”