"I attempted to transform my Word draft of this blog post into a PDF. I confess that I did fumble a bit at first (it’s been a while), but I eventually managed to get the job done. According to my stopwatch, the full ordeal took me 42 seconds."
Not necessarily. There might not have been an obvious criminal action if Manafort just had someone else convert an existing P&L disclosure from PDF to Word. The real problem was asking someone to convert his fraudulent Word doc to PDF.
And since PDF is encapsulated PostScript, and PostScript is a Turing-complete language, this problem is actually uncomputable in general! I guess it can be done well enough in practice by pattern-matching — if the document came from Word originally, it's probably possible to reverse the process — but that is one converter I would certainly not want to have to write!
"I attempted to transform my Word draft of this blog post into a PDF. I confess that I did fumble a bit at first (it’s been a while), but I eventually managed to get the job done. According to my stopwatch, the full ordeal took me 42 seconds."
When the real problem ws turning a PDF into Word.