There are two types of people in this world: those who know how to convert PDFs into Word documents and those who are indicted for money laundering. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is the second kind of person.
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So here’s the essence of what went wrong for Manafort and Gates, according to Mueller’s investigation: Manafort allegedly wanted to falsify his company’s income, but he couldn’t figure out how to edit the PDF. He therefore had Gates turn it into a Microsoft Word document for him, which led the two to bounce the documents back-and-forth over email. As attorney and blogger Susan Simpson notes on Twitter, Manafort’s inability to complete a basic task on his own seems to have effectively “created an incriminating paper trail.”
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In Manafort’s defense, converting documents to and from Word could be easier. Not having tried it for a while, 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. Changing PDFs back to editable Word documents, meanwhile, does get a little more complicated. Try it in Adobe Acrobat (via the “Save as Other” command under “File” on a Mac) and you’ll quickly be redirected to Adobe’s website and presented with a handful of subscription packages that will allow you to transform your documents. For as little as $2 a month, Adobe will allow you to convert PDF files to Word, Excel, and rich text formats. If this feels extortionate, there are also plenty of services online that promise to let you do the same thing for free, but—and, to be clear, I’m no financial genius—even people who are allegedly misreporting millions of dollars in income can almost certainly afford the budget option. Indeed, it’s probably a little safer, all things considered.

What have we learned from all this? If you’re going to engage in some kind of complicated conspiracy, it’s probably a good idea to bone up on some basic computer skills first.