Top Trump aide pleads guilty to fraud
Campaign official Rick Gates says he conspired, lied to FBI as Russia inquiry deepens
WASHINGTON— A third former member of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has admitted to a crime and agreed to co-operate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
Rick Gates, who was deputy chair of Trump’s campaign and then deputy chair of Trump’s inauguration committee, pleaded guilty Friday afternoon to committing a conspiracy to defraud the United States and lying to the FBI, numerous U.S. media outlets reported.
He told the judge that he understood his eventual sentence would be dependent on his co-operation with Mueller.
The conviction of Gates further validates Mueller’s probe, which has been criticized by Trump as a witch hunt. And it exposes Trump to yet more legal and political risk.
Gates’s decision comes a day after Mueller laid new bank fraud and tax evasion charges against him. In a letter to family and friends, obtained Friday by ABC, Gates said, “Despite my initial desire to vigorously defend myself, I have had a change of heart.”
“The reality of how long this legal process will likely take, the cost, and the circus-like atmosphere of an anticipated trial are too much. I will better serve my family moving forward by exiting this process,” he said.
Gates joins two campaign members, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who previously pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in agreeing to assist Mueller. A fourth person, lawyer Alex van der Zwaan, pleaded guilty Tuesday for lying to the FBI about his interactions with Gates.
The charges against Gates were not about his conduct on the campaign. It is not known what information Gates might have on Trump or people close to Trump.
At very least, legal experts said, his plea puts more pressure on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman for whom he served as right- hand man in politics and business. The Los Angeles Times reported last weekend that its sources said Gates had agreed to testify against Manafort but did not have incriminating information on Trump.
Regardless, said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, Gates’s plea will make Trump’s situation “a lot worse.”
“It makes it more likely that Manafort’s going to plea. Although he was always going to plea eventually, anyway. But it just speeds up that day where he’s going to have to,” Zeidenberg said.
Nick Akerman, a former assistant prosecutor on the Watergate scandal, said Mueller would likely require information on people other than Manafort to accept a deal with Gates, since the case against Manafort is already strong.
“He’s in a position to know a lot, and I can’t imagine they would enter into any deal with him that would not involve total co-operation. It’s not just testifying against Manafort,” Akerman said.
Gates’s plea is the second major development in the investigation in a week. Dramatically undercutting Trump’s frequent claim that the allegation of Russian election meddling is a fraud, Mueller announced last Friday that he was charging 13 alleged members of a Russian operation to assist Trump in 2016 using online trickery. Gates and Manafort had been charged the same day in October for a series of alleged offences committed outside of the campaign. Prosecutors alleged they had spent the period from 2006 to 2016 laundering millions of dollars they received from a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party, and from 2006 to 2014 lobbied the U.S. on behalf of this party, Viktor Yanukovych’s once-governing Party of Regions, without registering as foreign agents as required by law.
On Thursday, Mueller also alleged that Gates funnelled millions into foreign bank accounts in Cyprus, the Seychelles and elsewhere, and “hid the existence and ownership of the foreign companies and bank accounts, falsely and repeatedly reporting to their tax preparers and to the United States that they had no foreign bank accounts.”
Gates had faced the possibility of decades in prison.
The guilty plea will likely make his penalty substantially less severe. Manafort continues to fight the charges against him.
Mueller, the former director of the FBI, was appointed in May to probe the relationship between Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, which U.S. intelligence agencies believe interfered in the 2016 presidential election to try to help Trump get elected.
Trump argues that the probe is a biased exercise that has found “no collusion” and “no obstruction.” He and his allies have dismissed the previous two guilty pleas as inconsequential, claiming they do not reflect on him personally.