Trump campaign’s ex-chair Manafort held for conspiracy
Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and associate Rick Gates, were arrested on Monday and charged by investigators with conspiracy against the United States, money laundering and failing to register as foreign agents. Another aide has pleaded guilty to lying about his Russia links.
Manafort and Gates were indicted on 12 counts that included failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts,” the office of special counsel Robert Mueller said in a statement, adding the duo was “permitted to surrender themselves” to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which they did.
The 31-page indictment did not mention Trump or Russia. But Mueller’s office plugged that gap, unsealing a guilty plea by Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos for making false statements about ties to people who he knew had “close connections with senior Russian government officials”. Papadopoulos was a Trump campaign volunteer who had come to be identified by the presidential candidate himself as one of his foreign policy advisers.
He had sought to set up meetings between Trump campaign and the Russian leadership, and as he wrote in an email, “including (Russian President Vladimir) Putin”. The indictment on Manafort and Gates, handed by the jury on October 27 and unsealed on Monday, marked the first indictments and arrests in the probe of Russian meddling in US presidential election in 2016, that has dogged Trump from the start, to mounting frustration.
Manafort and Gates will be arraigned in a federal court later— a proceeding at which charges against them will be read out and they will be asked to plead guilty or innocent. They are expected to be released on bail. But additional charges could be be brought against them later. “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign,” the President tweeted in response.