Manafort’s longtime protegé Gates worked in Ukraine

The relationship between Rick Gates and his longtime protegé Paul Manafort, the ex-Trump campaign chief, goes back decades.

Both were hit with 12 counts on Monday, including conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, according to the Justice Department.

They have steadily worked together for more than 10 years. Gates followed Manafort overseas to work in Ukraine, and later to the Trump campaign, where he was a senior aide in the future president’s inner circle.

When Manafort’s role was reduced, Gates stayed with the campaign, however, and went on to run a pro-Trump group after the election.

Gates, 45, first started as an intern three decades ago at Black, Manafort, Stone, Kelly – an influential Washington lobbying firm in the 1980s.

He started there the same year Manafort departed, according to a July profile in The New York Times.

But in 2006 he joined Manafort’s consulting firm, Davis Manafort, working in Kiev, Ukraine.

“Rick was Paul’s business guy,” Tad Devine, a Democrat operative who worked with the firm for some time, told the Times last summer.

Among the firm’s high-profile Eastern European clients was Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – the pro-Moscow politician who they shaped as a reformer. Yanukovych fled Ukraine during an early 2014 revolution and now lives in exile in Russia.

Investigators have reportedly been looking at Manafort’s overseas connections – particularly investment funds and companies set up in Cyprus to receive payments.

Gates worked with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin ally accused of having ties to organized crime, in 2008 on a deal with Manafort on a botched deal for communications firms in the Ukraine, Bloomberg reported in September.

Deripaska, who has had repeated difficulty getting a US visa, late sued Manafort in a Cayman Islands court, parts of which were reportedly resolved.

Manafort later came under fire when it was revealed he offered Deripaska personal briefings while he ran the Trump campaign.

Gates followed Manafort to the Trump campaign, where he rose quickly.

After campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was ousted in favor of Manafort, Gates took on the No. 2 role previously held by Stuart Jolly.

He worked in tandem with Manafort during the heated end of the primary season, as Trump secured the Republican nomination.

Rumors swirled last July that he oversaw Melania Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, which turned out to have sections lifted from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Manafort and other campaign officials said news reports of Gates’ work on the speech weren’t true.

“Rick’s not a speechwriter and he doesn’t have a role in the campaign’s speech-writing process – we have other people for that,” campaign spokesman Jason Miller told CNN at the time. “Anybody saying differently is being intentionally misleading.”

He was, however, involved in the inner circle for the Trump campaign at that time, appearing on stage as the candidate prepared for his speech before the Republican National Committee in Cleveland.