MANAFORT RAP ON TAP
EAVESDROP & INDICT SHOCKERS:
PRESIDENT TRUMP’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was under surveillance both before and after the 2016 election and prosecutors have told him he will be indicted, according to reports.
The FBI began investigating the longtime Republican operative in 2014 because of his work with the pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine and, and it secured a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor him, CNN reported Monday.
That warrant was discontinued, but investigators received another one that extended into the beginning of this year after intercepting communications with suspected Russian operatives, the news outlet said.
Manafort has become a focus of various investigations into alleged Russian efforts to tilt the 2016 election toward Trump. Those probes are going forward in Congress, the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s office.
Mueller’s agents raided Manafort’s Alexandria, Va., home in July, with The New York Times reporting Monday that prosecutors told him soon after that he would be indicted.
Manafort stepped down from Trump’s campaign last August after reports of under-the-table payments when he worked in Ukraine for the Party of the Regions, whose president, Viktor Yanukovych, fled to Russia amid violent protests in Kiev.
He is the second Trump associate believed to have been under a federal surveillance, or FISA, warrant, with reports earlier this year that foreign policy adviser and former Moscow financier Carter Page was also being monitored.
Government applications for FISA warrants require information suggesting the target of the surveillance may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.
The vast majority of requests by the government are granted, though the courts and warrants are secret.