Court: Manafort lied to prosecutors

NEW YORK: Paul Manafort broke his plea deal by repeatedly lying to prosecutors after he agreed to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, a judge has ruled.

His misrepresentations touched on areas of central interest to Mueller’s prosecutors. Manafort lied about his contacts with a Russian translator, Konstantin Kilimnik, who Mueller says has ties to Russian intelligence services, the judge concluded on Wednesday. Some of the contacts with Kilimnik came while Manafort was running President Donald Trump’s campaign, and some after Trump’s election, prosecutors said.

Manafort also lied about the nature of a $125,000 payment to a law firm and about a matter under a separate department of justice investigation, according to US district judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington. Jackson’s ruling came more than two months after prosecutors first said Manafort breached his plea deal by repeatedly lying.

The ruling doesn’t bode well for Manafort, 69, when he stands before Jackson for sentencing on March 13 for pleading guilty to two conspiracy counts. He faces up to 10 years in prison, and Jackson may still conclude that he no longer deserves any leniency for attempting to cooperate in a dozen debriefings on a wide range of topics.

But the ruling wasn’t all bad news for Manafort. Jackson ruled that prosecutors failed to prove that he intentionally made false statements about Kilimnik’s role in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. BLOOMBERG