Manafort set to fight latest of allegations
Ex-Trump aide innocent, lawyers say; hearing soon
Former Donald Trump presidential campaign chairman Paul Manafort plans to fight prosecutors’ claims that he tried to tamper with a witness — an accusation that could get him sent to jail before he goes on trial this summer to face conspiracy and money laundering charges.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia set a June 15 hearing to weigh prosecutors’ demand that she revoke or tighten the terms of Manafort’s release while he is awaiting trial. Manafort, 69, has been on home detention.
The judge gave Manafort’s lawyers until Friday to present a written rebuttal to accusations by prosecutors that he and a longtime associate repeatedly contacted two executives at a public relations firm in hopes of persuading them to provide false testimony about secret lobbying they did at Manafort’s behest in 2013.
“Mr. Manafort is innocent, and nothing about this latest allegation changes our defense,” Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement. “We will do our talking in court.”
In a Monday night filing, prosecutors with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office asked the judge to revoke or revise the conditions of Manafort’s bail because they had found probable cause to believe he sought
to tamper with witnesses.
In their filing, prosecutors said Manafort and a longtime associate reached out to two unidentified potential witnesses in February, shortly after new charges were filed accusing Manafort of failing to register as a foreign agent while lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. Those two people, prosecutors said, had worked with Manafort on that lobbying in 2012 and 2013.
Around that same time, Manafort’s co-defendant and longtime business associate, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
The day after Gates’ plea, Manafort messaged and called one of the witnesses and continued reaching out over the next several days, according to a sworn affidavit filed by an FBI agent in the case.
Prosecutors say it appears Manafort and his longtime associate — identified by people close to the case as Konstantin Kilimnik — were seeking to get the two people to say, if investigators asked, that their past work together was focused on European officials and did not involve lobbying U.S. officials.
“We should talk,” Manafort texted in February to a person identified only as “D1,” according to court papers. “I have made clear that they worked in Europe.”
Days later, court papers say the person identified as Kilimnik texted the other individual, writing, “Basically P wants to give him a quick summary that he says to everybody (which is true) that our friends never lobbied in the US, and the purpose of the program was EU.”
Prosecutors say the “P” was Paul Manafort. Reached Tuesday, Kilimnik declined to comment.
The FBI said one of the public relations firm’s executives, who also is not named in the filing, told the government that they “understood Manafort’s outreach to be an effort to ‘suborn perjury’” by encouraging others to lie to federal investigators by concealing the firm’s U.S. work.
If a judge agrees, Manafort could have his bail revoked, forcing him to await trial in jail.
The filing marks the second time that Mueller’s team has accused Manafort of violating a judge’s order in the case. Late last year, federal agents discovered that Manafort was attempting to ghostwrite an opinion piece in Ukraine even though he was under a gag order in the case.
He goes on tax and bank fraud charges in July in Alexandria, Va. The trial in D.C. on the lobbying charges is to begin in September.
The charges, which involve tens of millions of dollars routed through offshore accounts, do not relate to his work on the Trump campaign or involve allegations of Russian election interference.
Sending Manafort to jail before trial could intensify the pressure on him to reach a plea deal with prosecutors.
Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who is now in private practice in Chicago, said if the government’s claims against Manafort are true, he is in fresh trouble.
“What’s unusual, what leaps out at me, is the degree of specificity in the allegation. Add the fact that the intended recipients of the message have stated that they believed they were being asked to lie in matters directly related to the investigation, and it suggests this is a very serious allegation against Mr. Manafort,” Cotter said.
The court filing indicates that some of the suspicious messages were recovered from cloud storage of Manafort’s phone, while others were retrieved from the phones of the two individuals, who have spoken to investigators about the contacts.
At issue is a collection of former senior European officials, informally referred to as the Hapsburg group, who were secretly retained in 2012 by Manafort as part of his lobbying work for Ukraine, according to prosecutors. Manafort and public relations executives steered those former European officials
to meetings with U.S. politicians, trying to sway the Americans to be more favorable toward the Ukrainian government, according to prosecutors.
The work preceded Manafort’s role with the Trump campaign from March to August of 2016.
The government filings come at a key time in Manafort’s case, amid a window for any potential, last-minute plea negotiations before he is to face trials.
Court papers had suggested that he was close to working out his bail package and being released from house arrest.
Up until late May, it appeared he had reached an agreement with prosecutors. But on May 25, Mueller’s team filed paperwork under seal with the judge that suggested the bail package had hit a snag.
According to the court filing made public Monday, that was the same month the witnesses provided the content of their messages with Manafort to federal investigators.
The filing also comes amid new signs of pressure on Manafort’s financial situation. Unnamed supporters last week announced the creation of a new legal defense fund for him. The fund’s website was initially registered in December by Bruce Baldinger, a New Jersey real estate lawyer who has worked for years with Manafort, according to a person familiar with the situation.
TRUMP ON SESSIONS
Also on Tuesday, Trump blamed Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the ongoing investigation into Russian election interference, suggesting in a morning tweet that the probe could have been shut down by now if Sessions hadn’t recused himself.
In the tweet, Trump renewed a familiar line of attack against the top U.S. law enforcement official, whom he has repeatedly castigated for recusing himself from the investigation now led by Mueller.
“The Russian Witch Hunt Hoax continues, all because Jeff Sessions didn’t tell me he was going to recuse himself,” Trump said in the tweet. “I would have quickly picked someone else. So much time and money wasted, so many lives ruined… and Sessions knew better than most that there was No Collusion!”
The investigation into possible coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign was opened by the FBI in July 2016, months before Trump was elected president and long before he nominated Sessions to be attorney general.
Trump’s tweet seems to suggest that Sessions, who was among Trump’s earliest and most vocal campaign supporters, could have quashed the case once in office if he hadn’t recused himself — or at least not allowed the appointment of a special counsel.
Besides investigating possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, Mueller is also investigating whether Trump has obstructed the investigation.
Trump has repeatedly raged over Sessions’ recusal, and the president’s efforts to shame his attorney general into quitting or reversing the recusal are of interest to Mueller’s investigators.
The president’s tweet conceded that Sessions had insider knowledge on the no collusion claims. That would seem to make a case that recusal was appropriate.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the president’s tweet.
Just last week, Trump went on Twitter to say that he wished he had picked someone other than Sessions to be his attorney general.
Information for this article was contributed by Spencer S. Hsu, Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky and John Wagner of The Washington Post; and by Chad Day, Eric Tucker and Nataliya Vasilyeva of The Associated Press.