Judge Agrees That Paul Manafort Lied in Russia Investigation

February 14, 2019
WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, lied to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s prosecutors despite agreeing to cooperate in the sprawling Russia investigation.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson effectively voids Manafort’s plea agreement and means the 69-year-old former Republican operative and lobbyist will likely be sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.
“The Office of Special Counsel is no longer bound by its obligations under the plea agreement, including its promise to support a reduction of the offense level,” Jackson wrote in her order.
Manafort already has been convicted of eight charges of bank fraud and tax evasion following a trial last year in Alexandria, Va., and he has pleaded guilty to two additional charges of conspiracy.
All the charges involve Manafort’s work for the Russian-backed president in Ukraine — before he joined Trump’s campaign — and subsequent allegations of attempted witness tampering.
The legal battle over whether Manafort lied to prosecutors — his defense team denied it — revealed new clues about Mueller’s closely guarded investigation into meetings and other contacts between Trump’s campaign aides and Russians during the 2016 presidential race.
A partially redacted document filed by Manafort’s lawyers disclosed that he shared polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-born associate who worked with Manafort in Ukraine. Prosecutors say Kilimnik has ties to Russian intelligence, an allegation he has denied.
In addition, the relationship between Manafort and Kilimnik was extensively discussed in a closed court hearing on Feb. 4.
“This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating,” Andrew Weissman, a top Mueller deputy, told the judge. A heavily redacted transcript was released after the hearing.
Weissman did not elaborate, but he cited a meeting between Manafort and Kilimnik at a cigar club in New York City on Aug. 2, 2016.
“That meeting and what happened at that meeting is of significance to the special counsel,” he said.
The meeting took place less than two weeks after Trump had accepted his party’s presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention and about two weeks before Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign over questions about his work in Ukraine.
Richard Gates, Manafort’s deputy at the time, also attended the meeting. Gates initially was named in the same indictment as Manafort, but he later pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy and lying to investigators, and he has been cooperating with prosecutors.
Manafort’s conversations with Kilimnik were one of five topics that prosecutors said Manafort lied about.
The judge agreed with prosecutors on three of the five that Manafort “intentionally false statements,” including on conversations involving Kilimnik.
———
©2019 Los Angeles Times
Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
In The News
Health
Voting
In The News

WASHINGTON - The Food and Drug Administration has relaxed the rules around storage and transportation for some coronavirus vaccines in order to speed up the vaccine rollout. Frozen vials of Pfizer-BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine will be allowed to be kept at "conventional temperatures" found in pharmaceutical freezers... Read More

WASHINGTON – The U.S. Treasury Department on Friday imposed sanctions on Saudi Arabia’s former deputy head of Intelligence and the nation’s “Rapid Intervention Force” for their roles in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The move came just hours after the Biden Administration released... Read More

WASHINGTON — COVID has taken a toll on student learning and wellbeing, but a coalition of community schools advocates believes they have the answer to correcting academic learning loss and supporting the holistic development of young people. They say their next-generation community schooling lays the foundation... Read More

DES MOINES, Iowa - Residents of Iowa will have to wait until next week to learn if dramatic changes are going to be made to how they participate in future elections. Earlier this week, both houses of the State Legislature voted along party lines with their... Read More

BOISE, Idaho – To the outsider, it seems like a movie that has a bizarre twist just as the heroine should be taking her victory lap. Lauren Stein McLean, an entrepreneur who had served on Boise, Idaho’s city council for nearly a decade, and served as... Read More

The failure of the prison system to provide adequate mental health care is causing people to kill themselves at high rates, according to a new report. The report, published in February in the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet, reviewed data from 27 countries, concluding that some of... Read More