Political News

Manafort Breached Plea Deal by Repeatedly Lying, Mueller Says

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, the special counsel’s office said in a court filing late Monday.

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Manafort Breached Plea Deal by Repeatedly Lying, Mueller Says
By
Sharon LaFraniere
, New York Times

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, the special counsel’s office said in a court filing late Monday.

Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller said Manafort’s “crimes and lies” about “a variety of subject matters” relieve them of all promises they made to him in the plea agreement. But under the terms of the agreement, Manafort cannot withdraw his guilty plea.

Defense lawyers disagreed that Manafort has violated the deal. In the same filing, they said that Manafort has met repeatedly with the special counsel’s office and “believes he has provided truthful information.”

But given the impasse between the two sides, they asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to set a sentencing date for Manafort, who has been in solitary confinement in a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia.

The eleventh-hour development in Manafort’s case is a fresh sign of the special counsel's aggressive approach in investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone in the Trump campaign knew about or assisted Moscow’s effort.

Striking a plea deal with Manafort in September potentially gave prosecutors access to information that could prove useful to their investigation. But their filing on Monday, a rare step in a plea deal, suggested that they think Manafort was withholding details that could be pertinent to the Russia inquiry or other cases.

Manafort had hoped that in agreeing to cooperate with Mueller’s team, prosecutors would argue that he deserved a lighter punishment. He is expected to face at least a decadelong prison term for 10 felony counts including financial fraud to conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Instead, after at least a dozen sessions interrogating him, the special counsel’s prosecutors have not only decided Manafort does not deserve leniency, but also could seek to refile other charges that they had agreed to dismiss as part of the plea deal.

The prosecutors did not describe what Manafort lied about, saying they would set forth “the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies” in an upcoming sentencing memo.

A jury in Northern Virginia convicted Manafort, 69, of eight counts of financial fraud in August stemming from his work as a political consultant in Ukraine. The jury deadlocked on 10 other charges.

Faced with a second trial in the District of Columbia on related charges in September, he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts and to an open-ended arrangement requiring him to answer “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly” questions about “any and all matters” of interest to the government.

It was unclear at that time how much Manafort had to offer prosecutors. Though he had arguably deeper ties to pro-Russian figures than anyone else connected with the Trump campaign, he had consistently said that he had no information against the president. Legal experts suggested that if he had been able to significantly further Mueller’s inquiry, he could have negotiated a more favorable deal.

As it is, the plea agreement specifies that if prosecutors decide that Manafort has failed to cooperate fully or “given false, misleading or incomplete information or testimony,” they can prosecute him for crimes to which he did not plead guilty to in the District of Columbia. They could also conceivably pursue the 10 charges on which the Virginia jury failed to reach a consensus. Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced in the Virginia case on Feb. 8.

Mueller’s investigators have charged a number of former aides to Trump with lying to them. Three former Trump campaign officials or advisers have pleaded guilty to misleading federal investigators: Michael T. Flynn, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos, who reported to prison on Monday to serve his 14-day sentence. A Dutch lawyer, Alex van der Zwaan, who had business dealings with Manafort, also pleaded guilty to lying to the special counsel’s office.

In his most recent criticism of the special counsel, Trump has suggested that prosecutors are frustrated because they cannot produce any evidence against his campaign. “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess,” he wrote on Twitter recently. “They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want,” he declared. “They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t care how many lives” they ruin.

Trump’s lawyers responded last week to questions Mueller had for the president about ties between his campaign and Russia. Among the questions were inquiries about what Trump knew about Russian offers to Manafort during the campaign to assist Trump’s presidential run. The president’s lawyers have declined to discuss what he told Mueller and it is not clear whether any of his answers conflicted with what Manafort told investigators.

Manafort’s allies have hoped that his sessions with the special counsel would end soon so that he could be sentenced and transfer to a federal prison, where conditions are comparatively better than in a local jail. At a recent court hearing in Alexandria, Manafort came into the courtroom in a wheelchair, his foot wrapped in a white bandage, possibly from an attack of gout.

But few of Manafort’s friends predicted that his sentencing would be hastened by prosecutors declaring him to be a liar. The development stunned some people close to the White House, as well as legal experts.

“Everybody who lies to Mueller gets called on it — so he had to know that Mueller would catch him so the question is what was he hiding that is worse than going to jail for the rest of your life,” said Joyce Vance, a professor of law at the University of Alabama law school and former federal prosecutor.

“There are often rocky dealings with a cooperator and Mueller didn’t cut bait at the first sign of trouble. It was likely more than one lie and this would not have been a minor detail — it had to be something material and significant and intentional.”

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