Russia Is Not on the Docket at Manafort’s Trial, but It Will Be in the Air

WASHINGTON — When they present their evidence in the financial fraud trial of Paul Manafort beginning this week, federal prosecutors have promised the judge, no government witness will even utter the word Russia.

Russia inevitably looms over the entire proceeding anyway.

Manafort, who was chairman of President Donald Trump’s campaign, faces 32 charges of bank and tax fraud largely stemming from his work a political consultant in Ukraine and predating the campaign. The trial, scheduled to get underway Tuesday morning with jury selection in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, will not be about collusion or Russian disinformation, even if a stray reference to the country inevitably creeps in.

But the subtext — whether Manafort knew about Russian efforts to influence the election, and whether the threat of conviction could lead him to cooperate with the special counsel, Robert Mueller — weighs not just on the prosecution and defense, but on the White House as well.

Among the Americans charged so far by Mueller’s prosecutors, Manafort not only held the highest position in Trump’s campaign, but he also arguably has the deepest connections to Russia-aligned politicians and political forces.

Manafort has given no indication that he wants to help the government or has information that would do so; his friends say he believes he is innocent and will be acquitted.

But if he does know something of interest to Mueller and chooses to enter a plea agreement, his cooperation could help prosecutors put together a clearer picture of how Russian actors intervened in the presidential election and how the Trump campaign, wittingly or unwittingly, interacted with them.

A number of events and relationships that have come up in Mueller’s inquiry touch on Manafort’s association with the Trump campaign and help explain why he is still seen as a potentially pivotal figure in the Russia inquiry even if his trial is limited to charges unrelated to the president.

In June 2016, while campaign chairman, Manafort attended the now-well-documented meeting at Trump Tower with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer. The meeting was set up through an intermediary with Donald Trump Jr., who was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. The president has denied knowing anything about the meeting, but it remains a focus of the Mueller inquiry.

Manafort had business dealings with Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who has close ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. By 2016, Deripaska was suing Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, for tens of millions of dollars he said they owed him. Manafort claimed that Deripaska was in fact in debt to him.

In July 2016, just before the Republican National Convention, Manafort sought to get a message to Deripaska offering “private briefings” about the presidential race.

Manafort tried to pass that message to Deripaska through Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a Russian citizen whose relationship with Manafort has figured repeatedly in court filings by Mueller’s team. Prosecutors have said Kilimnik had active ties to a Russian intelligence service — including during 2016, when he was in contact with both Manafort and Gates.

For the previous decade, the three men had worked together promoting pro-Russian political forces in Ukraine and boosting the political fortunes of Viktor F. Yanukovych, who was elected president of Ukraine in 2010. In a filing Monday, the prosecutors said Manafort earned $60 million for that work.

In Kiev, Kilimnik was sometimes referred to as “Manafort’s Manafort.” He has denied that he was ever a Russian spy and said he quit working for Manafort in 2014 after Yanukovych was ousted as Ukraine’s leader and fled to Russia.

Manafort said he never knowingly communicated with a Russian intelligence officer but acknowledged that he and Kilimnik met in May and August 2016. The second meeting took place about two weeks before he was forced to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman because of his Ukraine work.

Prosecutors also stated in a court filing that Gates, Trump’s deputy campaign chairman, was in contact with Kilimnik in the two months before the election, even though he was aware of Kilimnik’s background in Russian military intelligence. Gates has pleaded guilty in the case, is cooperating with Mueller’s team and is scheduled to testify against Manafort.

Manafort was also indicted on charges of money laundering and failing to disclose his lobbying work for foreign interests in a separate case scheduled for trial in U.S. District Court in Washington in September. In that case, prosecutors say, Kilimnik and Manafort worked together to influence the testimony of two witnesses in Manafort’s favor.

Kilimnik will almost certainly not be extradited from Russia to face the obstruction-of-justice allegations, but Manafort will now face those charges as well at the Washington trial.

Trump’s pro-Russia statements and openness to policy shifts regarding Moscow predated Manafort’s tenure on the campaign and continued after Manafort stepped down from the campaign in August 2016.

Manafort has long insisted that he does not have any secrets to give up to Mueller’s team, even if he wanted to. “I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation,” he told The New York Times last year. But veterans of such trials say that especially for someone like Manafort, accustomed to a backyard putting green, suits from a men’s boutique called the world’s most expensive and road trips in a Mercedes-Benz SL 550 convertible, the prospect of years in prison can play an outsize role in a decision to seek a plea deal if the trial does not seem to be going well.

Manafort, 69, already has a taste of what could await him if he is convicted.

His bail was revoked over the witness tampering allegations, and he is being held in the Alexandria city jail, where friends say he is permitted only two 30-minute visits a week with his wife, Kathleen. He can walk or exercise outside an hour a day. And unlike a rural Virginia jail where he was incarcerated earlier, which he said treated him like a “VIP,” he is clad in a dark-green jumpsuit like any other inmate.

His once-flush bank accounts have been frozen, according to his friends, and they are soliciting online donations to his legal defense fund.

Manafort’s supporters insist that the suspicions about him are vastly overblown. They point out that despite the long list of criminal charges against him, prosecutors have not suggested that he was serving anyone’s interest but his own.

His dealings with Kilimnik and Deripaska, the Kremlin-connected oligarch, were strictly business-related; his offer to brief Deripaska on the Trump campaign was just an innocuous courtesy that was never even accepted, they say.

They portray him as the victim of a runaway special counsel supervised by a deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who they say should be removed from office. Prosecutors have piled on charges, they say, because they have come up empty-handed in their search for evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to tip the election.

The website seeking funds for Manafort’s defense features headlines such as “Stopping Robert Mueller to protect us all” and “The mess Rod Rosenstein made.”

In the trial that begins Tuesday, prosecutors have told Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that they will carefully steer clear of any political inferences that could prejudice the jury. But they do plan to show that a group of Ukrainian oligarchs financed his work to help elect Yanukovych and promote pro-Russian political interests. They named four Ukrainian oligarchs: Rinat Akhmetov, Andriy Klyuyev, Borys Kolesnikov and Sergei Lyovochkin. Yanukovych appointed two of them to top government posts when he was elected president.

Manafort’s role in the Trump campaign will be mentioned only in the limited context of a loan that Manafort obtained, prosecutors have said. One bank chairman knew Manafort’s application for a loan was based on false documents but approved it because he was promised — and received — a position on the Trump campaign, according to the prosecutors. The bank chairman also hoped for a job in the administration, they said, but it did not materialize.

Even so, the trial will also be a blunt reminder that while Trump dismisses the Mueller inquiry as a “witch hunt,” it has had very real consequences for its targets.