Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged Donald Trump's 2016 Campaign Leaders Paul Manafort and Rick Gates new counts on Tax and Bank fraud
Thursday, February 22, 2018
Paul Manafort and Richard Gates arrive at the Prettyman Federal Courthouse for a bail hearing
November 6, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo: CNBC)
VietPress USA (Feb. 22, 2018): Special
Counsel Robert Mueller just indicted two main Donald Trump 2016 presidential
campaign leaders Paul Manafort and Rick
Gates with new charges of Tax and Bank fraud counts.
According to Wikipedia, Paul John Manafort Jr. (born
April 1, 1949) is an American lobbyist, political consultant and lawyer.
He joined Donald Trump's
presidential campaign team in March 2016 and served as campaign manager from
June to August 2016. He was previously an adviser to the U.S. presidential
campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In 1980 Manafort co-founded
the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Black,
Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R.
Black Jr., and Roger J. Stone, joined
by Peter G. Kelly in
1984.
Manafort is under investigation by multiple federal agencies. The Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reportedly had an active criminal
investigation on him since 2014 regarding business dealings while he was
lobbying for former President Yanukovich of Ukraine. He is also a person of
interest in the FBI counterintelligence probe
looking into the Russian
government'sinterference in the 2016
presidential election. Manafort was told, after his house was raided, that
he would be indicted by Robert Mueller's prosecutors.
On October 30, 2017, Manafort surrendered to the FBI after news
broke that a federal grand jury had indicted him and his business associate Rick
Gates. The charges arise from his consulting work for a pro-Russian
government of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. The
indictment had been requested by Robert
Mueller's special investigation unit. The indictment charged Manafort with
conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, failure to file reports
of foreign bank and financial accounts, being an unregistered agent of foreign
principal, false and misleading FARA statements, and false
statements. Manafort has pleaded not guilty, and is free on bail.
In February 2016 Manafort approached Donald Trump, whom he did not know well,
through a mutual friend, Thomas J.
Barrack Jr. He pointed out his experience advising presidential
campaigns in the United States and around the world, described himself as an
outsider not connected to the Washington establishment, and offered to work
without salary. In March 2016 he joined Trump's presidential
campaign to take the lead in getting commitments from convention
delegates. In June 2016, Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and promoted
Manafort to the position. Manafort gained control of the daily operations of
the campaign as well as an expanded $20 million budget, hiring decisions,
advertising, and media strategy.
On June 9, 2016, Manafort, Donald Trump Jr.(Elder son of Trump),
and Jared Kushner (Trump's
son-in-law) were participants in a
meeting with Russian attorney Natalia
Veselnitskaya and several others at Trump Tower. A British music agent,
saying he was acting on behalf of Emin Agalarov and the Russian government,
had told Trump Jr. that he could obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton if he met with a
lawyer connected to the Kremlin. At first Trump Jr. said the meeting had
been about the Magnitsky Act;
later he said the offer of information about Clinton had been a pretext to
conceal Veselnitskaya's real agenda.
In August 2016, Manafort's connections to former Ukrainian
PresidentViktor Yanukovych and
his pro-Russian Party of Regions drew
national attention in the US, where it was reported that Manafort may have
illegally received $12.7 million in off-the-books funds from the Party of
Regions.
On August 17, 2016, Donald Trump received his first security
briefing. The same day, August 17, Trump shook up his campaign
organization in a way that appeared to minimize Manafort's role. It was
reported that members of Trump's family, particularly Jared Kushner who had
originally been a strong backer of Manafort, had become uneasy about his
Russian connections and suspected that he had not been forthright about
them. Manafort stated in an internal staff memorandum that he would
"remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the
big-picture, long-range campaign vision". However, two days later,
Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign
after Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior
leadership roles within that campaign."
Rick Gates (Richard W. Gates III).
The other important leader at
Trump's 2016 Campaign is Rick Gates. His full name is Richard W. Gates
III (born April 27, 1972), is an American political consultant and
lobbyist. He is a longtime business associate of Paul Manafort and served as deputy to
Manafort when the latter was campaign manager of the Donald
Trump presidential campaign in 2016. He and Manafort were indicted in
October 2017 on charges related to their consulting work with political figures
in Ukraine. He graduated from Prince George High
School in 1990 and is a 1994 graduate of the College
of William & Mary with a degree in government. Later he
earned a master's degree in
public policy from George
Washington University.
Gates was an intern at the
Washington, D.C. consulting firm Black,
Manafort, Stone and Kelly. There he worked with Republican lobbyist Rick Davis,
eventually going to work for him and Manafort in 2006 at their new consulting firm
Davis Manafort, with an office in Kiev,
Ukraine.[Among the clients Gates worked
with were Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, taking over this work when Davis
left the firm in 2008 to work on the presidential
campaign of John McCain.
Manafort and Gates surrendered to the FBI on
October 30, 2017, and at a court hearing both plead not guilty. While awaiting trial,
Manafort was released on $10 million bond and Gates was released on $5 million
bond. Prosecutors described them as flight risks, and as a condition of
pretrial release, both men surrendered their passports and
were placed under house arrest. Now both of them have been charged more counts
on Tax and Bank fraud, money laundry.
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are reportedly facing new charges in Mueller probe's money laundering case
Former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are facing new charges in their case, multiple outlets reported Wednesday.
Manafort and Gates have both pleaded not guilty to charges of money laundering, lying to federal investigators and acting as unregistered foreign agents.
Special counsel Robert Mueller told the court on Friday that new criminal conduct was discovered in the case.
The charges, first reported by Politico, were put under seal by Judge Amy Berman, keeping details about the charges themselves from public view.
The development follows the special counsel's recent discovery of alleged "additional criminal conduct" articulated in a court document sent from the prosecutor's office Friday.
In that filing, Manafort and Gates were accused of "a series of bank frauds and bank fraud conspiracies." Some of those bank frauds are related to properties that Manafort is seeking to pledge as collateral in lieu of a $10 million bail bond, the special counsel said.
Mueller's office said the three properties Manafort put up for bail are insufficient substitutes for the bond.
"The bail package that Manafort proposes is far less than the $10 million that he alleges in his supplemental memorandum, and the difference is not made up by any surety," the special counsel said.
One of those properties is Manafort's Manhattan apartment in Trump Tower, which Mueller said is at risk of bank foreclosure.
At another property in Fairfax, Virginia, Manafort is alleged to have acquired a mortgage "from The Federal Savings Bank through a series of false and fraudulent representations to The Federal Savings Bank." Manafort previously claimed that the property had no mortgage, Mueller said.
The special counsel is investigating whether Manafort promised to get the president of Federal Savings Bank, Stephen Calk, a job in the White House in exchange for $16 million in loans, NBC News reported Wednesday.
Manafort and Gates were indicted by the special counsel in October 2017 on multiple charges, including conspiracy to launder money, lying to federal investigators and failure to register as foreign agents in their work on behalf of a pro-Russia Ukraine party.
Manafort is a lobbyist deeply connected to the governments of Russia and Ukraine who also served as then-candidate Donald Trump's campaign chief for a time. Gates, who was Manafort's longtime associate, also worked on the Trump campaign.
Lawyers for Manafort and Gates and a spokesman for the office of the special counsel did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment.
