Judge finds Manafort lied to investigators in Russia probe

manafort Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman | AP

The Russia-Trump mystery deepens with revelation that Paul Manafort, was found to be lying to investigators. The former Trump campaign chairman also intentionally lied to a federal grand jury.

US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson's decision was another loss for Manafort, a once-wealthy political consultant who rose to lead Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and now faces years in prison in two criminal cases brought in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. The ruling hurts Manafort's chance of receiving a reduced sentence, though Jackson said she would decide the exact impact during his sentencing next month.

Manafort is known to have intentionally lied about meetings with a suspected Russian intelligence asset. This was directly linked to Mueller's wider inquiry, which includes a look into whether there were any links or coordination between the Trump campaign to Russia and whether or not the interference has affected the election results. With the new insights at hand, prosecutors have made clear that they remain deeply interested in Manafort's interactions with a man the FBI says has ties to Russian intelligence.

This definitely will be bad news for a White House as cloaked in suspicion as this one. It will fuel further crank up pressure on Trump's inner circle. In her ruling Wednesday, Jackson provided few new details as she found there was sufficient evidence to say Manafort broke the terms of his plea agreement by lying about three of five matters that prosecutors had singled out.

Despite a string of convictions and guilty pleas from the President's former associates, Rob Mueller is yet to provide any proof of conspiracy between Trump's campaign and Russians. Manafort's attorney's had argued that he had not misled investigators, but forgot some details that are clear now, the ruling rejected this allusion largely.


The judge found that Manafort did mislead the FBI, prosecutors and a federal grand jury about his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, the co-defendant who the FBI says has ties to Russian intelligence. Prosecutors had accused Manafort of lying about several discussions the two men had including about a possible peace plan to resolve the Russia-Ukraine conflict in Crimea.

Last week at a sealed hearing, Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said one of the discussions an Aug. 2, 2016, meeting at the Grand Havana Club cigar bar in New York went to the "larger view of what we think is going on" and what "we think the motive here is." Rick Gates, Manafort's longtime deputy and also a Trump campaign aide, attended the said meeting in August.

"This goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the Special Counsel's Office is investigating," Weissmann said, according to a redacted transcript of the hearing.

He added: "That meeting and what happened at that meeting is of significance to the special counsel." The meeting occurred while Manafort was still in a high-ranking role in the Trump campaign.

And prosecutors say the three men left separately so as not to draw attention to their meeting. The million-dollar question in the entire investigation is, why did all the men involved lie about their connections to the Russians.

According to Weissmann, investigators were also interested in several other meetings between Kilimnik and Manafort including when Kilimnik traveled to Washington for Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

And Manafort's attorneys accidentally revealed weeks ago that prosecutors believe Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik during the 2016 presidential campaign.