Paul Manafort and special counsel Robert Mueller will argue in court over whether the former Trump campaign chief breached his plea deal agreement by lying to investigators.
A Feb. 4 court date was set for those arguments during a Friday hearing in Washington to discuss next steps. The federal judge overseeing the case said the hearing will be sealed, but a transcript, with redactions, will be released as soon as possible afterwards.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that after the Feb. 4 hearing, she will determine whether Manafort lied and thus breached his plea deal. That determination could impact the prison sentence that he may face.
Both Manafort’s legal team and Mueller’s team will likely turn in a pre-sentencing report by the week’s end, on Feb. 8.
Manafort’s legal team has maintained that he did not lie — an accusation first leveled at Manafort by the special counsel in November. His team’s court filing Wednesday said Manafort only demonstrated a “lack of consistency” in his 12 meetings with federal investigators after he took the plea deal in September.
But when asked by Jackson if Manafort’s legal team is “conceding” that Mueller’s office made the determination in “good faith” that Manafort breached the deal, Richard Westling said, “Yes, your honor.”
The judge told Mueller’s team that she had “questions” about the allegations and had “not made any decisions yet” on whether Manafort intentionally misled investigators. Manafort, 69, is already staring at spending the rest of his life in prison. On Feb. 8, he will be sentenced in Virginia, where he was convicted in August for bank and tax fraud.
Manafort was in court Friday, his first appearance since October 2018. He has been jailed since June because of witness tampering charges, and entered the courtroom in a blue suit Friday, using a cane.
A prosecutor for the special counsel’s team, Andrew Weissman, said it is unlikely to hit Manafort with additional charges related to the allegation of breaching the plea deal — but noted that because of the breach, the federal government is no longer bound to it.
“There are a lot of promises we have made absent being a breach,” Weissmann said. “I can think of a situation — a hypothetical situation — that that could be something the government wants to do.”
In December, the special counsel detailed what prosecutors said were Manafort’s “multiple discernable lies.”
This month, Manafort’s defense team filed its initial response in opposition to the allegations. That filing, which was improperly redacted, showed Manafort, while serving as the campaign manager for President Trump’s campaign, shared political polling data with a business associate who also had ties to Russian intelligence: Konstantin Kilimnik.
Last week, Mueller’s team presented more evidence to support its allegation that Manafort breached his plea deal by lying — and revealed that a large focus of the investigation has been on Manafort’s relationship with a Russian associate. Prosecutors also have “documentary evidence” that Manafort lied when he said he had no direct or indirect contact with officials in the Trump administration, the lengthy, but heavily redacted court filing revealed.
Manafort’s defense then filed a brief reply on Wednesday ahead of Friday’s hearing that said Manafort is mostly a victim of faulty memory.
“When placed in proper context, much of the evidence presented by the [special counsel] merely demonstrates a lack of consistency in Mr. Manafort’s recollection of certain facts and events,” lawyers for Manafort wrote in their filing. “Indeed, many of these events occurred years ago, or during a high-pressure U.S. presidential campaign he managed when his time was extraordinarily limited, or during the difficult time that followed his departure from the 2016 presidential campaign because of the allegations leveled at him and the investigations that followed.”
