Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office submitted a highly redacted filing Wednesday to the U.S. District Court in D.C. to say prosecutors recently learned new information pertinent to a federal judge’s ruling against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort for lying to investigators.
The memo mentions that Rick Gates, a former business associate to Manafort who is cooperating with Mueller’s team, was interviewed by Mueller’s office on Feb. 15 and offered new details related to the ruling that Manafort intentionally lied about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian employee of Manafort’s political consulting firm who the FBI claims has ties to Russian intelligence.
Manafort met Kilimnik at least twice during the 2016 campaign.
Due to the redactions, the exact nature of the fresh evidence provided by Gates is unclear, but Mueller’s team insists it should not affect the court’s ruling on Manafort because “the government presented additional and sufficient evidence that Manafort lied.”
Prosecutors have said that Manafort lied about whether he ordered Gates to give polling data from the Trump campaign to Kilimnik before the 2016 election.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled on Feb. 13 that Manafort intentionally lied to Mueller’s investigators, thus breaching the terms of his plea agreement and allowing Mueller’s team to no longer support a shorter prison sentence for Manafort.
Manafort’s team claimed he did not lie but rather exhibited a “lack of consistency” when he met with federal investigators 12 times since he accepted the plea deal in September.
Manafort, 69, who faces sentencing on March 13 for one of two cases he is involved in, pleaded guilty last year to two conspiracy charges in D.C.
Separately, Manafort was convicted in August on eight counts of bank and tax fraud by a jury in Virginia and could face 19 to 24 years behind bars for those crimes, according to federal guidelines. His sentencing date for that case is March 8.
