The Justice Department said Rick Gates deserves probation after his star witness role in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
“The government respectfully moves this Court for a significant downward departure from Gates’s advisory guidelines range based on his substantial assistance, and does not oppose his request for probation,” U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jessie Liu’s office told the court Tuesday, agreeing with the former Trump campaign deputy chairman’s lawyers. “The government respectfully requests that the court make Gates’s continued cooperation a condition of his sentence.”
If the 47-year-old walks away with little more than a slap on the wrist during his sentencing next week, it would be an impressive feat for the longtime Paul Manafort business associate and Republican operative who found himself at the center of Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and Russia. Gates was charged in two separate courts for a host of foreign-based financial schemes before he agreed to cooperate.
Gates gave Mueller a window into all the meetings and conversations he was privy to during the 2016 presidential election, recounting interactions with Manafort and longtime Trump associate Roger Stone, including a phone call allegedly between Trump and Stone about a WikiLeaks release of hacked Democratic emails, that became part of their successful prosecutions.
He also helped the DOJ in an unsuccessful spin-off case against former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig, who was charged with misleading the DOJ during its inquiry into whether he should have registered as a foreign agent of Ukraine, and “although Craig was acquitted, Gates’s testimony was corroborated and credible, and the government believes that Gates testified truthfully and completely in that case.”
“Gates’s cooperation has been steadfast despite the fact that the government has asked for his assistance in high-profile matters, against powerful individuals, in the midst of a particularly turbulent environment. Gates received pressure not to cooperate with the government, including assurances of monetary assistance. He should be commended for standing up to provide information and public testimony against individuals such as Manafort, Craig, and Stone, knowing well that they enjoy support from the upper echelons of American politics and society,” the DOJ said in an 18-page sentencing memorandum with more than 1,000 pages of evidence attached.
When asked what sort of pressure and monetary assistance the DOJ was referring to, the U.S. Attorney’s Office told the Washington Examiner it had no comment beyond the information available in court documents.
Recently released FBI notes of a 2018 interview with Gates show he felt pressured by Manafort not to plead on multiple occasions, including with discussion of pardons and a legal defense fund.
“Manafort said something like, ‘I talked to [then-White House lawyer John] Dowd. I’ve got you covered at the White House’ and added that a legal defense fund was coming and they were going to ‘take care of us.’ Manafort told Gates there were two funds out there. The first was called ‘Patriot Defense Funds,’ and it covered White House staff. The other fund would cover anyone outside of the White House, and Manafort and Gates would be ‘#1 and #2 on that list.’”
The day before his plea in February 2018, Gates said Manafort called him to tell him to “stick to your guns, we’ll get through this.” Gates said Manafort told him that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner was supporting them. Manafort also told Gates he’d been talking with Dowd when Trump walked into the room and told Manafort to “stay strong.” The FBI wrote that “Gates had no basis to trust Manafort and thought the conversation was designed to convince Gates not to plead guilty.”
“We believe that the parties are in agreement that Mr. Gates has fulfilled every obligation he agreed to (and then some) and that he has devoted enormous energy and commitment to this task while telling the truth and maintaining his composure,” Gates lawyer Thomas Green told the court Monday.
The defense team said Gates spent more than 500 hours with Mueller’s team and other federal and state prosecutors and that he’d responded to three congressional subpoenas and was interviewed by congressional investigators.
The DOJ said the “substantial” assistance from Gates included meeting with prosecutors and investigators across the DOJ more than 50 times, with information he provided being used in more than a dozen search warrants. Prosecutors said Gates “has provided truthful and valuable information in a number of different ongoing matters.” Gates is mentioned more than 100 times in Mueller’s lengthy report, and his description of key events appears throughout.
“Although he is being sentenced now, Gates has committed to continue his cooperation with the government and has agreed that the court can make such continuing cooperation a condition of any probationary sentence that he may receive,” the DOJ said this week.
Gates could spend up to 10 years in prison for the conspiracy and false statements counts he pleaded guilty to, but sentencing guidelines suggest a range of roughly four to five years because he had no prior criminal history, and the DOJ asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson to use her discretion to cut that down to zero. Gates is set to be sentenced on Dec. 17.
Along with Manafort, Gates was initially charged on eight counts, including for violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act for their work in Ukraine on behalf of pro-Kremlin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, failures to report income from the overseas work, money laundering and tax fraud schemes, and false statements covering up what they had done. A 32-count superseding federal indictment was handed down in Virginia in February 2018, where Gates was further charged with helping Manafort file false tax returns for years, lying about his tax returns, bank fraud conspiracies, and more. Gates was alleged to have helped Manafort conceal more than $10 million in overseas accounts and to have wired more than $3 million from various overseas accounts to accounts he controlled, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Manafort in the process.
Gates entered into a deal with the DOJ the next day, pleading guilty to two counts: to commit tax fraud, to hide foreign accounts, and to dodge registering as a foreign agent, which included false statements to DOJ; and making false statements to the FBI to cover up Manafort’s unregistered Ukraine-related lobbying to members of Congress. The DOJ dismissed the other charges against him in exchange for his cooperation.
Since the plea deal, prosecutors said Gates “has admitted his own participation in crimes in addition to those to which he pled guilty — several of which the government was unaware of.”
