WASHINGTON
— Paul J. Manafort was in bed early one morning in July when federal
agents bearing a search warrant picked the lock on his front door and
raided his Virginia home. They took binders stuffed with documents and
copied his computer files, looking for evidence that Mr. Manafort,
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, set up secret offshore bank
accounts. They even photographed the expensive suits in his closet.
The
special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, then followed the house search
with a warning: His prosecutors told Mr. Manafort they planned to indict
him, said two people close to the investigation.
The
moves against Mr. Manafort are just a glimpse of the aggressive tactics
used by Mr. Mueller and his team of prosecutors in the four months since taking over the Justice Department’s investigation
into Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s election, according to
lawyers, witnesses and American officials who have described the
approach. Dispensing with the plodding pace typical of many white-collar
investigations, Mr. Mueller’s team has used what some describe as
shock-and-awe tactics to intimidate witnesses and potential targets of
the inquiry.
Mr.
Mueller has obtained a flurry of subpoenas to compel witnesses to
testify before a grand jury, lawyers and witnesses say, sometimes before
his prosecutors have taken the customary first step of interviewing
them. One witness was called before the grand jury less than a month
after his name surfaced in news accounts. The special counsel even took
the unusual step of obtaining a subpoena for one of Mr. Manafort’s
former lawyers, claiming an exception to the rule that shields
attorney-client discussions from scrutiny.
“They
are setting a tone. It’s important early on to strike terror in the
hearts of people in Washington, or else you will be rolled,” said
Solomon L. Wisenberg, who was deputy independent counsel in the
investigation that led to the impeachment trial of President Bill
Clinton in 1999. “You want people saying to themselves, ‘Man, I had
better tell these guys the truth.’”
Few
people can upend Washington like a federal prosecutor rooting around a
presidential administration, and Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director,
is known to dislike meandering investigations that languish for years.
At the same time, he appears to be taking a broad view of his mandate:
examining not just the Russian disruption campaign and whether any of
Mr. Trump’s associates assisted in the effort, but also any financial
entanglements with Russians going back several years. He is also
investigating whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice when he fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director.
Mr.
Manafort is under investigation for possible violations of tax laws,
money-laundering prohibitions and requirements to disclose foreign
lobbying. Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, is
being scrutinized for foreign lobbying work as well as for conversations
he had last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. On
Monday, Mr. Flynn’s siblings announced the creation of a legal-defense
fund to help cover their brother’s “enormous” legal fees.
The
wide-ranging nature of Mr. Mueller’s investigation could put him on a
collision course with Mr. Trump, who has said publicly that Mr. Mueller
should keep his investigation narrowly focused on last year’s
presidential campaign. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Trump said Mr. Mueller would be overstepping his boundaries if he investigated his family’s finances unrelated to Russia.
For
the moment, Mr. Mueller’s team has shown a measure of deference to
White House officials, sparing them grand jury subpoenas and allowing
them to appear for voluntary interviews. Those sessions are expected to
begin soon. Ty Cobb, a lawyer brought in to manage the White House response to the inquiry, has told administration officials that he wants to avoid any subpoenas from the special prosecutor.
Staff
members have been working long hours answering Mr. Mueller’s request
for 13 categories of documents, including records related to Mr. Comey’s
firing and Mr. Trump’s role in drafting a misleading statement about a
June 2016 meeting between campaign officials and Russian-born visitors.
Nonetheless, the demand for documents has provoked at least one angry confrontation between Mr. Cobb and Donald F. McGahn II,
the White House counsel, over whether certain documents should be
withheld to protect the president’s right to confidentiality.
But
associates of both Mr. Manafort and Mr. Flynn have received more
peremptory treatment. Instead of invitations to the prosecutor’s office,
they have been presented with grand jury subpoenas, forcing them to
either testify or take the Fifth Amendment and raise suspicions that
they had something to hide. At least three witnesses have recently been
subpoenaed to testify about Mr. Manafort: Jason Maloni, a spokesman who
appeared before the grand jury for more than two hours on Friday, and
the heads of two consulting firms — Mercury Public Affairs and the
Podesta Group — who worked with Mr. Manafort on behalf of Viktor F.
Yanukovych, the pro-Russia former president of Ukraine.
Mr.
Mueller’s team also took the unusual step of issuing a subpoena to
Melissa Laurenza, a specialist in lobbying law who formerly represented
Mr. Manafort, according to people familiar with the subpoena.
Conversations between lawyers and their clients are normally considered
bound by attorney-client privilege, but there are exceptions when
lawyers prepare public documents that are filed on behalf of their
client.
Mr.
Mueller took over the Russia investigation in May, after the F.B.I. had
already spent nearly a year looking into connections between Mr.
Trump’s associates and Russians. His team has occasionally been caught
by surprise, hearing of possibly important information only when it is
revealed in the news media.
This was the case in July, when Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors learned about email exchanges between Donald Trump Jr. and an emissary for a Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch
only after they were disclosed in The New York Times, according to a
law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Donald
Trump Jr., the president’s son, set up the Trump Tower meeting to
receive what he was told would be damaging information about Hillary
Clinton from the Russian government.
Soon
after his name surfaced, one of the Russian-born participants at the
meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, was ordered to testify before the grand jury,
according to one of Mr. Akhmetshin’s associates.
“They
seem to be pursuing this more aggressively, taking a much harder line,
than you’d expect to see in a typical white collar case,” said Jimmy
Gurulé, a Notre Dame law professor and former federal prosecutor. “This
is more consistent with how you’d go after an organized crime
syndicate.”
The
tactics reflect some of the hard-charging — and polarizing —
personalities of Mr. Mueller’s team, seasoned prosecutors with
experience investigating financial fraud, money laundering and organized
crime.
Admirers
of Andrew Weissmann, one of the team’s senior prosecutors, describe him
as relentless and uncompromising, while his detractors say his scorched
earth tactics have backfired in some previous cases. Greg B. Andres,
another one of Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors, once ran an investigation into
a Mafia kingpin. Zainab N. Ahmad made her name as a prosecutor pursing
high-profile terrorism cases.
Some
lawyers defending people who have been caught up in Mr. Mueller’s
investigation privately complain that the special counsel’s team is
unwilling to engage in the usual back-and-forth that precedes — or
substitutes for — grand jury testimony. They argue that the team’s more
aggressive tactics might end up being counterproductive, especially if
some grand jury witnesses turn out to be more guarded than they would
have been in a more informal setting or invoke the Fifth Amendment.
The
longer Mr. Mueller’s investigation goes on, the more vulnerable he will
be to allegations that he is on a fishing expedition, said Katy
Harriger, a professor of politics at Wake Forest University and the
author of a book on special prosecutors. Such accusations dogged the
investigation of Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel whose
investigation of Mr. Clinton stretched on for years.
To
a degree, Mr. Mueller is in a race against three congressional
committees that are interviewing some of same people who are of interest
to the special prosecutor’s team. Even if the committees refuse to
grant them immunity, congressional testimony that becomes public can
give other witnesses a chance to line up their stories.
Rep.
Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, said committee staff members were going to great lengths not
to get in Mr. Mueller’s way. But Senator Charles E. Grassley, the
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, indicated last week that his
committee might subpoena witnesses to testify about the circumstances of Mr. Comey’s firing even over Mr. Mueller’s objections.
Mr. Mueller’s need to navigate this complex landscape could explain the timing of the raid on Mr. Manafort’s house, which took place in the early hours of July 26. The raid came one day after Mr. Manafort was interviewed by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
On
the day of the raid, Mr. Manafort was scheduled to talk to the Senate
Judiciary Committee, an interview that was eventually canceled.
It
is unusual for a prosecutor to seek a search warrant against someone
who, like Mr. Manafort, had already put his lawyer in contact with the
Justice Department. No search warrants were executed during the
investigations by Mr. Starr or Patrick J. Fitzgerald, a special counsel
appointed during the George W. Bush administration to investigate the
leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer.
To
get the warrant, Mr. Mueller’s team had to show probable cause that Mr.
Manafort’s home contained evidence of a crime. To be allowed to pick
the lock and enter the home unannounced, prosecutors had to persuade a
federal judge that Mr. Manafort was likely to destroy evidence.
Said Mr. Gurulé, the former federal prosecutor, “Clearly they didn’t trust him.”
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