WASHINGTON
— Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, agreed on
Friday to cooperate with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, as
part of a deal in which he pleaded guilty to reduced charges stemming
from consulting work he did for pro-Russia political forces in Ukraine.
Appearing
in United States District Court in Washington, Mr. Manafort entered
guilty pleas on two conspiracy charges. Andrew Weissmann, the lead
prosecutor, told Judge Amy Berman Jackson that there was a cooperation
agreement with Mr. Manafort but provided no details.
It
was not immediately clear what information Mr. Manafort might provide
to prosecutors or how the plea agreement might affect Mr. Mueller’s
investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and related
questions about possible collusion by the Trump campaign and
obstruction of justice by Mr. Trump.
The
plea deal is another unsettling development for Mr. Trump. For months,
Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Manafort for fighting the charges. In private
discussions with his lawyers, Mr. Trump has raised the possibility of pardoning Mr. Manafort.
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The president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, quickly sought to distance Mr. Trump from the plea deal.
“Once
again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do
with President Trump or the Trump campaign,” he said in a statement.
“The reason: The president did nothing wrong and Paul Manafort will tell
the truth.”
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Kevin Downing, one of Mr. Manafort’s lawyers, said it was a “tough day” for his client.
“He
has accepted responsibility and this is for conduct that dates back
many years,” Mr. Downing said. “And everybody should remember that.”
Mr.
Manafort held senior roles in the Trump campaign for five months in
2016, a period of intense interest to Mr. Mueller’s team.
Mr.
Manafort’s work in Ukraine also put him in the middle of a network of
lobbyists and influence brokers who are now under investigation by
federal prosecutors in New York. They include Tony Podesta, a prominent
Democratic lobbyist; Vin Weber, a former Republican member of Congress,
and Gregory Craig, a former White House counsel in the Obama
administration.
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As
part of the deal, the government has the authority to seize four of Mr.
Manafort’s homes in New York and Virginia as well as the money in a
number of bank accounts, court documents filed by prosecutors said.
In
documents filed with the United States District Court in Washington,
prosecutors from Mr. Mueller’s office charged Mr. Manafort with one
count of conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Mr.
Manafort pleaded guilty to those charges.
Mr.
Manafort was not sentenced. For now he will remain in jail, where he
has been since June, when prosecutors accused him of witness tampering.
The prosecutors dropped five other charges encompassing money laundering and violations of a lobbying disclosure law.
Mr. Manafort was convicted last month
on bank and tax fraud charges after a trial in federal court in
Alexandria, Va. He was scheduled to face a second trial on the seven
separate but related charges in Washington starting next week.
It
is not clear what information Mr. Manafort might have that would be
valuable to Mr. Mueller’s investigation. Mr. Manafort served in several
roles in the Trump campaign, and was present for the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between a number of campaign officials and a Russian lawyer who was thought to be offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.
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Mr.
Manafort was once a business partner of another person who has figured
in the Mueller inquiry: Roger Stone, who was once a political adviser to
Mr. Trump. And in his Trump campaign roles, he worked closely with
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law.
Mr.
Manafort had business dealings with Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian
oligarch who has close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. By
2016, Mr. Deripaska was suing Mr. Manafort and his business partner,
Rick Gates, for tens of millions of dollars he said they owed him. Mr. Manafort claimed that Mr. Deripaska was in fact in debt to him.
In
July 2016, just before the Republican National Convention, Mr. Manafort
sought to get a message to Mr. Deripaska offering “private briefings”
about the presidential race.
Mr. Manafort tried to pass that message to Mr. Deripaska through Konstantin V. Kilimnik,
a Russian citizen whose relationship with Mr. Manafort has figured
repeatedly in court filings by Mr. Mueller’s team. Prosecutors have said
Mr. Kilimnik had active ties to a Russian intelligence service —
including during 2016, when he was in contact with both Mr. Manafort and
Mr. Gates.
For the previous decade,
the three men had worked together promoting pro-Russian political forces
in Ukraine and boosting the political fortunes of Viktor F. Yanukovych,
who was elected president of Ukraine in 2010.
Four former Trump aides in addition to Mr. Manafort have pleaded guilty to charges related to the special counsel investigation: Michael D. Cohen, the president’s longtime personal lawyer; Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser; Rick Gates, the former deputy campaign chairman; and George Papadopoulos, a former campaign adviser.
The
president railed against plea deals in general after Mr. Cohen pleaded
guilty last month to breaking campaign finance laws and other charges,
implicating Mr. Trump in the cover-up of a potential sex scandal during
the 2016 presidential race. Mr. Trump said that trading information on
someone else for lesser charges or a lighter sentence “almost ought to
be outlawed.”
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Mr.
Manafort, who had repeatedly insisted that he would not cooperate with
the special counsel, has been reassessing his legal risks after last
month’s trial. He was found guilty in that case of eight counts of tax
fraud, bank fraud and failure to report a foreign bank account, crimes
that legal experts predicted were likely to result in a prison term of
six to 12 years.
The court filings by
the prosecutors provided abundant new details about the surreptitious
techniques Mr. Manafort used to try to advance the interests of the
former president of Ukraine, Viktor F. Yanukovych, in the United States
between 2006 and 2014.
The charging
papers detailed Mr. Manafort’s previously undisclosed work with “a
senior Israeli government official” and two European consultants to
discredit Yulia V. Tymoshenko, a political opponent who Mr. Yanukovych’s
government prosecuted and ultimately jailed.
Mr.
Manafort admitted to coordinating with the Israeli official, who
prosecutors did not identify, on an effort to pressure Jewish officials
in the Obama administration — whom Mr. Manafort called “[O]bama jews” at
the time — to temper their support for Ms. Tymoshenko by highlighting
her alliance with a Ukrainian political party that espoused antisemitic
views, according to prosecutors.
“The
Jewish community will take this out on Obama on election day if he does
nothing,” Mr. Manafort wrote in a private communication at the time
that was detailed by prosecutors.
And
Mr. Manafort worked with the two European consultants — who are not
named in the charging document, but who The New York Times has identified as Alan Friedman and Eckart Sager
— to plant new stories in the United States with “no fingerprints”
alleging that Ms. Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian
official, according to prosecutors. Mr. Manafort wrote at the time to a
colleague that his goal was “to plant some stink on Tymo” — referring
Ms. Tymoshenko by a nickname — and stressed that it was “very important
we have no connection.”
Mr. Manafort
also waged an “all out campaign” to kill a Senate resolution that would
have condemned the treatment of Ms. Tymoshenko by Mr. Yanuovych’s
government, without ever revealing to the senators who met with his
lobbyists that they were paid by the campaign, the prosecutors said.
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