Paul Manafort Lied to Robert Mueller About Russian Contacts, Judge Rules

The ruling suggests that Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman attempted a major cover-up.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Paul Manafort lied to prosecutors about his contacts with a colleague who had suspected ties to Russian intelligence, activity that occurred while Manafort ran President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and continued into 2018.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson found that Manafort violated an agreement he reached in September with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office to cooperate fully with their inquiry into Trump campaign contacts with Russia. Jackson’s ruling, which came during a sealed hearing Wednesday, will likely bring Manafort a longer prison term when Jackson sentences him next month on charges including money laundering, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, to which he pleaded guilty last year. 

The ruling also underscores a key allegation from Mueller: Manafort lied to cover up contacts he had with a suspected proxy for the Russian government while serving as head of Trump’s campaign.

Jackson agreed that prosecutors had shown that Manafort misled prosecutors about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik—a longtime Manafort employee in Ukraine—who prosecutors have said retains active ties to Russian military intelligence, known as GRU. Federal prosecutors charged agents of the same agency with carrying out hacks of the Democratic National Committee and other Democrats as part of an effort to help Trump win the presidency. 

The special counsel’s office “established by a preponderance of the evidence that the defendant intentionally made multiple false statements to the FBI, the [Office of Special Counsel] and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation: his interactions and communications with Kilimnik,” Jackson wrote. Jackson also ruled that prosecutors had established that Manafort lied about a $125,000 payment that a pro-Trump super-PAC arranged to have paid to a law firm that Manafort owed money and that Manafort made false statements about another Justice Department investigation. The judge said prosecutors had failed to show that Manafort lied about Kilimnik’s role in the witness tampering effort for which the Ukrainian has been indicted or that Manafort intentionally lied about his contacts with the Trump administration.

Prosecutors have said that Manafort, a longtime lobbyist, lied about his discussions with Kilimnik about a peace plan for Ukraine. The plan presumably would have included the removal of economic sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia in 2014 after it invaded Crimea and backed separatist fighters in Eastern Ukraine. Manafort falsely claimed he rejected the plan and failed to disclose that he continued to discuss it with Kilimnik even into last year, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors have focused on an August 2, 2016, meeting at the Grand Havana Club in New York City, where they say Manafort and Kilimnik discussed such a plan. At the same meeting, Manafort also gave Kilimnik detailed internal polling conducted on behalf of the Trump campaign, they say. Emails first reported by the Washington Post suggest that Kilimnik sought the meeting at the behest of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Deripaska is a former Manafort patron and business associate who claims that Manafort owed him millions at the time. The oligarch denies that he has ever interacted with Kilimnik.

In a hearing earlier this month, Andrew Weissmann, a lead prosecutor under Mueller, said the special counsel’s office believes that Manafort lied about his contacts with Kilimnik to “augment his chances for a pardon” by Trump. The president has regularly claimed that neither he nor anyone on his campaign conspired with Russia in 2016, while raising the possibility he may pardon Manafort and others if they refuse to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate