In essence, the two men were accused of hiding their income from lobbying work for Ukraine to avoid paying taxes, then lying about it. The thirty-one-page indictment made no mention of Trump, Russia, or “collusion.” The media seemed as dejected as a kid who wakes up on Christmas morning only to find there are no presents under the tree. The alleged crimes all predated Manafort’s and Gates’s involvement with Trump’s campaign.26
The Manafort and Gates indictments were unsealed the same day Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying. Now Flynn, Papadopoulos, Manafort, and Gates were being squeezed to flip on Trump. None of them did. And that made the special counsel team very angry.
It was clear that Papadopoulos was a dud. The team had nothing on Flynn besides lying, a potential FARA charge, and the useless Logan Act. But it had a paper trail of financial improprieties committed by Manafort and Gates, which could result in substantial prison time.
The charges were politically motivated. On the same day Manafort was indicted, Democrat power lobbyist Tony Podesta, the brother of Clinton adviser John Podesta, stepped down from his post at the Podesta Group. The special counsel had opened an investigation into Tony Podesta because he had done work on a Ukrainian public relations project organized by Manafort. He had filed a retroactive FARA declaration in April and has never been charged.27
Indeed, Washington is home to many political consultants who flocked to post–Soviet Union countries to ply their trade. Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. Obama-connected consultants lobbied for his rival, Yulia Tymoshenko. The Clintonistas took the side of Viktor Yushchenko, a Putin antagonist. Like Manafort, everyone else got rich.28
Yes, such activities could be unsavory, but they could also be politically useful to the United States. For example, though Yanukovych was a “thug,” as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy pointed out, Manafort remade him “from the ground up: Learn English, warm to Europe, embrace integration in the European Union, endorse competitive democracy.”
But as his various businesses soured, Manafort owed some tycoons money, particularly Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum baron. Manafort was accused of leveraging his position with the Trump campaign by sharing polling data with Deripaska, as if to prove that his candidate did indeed have a shot at the presidency.29
Manafort’s associate Kilimnik supposedly passed the polling data to two Ukrainian oligarchs after an August 2016 meeting at a Manhattan cigar club. According to the FBI, Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence.30 A federal judge described that allegation as an “undisputed core” of Mueller’s investigation.31
The Kilimnik connection was accidentally revealed when Manafort’s attorneys failed to redact a footnote in a filing. “The document provided the clearest evidence to date that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russians during the 2016 presidential race,” reported the New York Times.32
“This is the closest thing we’ve seen to collusion,” said Clint Watts, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute.33
The sharing of polling data was not a “collusion” conspiracy. But Kilimnik, often described as a “shadowy” character, was the Russian that Mueller desperately needed to connect Trump to Putin.
In fact, Kilimnik had stronger ties to Senator John McCain than to Putin.
A graduate and former language instructor at an elite Russian military academy, Kilimnik began working in 1995 as a translator in the Moscow office of the International Republican Institute (IRI), a nonprofit pro-democracy think tank funded in part by the US government.34 The IRI was headed by McCain for twenty-five years until he stepped down in August 2018.35
Kilimnik, who is five foot three, was nicknamed “the midget” by his fellow staffers and kidded about being a spy because of his background, according to political consultant Michael Caputo, an American who worked in Moscow and later on the Trump campaign. Kilimnik became the deputy director for IRI’s Moscow office. In 2004, he did work on the side as a translator for Manafort’s then partner Rick Davis, who was in Ukraine consulting for billionaire Deripaska. Fired by IRI for moonlighting, he began translating for Manafort. That began a long and mutually beneficial association as both built valuable contacts among Ukrainian government officials and the country’s political elite.36
Kilimnik, who lives in Moscow, told the Wall Street Journal he met Deripaska only once, when interpreting for Davis. “I have never had anything to do with any intelligence service of Russia,” he wrote by email, saying the accusations against him had been “intentionally pushed out to make me a ‘missing link’ in a story that is built of flawed foundation.”37
In fact, according to hundreds of government documents, Kilimnik was a “sensitive” intelligence source for the US State Department—information deliberately omitted from the Mueller Report.38
Kilimnik’s communications with the State Department went back to 2013. He often met with the chief political officer at the US Embassy in Kiev, relaying messages to Ukraine’s leaders and delivering written reports to US officials. They believed he was impartial, with no particular allegiance to Moscow.39
Three government officials confirmed to reporter John Solomon that Mueller’s team had had all the interviews the FBI had done with State Department officials, in addition to Kilimnik’s written reports, “well before they portrayed him as a Russia sympathizer with ties to Moscow intelligence.”40
The Mueller Report also painted a proposed Ukraine-Russia peace plan that Kilimnik had presented to the Trump campaign in August 2016 as nefarious. But Mueller neglected to point out that Kilimnik had proposed a similar peace plan to the Obama State Department in May 2016.
“That’s what many in the intelligence world would call ‘deception by omission,’ ” Solomon wrote.41 That exclusion by Mueller not only was unethical but raised more questions about what other crucial information was missing from his report.
However, once the fishing expedition began, fish were hooked. Both Manafort and Gates had reaped the benefits of lucrative consulting work and—instead of paying Uncle Sam his share—parked large sums of money overseas.
Gates pleaded guilty in February 2018 to two charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States involving undeclared income and making a false statement. He became the fifth person targeted by Mueller to admit to criminal misconduct and the third Trump associate to state his willingness to cooperate with the special counsel. Since Gates had continued his work for Trump long after Manafort’s resignation, he presumably had dirt to dish.42
As of March 2019, Gates had not been sentenced and was still providing help in “several ongoing investigations,” perhaps activities surrounding Trump’s inauguration.43
A superseding indictment, obtained from a federal grand jury in Virginia, alleged that the two men had engaged in a complex scheme to defraud lenders and obtain more than $20 million in loans, doctoring financial statements to show millions of dollars in income they didn’t have.44
Manafort said he would continue to defend himself “against the untrue piled up charges. . . . I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface, he chose to do otherwise.”45
Manafort faced charges in two jurisdictions, the District of Columbia and the Eastern District of Virginia. One new charge included the allegation that Manafort “secretly retained” a group of “former senior European politicians” in 2012 to support his Ukrainian client’s positions while appearing to be independent.46
US District Judge T. S. Ellis III in Washington, DC, cast a gimlet eye on the charges against Manafort, chastising the Mueller team for using an earlier investigation to pressure him to testify against Trump.
“You’re now using [that material] . . . as a means of persuading Mr. Manafort to provide information,” Ellis said during a heated hearing in May 2018.47 “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. What you really care about is what information
Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment. . . . The vernacular to ‘sing’ is what prosecutors use. What you have to be careful of is that they may not only sing, they may compose.”48
Even former Clinton attorney Lanny Davis said that Manafort’s attorneys had a point in trying to limit what the special counsel could pursue. “I don’t know whether that line has been crossed,” Davis said. “I certainly think there’s a question to be raised about what bank fraud has to do with Russian collusion, and that’s something that needs to be addressed by the court.”49
Mueller’s team found a tenuous connection. In June 2018, they indicted Manafort and Kilimnik on two counts of obstruction of justice by attempting to contact potential witnesses, believed to be high-ranking European political leaders, via phone calls, text messages, and encrypted apps.50
Kilimnik denied the allegations. Based on Manafort’s communications with Kilimnik, prosecutors asked the judge to revoke Manafort’s $10 million bail.51 US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson complied, remanding him to jail in Virginia on June 16, 2018.52 Though held as a “VIP” in a self-contained unit for his “safety,” Manafort was effectively kept in solitary confinement twenty-three hours a day, a policy designed to punish troublemakers. The facility was two hours south of Washington, making it “effectively impossible” for him to prepare for two trials, his attorneys argued.53
After prosecutors complained that Manafort’s “VIP” treatment was too luxurious, he was moved to another jail in mid-July.54 By the time Manafort went to trial on eighteen counts of tax evasion and bank fraud in the Virginia courtroom of Judge Ellis in the summer of 2018, his health had visibly deteriorated.
Mueller’s prosecutors painted Manafort as a profligate spender, going into elaborate detail about Manafort’s spending on seven homes, a $15,000 ostrich-skin jacket, cars, and other luxuries. Judge Ellis told them to move along, that it wasn’t a crime to be a big spender.55 He also instructed them not to use the pejorative term oligarchs, which implied that Manafort consorted with “despicable people.”56
The jury convicted him on eight counts of tax and bank fraud.57 To avoid a second trial in Washington, DC, Manafort agreed in September 2018 to plead guilty to conspiring against the United States and obstruction of justice and cooperate with the special counsel. He was interrogated more than a dozen times by the FBI and Mueller’s attorneys; nine of those times came after his plea deal.58
Investigators repeatedly brought up the June 9, 2016, meeting at Trump Tower that Manafort had attended with Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, pressing him on whether the presidential candidate had known about it in advance.59
It would not have been a crime if he had. But Manafort repeatedly denied that Trump had had prior knowledge of the meeting; he was accused in court of lying. The piling on of those “process” crimes was just another weapon in Mueller’s arsenal.
In a heavily redacted December 2018 court filing, Mueller’s team listed five topics Manafort had lied about: his interactions with Kilimnik, the role Kilimnik had played in trying to influence witness testimony; a business payment; his Trump administration contacts; and information for another investigation. Though Manafort denied having intentionally provided false information, the Mueller team insisted that he had breached his agreement, erasing any prospect for leniency.60
In February 2019, the Mueller team filed a highly anticipated eight-hundred-page sentencing brief. The media pundits were disappointed to find that it contained no evidence that Manafort, Gates, Kilimnik, Trump, or anyone else on the candidate’s campaign staff had conspired with Russia.
As Andrew McCarthy said, perhaps Manafort was a big-spending scoundrel. But did that justify the predawn raid in which his wife had been held at gunpoint? The “months of solitary confinement that have left him a shell of his former self”?
Manafort didn’t collude with Russia, McCarthy pointed out. “He worked for Ukraine, not Putin. Indeed, for much of his time in Ukraine, he pushed his clients against Putin’s interests.”61
But even more outrage was yet in store. Within minutes of Manafort’s final sentencing, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., indicted him for mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other New York state felonies. The core allegation was that Manafort had lied about buying a Manhattan condo to use as a home, as opposed to a rental. Some of the charges overlapped with the charges of which Manafort had already been found guilty, putting him into double jeopardy.
That “nakedly political prosecution,” said legal scholar Jonathan Turley, was intended to punish Manafort in case President Trump pardoned his former campaign manager, by convicting him on state charges out of the reach of executive power. It was lauded in the out-for-blood media as a clever “insurance policy.”62
In her zeal to get Manafort, New York attorney general Letitia James campaigned for office on changing the state constitution to reduce double-jeopardy protections, which would “remove constitutional protections from all citizens,” said Turley. “What is clear is that New York should not reduce protections for everyone in the state just to punish one man.”63
The effort to change the state constitution succeeded, but it may not survive judicial review. Though the indictments were unethical and constitutionally flawed, DA Vance brought them anyway.
“The state prosecutors have brought a case they otherwise would never waste time on—not because the case should be done, but to try to block a pardon,” McCarthy said. “This raw politicization of prosecutorial power ought to frighten everyone. . . . The New York district attorney did not indict Manafort because he committed mortgage fraud. The DA indicted Manafort because he worked on the Trump campaign and could be pardoned during Trump’s presidency. That’s disgraceful.”64
If there was any doubt that the prosecution by Vance was political, the announcement that while awaiting trial in Manhattan, Manafort would be transferred from a penitentiary in Loretto, Pennsylvania, to Rikers Island dispelled that notion. In a letter to the Loretto penitentiary warden, Manafort’s attorney objected and asked that the move be blocked because New York prosecutors were “insisting that Mr. Manafort remain on Rikers Island, likely in solitary confinement, pending trial.”65
Reserved for hard-core criminals and plagued by violence, Rikers is no place for an ailing elderly man convicted of white-collar offenses. “The decision to move Paul Manafort . . . from the decent federal prison to which he was sentenced to solitary confinement to the dangerous hell hole that is New York City’s Rikers Island seems abusive and possibly illegal,” wrote former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. “I know Rikers well having spent time there visiting numerous defendants accused of murder and other violent crimes. . . . Mass murderers and torturers are among those incarcerated at Rikers Island.”66
Former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik wrote that solitary confinement is “basically a deathtrap.” Even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) agreed, tweeting “A prison sentence is not a license for gov torture and human rights violations. That’s what solitary confinement is.”67
Attorney Sidney Powell, who had taken over Flynn’s case, also weighed in: “When a witness or defendant from whom prosecutors want ‘cooperation’ does not do as they demand, they put him in solitary confinement. And it works. It literally breaks people.”68
That was Vance’s goal: to break Manafort to get Trump. However, Jeffrey A. Rosen, Barr’s new deputy attorney general, blocked the move to Rikers—for now.69
Kilimnik lives in Moscow. He will never be extradited to face trial, but Mueller’s team smeared him as a spy, a central player in the Russian collusion narrative that didn’t exist.
Busting Roger Stone
Just after 6:00 a.m. on January 25, 2019, seventeen SUVs and two armored vehicles, sirens blaring and lights flashing, screamed into a quiet residential neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale where many houses bac
k up to a canal. A helicopter hovered overhead, and two police boats roared up to the back yard of a home.
Twenty-nine FBI agents, wearing tactical gear and wielding M4 rifles, swept across the lawn. Four agents approached the front door, two with a battering ram. One pounded on the front entrance, shouting “FBI! Open the door!” When a white-haired man wearing shorts and a T-shirt, clearly just awakened from sleep, complied, he saw two rifle barrels pointed at his head.70
Sixty-six-year-old Roger Stone was told he was under arrest. The feds scoured his home for documents, computers, phones, and, apparently, a meth lab or illegal gun-running operation, perhaps a terrorist hiding under a bed.
The bust was shown live on CNN, which conveniently happened to have a camera van parked down the street. The commentator described the scene as an “extraordinary arrest” involving “many lights, heavy weaponry.”71
The jackbooted tactics were to bust not an armed and dangerous criminal but a writer, self-promoter, and longtime friend and political adviser of Donald Trump, indicted the previous day on seven counts of lying to federal agents. The feds knew that Stone had no criminal record, owned no firearms, and had an expired passport and thus was not dangerous or a flight risk.
The raid was similar to that on Manafort’s condo, but on steroids.
“I opened the door to pointed automatic weapons,” Stone said later. “I was handcuffed. There were 17 vehicles in the street with their lights on, they terrorized my wife and my dogs.”72
Former FBI agent Kenneth Strange said the video shot by CNN showed all the markings of a predawn “knock and announce” arrest warrant, usually reserved to nab a cartel member.73
“The manner, timing, resources, and manpower used to effect Stone’s arrest bordered on the surreal,” said Strange. “And while Mueller and his minions may have been within their right to execute an arrest warrant in such a manner, their indifference to the optics of this ‘reality show arrest’ is baffling.”74
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