Gates And Manafort Were In Touch With Known Russian Agent During Campaign, According To New Mueller Filing
In a new court document filed Tuesday night, prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller allege that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were in contact with a Russian intelligence agent while they were working for the Trump campaign — and that Gates knew that the individual in question was a Russian agent.
The new memo was filed in connection with the sentencing of Alex van der Zwaan (pictured above), a lawyer who worked with Gates and Manafort on a report commissioned in 2012 by the Ukrainian government. (Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, is now in hot water for failing to register as a foreign agent while working on the report and laundering the money he earned from the report.) Van der Zwaan has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his contact in fall 2016 with Gates and the Russian agent identified in the new filing as "Person A." The Washington Post notes that Person A's description "matches the Russian manager of Manafort's lobbying office in Kiev, Konstantin Kilimnik."
Many of the details described in this filing are already known from previous court documents, but two new facts stand out. First, Kilimnik was allegedly working as a Russian agent in 2016, while he was talking to Gates, who was then the Trump campaign's liaison to the Republican National Committee. "Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agents
assisting the Special Counsel's Office assess that Person A has ties to a Russian intelligence service
and had such ties in 2016," the memo states. Those last six words are significant, according to the Post: "Prosecutors have said previously that a longtime Manafort and Gates associate had ties to Russian intelligence, but they have never said those ties remained during the 2016 campaign."
Secondly — perhaps more interestingly — Gates knew that Kilimnik worked, or had worked, for Russian intelligence. "During his first interview with the Special Counsel's Office, van der
Zwaan admitted that he knew of that connection, stating that Gates told him Person A was a former
Russian Intelligence Officer with the GRU," the memo states. (GRU stands for Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, or Main Intelligence Directorate, and is Russia's military intelligence agency.)
It's not yet clear what the nature of Kilimnik's ties to the GRU were in 2016. But the fact that Gates — and, in all likelihood, Manafort — knew that their Kiev office manager had worked for the GRU, and continued to work and communicate with Kilimnik even after they started working for Trump, suggests a certain laissez-faire attitude toward Russian intelligence within the Trump campaign. Gates, who is cooperating with Mueller, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to federal investigators. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to several counts of conspiracy and fraud connected to his unauthorized lobbying work in Ukraine.
