United States President, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has surrendered to Federal authorities amid an ongoing probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, CNN and the New York Times reported, citing unnamed sources.
The Times, citing someone involved in the case, said Manafort’s former business associate Rick Gates was also told to surrender to US authorities.
Manafort was seen leaving his home early Monday morning, according to a Reuters witness, and he was later confirmed to have turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Paul Manafort and his former business associate Rick Gates were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller and told to surrender to federal authorities.
Manafort walked into the FBI’s field office with his lawyer Kevin Downing in Washington, DC at around 8:15 a.m on Monday morning. An FBI agent greeted him and his lawyer as they entered the building.
The indictment was unsealed on Monday morning and contains 12 counts: conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading FARA statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
Manafort has been at the center of Mueller’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow during the 2016 election. The indictments against Manafort and Gates are the first since former FBI Director James Comey launched the probe over a year ago. Mueller took over the probe after Comey was fired in May.
Manafort was forced to step down as Trump’s campaign chairman in May, but Gates stayed and worked on Trump’s transition team. He was ousted from a pro-Trump lobbying group in April amid questions about Russia’s election interference, and continued to visit the White House as late as June, according to The Daily Beast.
Legal experts speculated over the weekend, after news of the sealed indictments broke on Friday, that Mueller would arrest Manafort in an effort to get him to “flip” against Trump.
The FBI conducted a predawn on Manafort’s home in July. Manafort was told at the time that he would be indicted, according to his longtime friend Roger Stone. Investigators were looking for tax documents and foreign banking records that are typically sought when investigating violations of Bank Secrecy Act.
Manafort has been associated with at least 15 bank accounts and 10 companies in Cyprus, dating back to 2007, NBC reported in March, and the FBI has issued grand jury subpoenas to several banks for Manafort’s records. The name of his longtime business associate Rick Gates appears on documents linked to many of those Cyprus companies, according to the New York Times.
BuzzFeed reported on Sunday that the FBI was looking at 13 suspicious wire transfers made by Manafort-linked offshore companies between 2012-2013.
Manafort has been cooperating with investigators’ requests for relevant documents. But the search warrant obtained by the FBI in July indicates that Mueller managed to convince a federal judge that Manafort would try to conceal or destroy documents subpoenaed by a grand jury.
The indictments isued on Friday were sealed, and Manafort’s attorneys did not receive a target letter, raising similar questions about whether Mueller thought Manafort would have tried to flee or destroy evidence if he were notified of his impending arrest three days beforehand.
Legal experts saw the July raid as a sign that something very serious was coming.
A former Department of Justice spokesman, Matthew Miller, said a raid coming months into an investigation when the subject’s attorneys had been speaking with, and presumably cooperating with, the DOJ “suggests something serious.”
“Manafort’s representatives have been insisting for months that he is cooperating with these investigations, and if you are really cooperating, DOJ typically doesn’t need to raid your house — they’ll trust you to respond fully to a subpoena,” former Department of Justice spokesman Matthew Miller said at the time.
Manafort’s ties to Russia came under scrutiny last August, when The New York Times discovered that a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine designated him $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments. Manafort, a longtime Republican operative, had advised the party and its former leader Viktor Yanukovych for nearly a decade.
On March 22, the Associated Press reported that Manafort was paid $10 million from 2006 to 2009 to lobby on behalf of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, using a strategic “model” that the AP said Manafort wrote would “greatly benefit the Putin Government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success.”
Manafort has insisted that he has never received any illicit cash payments. But he has a “pattern” of using shell companies to purchase homes “in all-cash deals,” as WNYC has reported, and then transferring those properties into his own name for no money and taking out large mortgages against them.
Manafort’s tendency to form shell companies to purchase real estate is not illegal. But it has raised questions about how much Manafort has been paid throughout the decades he’s spent as a political consultant, and by whom.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was recruited to help investigate Manafort for possible financial crimes and money laundering last month, and the IRS’s criminal-investigations unit was brought onto the investigation to examine similar issues.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Manafort was the subject of a new money laundering investigation in New York.
Manafort also attended a meeting last year at Trump Tower with Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and two Russian lobbyists who were said to have offered dirt on Hillary Clinton.