Getty Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort leaves Federal Court on December 11, 2017.
A federal grand jury has approved 32 new charges from Robert Mueller again Paul Manafort and Rick Gates today. You can read the superseding indictment just filed today, including all 32 charges, below. Or you can access and download the document directly from the Department of Justice’s website here. The description for the document reads: “Paul J. Manafort, Jr., of Alexandria, Va., and Richard W. Gates III, of Richmond, Va., were indicted by a federal grand jury on Feb. 22, 2018, in the Eastern District of Virginia. The indictment contains 32 counts: 16 counts related to false individual income tax returns, seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, five counts of bank fraud conspiracy, and four counts of bank fraud.”
A superseding indictment is an indictment with new charges or accusations, after new evidence has become available. It adds charges or defendants to an earlier indictment. These may be issued if new information has been found. Sometimes more than one superseding indictment might be added. Mueller had already indicted Gates and Manafort on a combined 12 counts in October, but now new charges have been added in Virginia. In this indictment, counts 6 through 10 and 15 through 32 are against Gates, and counts 1 through 5, 11 through 14, and 24 through 32 are against Manafort. Among the numerous new charges are claims that one or both men failed to file tax returns, failed to report foreign bank accounts, committed or conspired to commit bank fraud, acted as unregistered agents of a foreign government and foreign political parties, and hid that income from the United States. Some quotes from indictment include:
Between at least 2006 and 2015, 3 MANAFORT and GATES acted as unregistered agents of a foreign government and foreign political parties. Specifically, they represented the Government of Ukraine, the President of Ukraine (Victor Yanukovych, who was President from 2010 to 2014), the Party of Regions (a Ukrainian political party led by Yanukovych), and the Opposition Bloc (a successor to the Party of Regions after Yanukovych fled to Russia).
MANAFORT and GATES generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. From approximately 2006 through the present, MANAFORT and GATES engaged in a scheme to hide income from United States authorities, while enjoying the use of the money. During the first part of the scheme between approximately 2006 and 2015, MANAFORT, with GATES’ assistance, failed to pay taxes on this income by disguising it as alleged “loans” from nominee offshore corporate entities and by making millions of dollars in unreported payments from foreign accounts to bank accounts they controlled and United States vendors. MANAFORT also used the offshore accounts to purchase United States real estate, and MANAFORT and GATES used the undisclosed income to make improvements to and refinance their United States properties.
In the second part of the scheme, between approximately 2015 and at least January 2017, when the Ukraine income dwindled after Yanukovych fled to Russia, MANAFORT, with the assistance of GATES, extracted money from MANAFORT’s United States real estate by, among other things, using those properties as collateral to obtain loans from multiple financial institutions. MANAFORT and GATES fraudulently secured more than twenty million dollars in loans by falsely inflating MANAFORT’s and his company’s income and by failing to disclose existing debt in order to qualify for the loans.
The indictment goes on to talk about other schemes that the two are being charged with, and states that U.S. citizens have a responsibility to report their financial obligations to the U.S. for foreign bank accounts they have. The indictment also speaks of houses that Manafort bought with his money and renovations that he made.
The indictment also mentions unnamed “others” who may have played a role. Page 20, for example, reads: “Between in or around 2015 and the present, both dates being approximate and inclusive, in the Eastern District of Virginia and elsewhere, MANAFORT, GATES, and others devised and intended to devise, and executed and attempted to execute, a scheme and artifice to defraud, and to obtain money and property, by means of false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises, from banks and other financial institutions. As part of the scheme, MANAFORT and GATES repeatedly provided and caused to be provided false information to banks and other lenders, among others.”
A few other times that “others” were mentioned include on Page 25: “Having failed to secure a falsified P&L from the bookkeeper, GATES falsified the P&L. GATES wrote to MANAFORT and another conspirator, “I am editing Paul’s 2015 P&L statement.” And then: “In March 2016, MANAFORT, with the assistance of GATES and others, applied for a $5.5 million loan from Lender B on the Union Street property. As part of the loan process, MANAFORT submitted a false statement of assets and liabilities…”
Any time you want to read the full indictments from the Special Counsel’s office, they are filed on the Department of Justice’s website here.
This is a developing story.