Special Counsel Robert Mueller issued a superseding indictment Friday against Paul Manafort and his longtime Ukrainian protégé Konstantin Kilimnik, charging both men with obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Konstantin Kilimnik, who helped Manafort run a Ukraine lobbying effort years before Manafort became Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, was indicted as part of an existing money-laundering case against Manafort. Mueller accused Manafort earlier this week of trying to secure false testimony about the Ukraine lobbying from two witnesses, together with the fixer now identified as Kilimnik.
In previous filings, Mueller made references to an unidentified Manafort associate in Ukraine with ties to Russian intelligence. In one filing, he cited an FBI assessment that those ties continued into the 2016 election. Now, Mueller has added Kilimnik and the obstruction charges to his indictment alleging that Manafort made millions of dollars from the Ukraine lobbying without registering in the U.S. and laundered some of the proceeds.
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Mueller has now charged 20 people and extracted guilty pleas from five of them in his investigation into Russian election meddling. By adding Kilimnik to the running charges against Manafort in federal court in Washington, Mueller further strengthens his case against him ...
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Indicting someone like Kilimnik who is unlikely to be arrested may be part of a larger strategy by Mueller’s team, said Michael Koenig, a former Justice Department prosecutor now at Hinckley, Allen & Snyder.
“There must be more to this story because the charge alone against a guy who isn’t here and who they may never get doesn’t seem to have much value,” Koenig said. “It suggests it may be a chess move -- the consequences of which are yet unknown to everybody except Bob Mueller.”
The first sign Manafort was facing more problems came Monday when the government filed documents accusing him of witness tampering.
Manafort’s latest round of troubles started early this week, when Mueller’s team asked a judge to review his house arrest and to consider jailing him over his alleged attempt to influence witnesses.
Mueller’s accusations centered on work that Manafort arranged a half-decade ago to promote Yanukovych, a Russia ally, in the West. He worked with a lobbying firm that enlisted former European politicians, the so-called Hapsburg group, who wrote articles and addressed U.S. politicians. Manafort didn’t register for the work he did on behalf of a foreign government in the U.S., in violation of U.S. law, Mueller said.
Just after Mueller initially laid out those accusations in a February indictment, Manafort and Kilimnik called and sent encrypted texts to two individuals, attempting to persuade them to characterize the pro-Ukraine lobbying work as limited to Europe, Mueller’s team said this week.
The prosecutors, in this week’s filing, didn’t identify the individuals or firm, but two people familiar with the matter identified them as Alan Friedman and Eckart Sagart, longtime journalists who started a London-based firm known as Fact-Based Communications.
Mueller Indicts Konstantin Kilimnik, Manafort’s Ukraine Fixer (Bloomberg Politics)