Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team filed a new, heavily redacted memo with the DC U.S. District Court this week saying Rick Gates recently provided additional information that appears to adjust one part of the government's allegations against Paul Manafort that pertain, specifically, to "his interactions and communications with [Konstantin] Kilimnik."
From the memorandum:
The government seeks to bring to the Court's attention additional evidence concerning one prong of the third subject-matter area addressed in the February 13, 2019 ruling, which the Court's written order identifies as the defendant's multiple false statements to the FBI, the OSC, and the grand jury concerning matters that were material to the investigation: his interactions and communications with Kilimnik.
Specifically at issue is the Court's finding that Manafort lied in claiming that he [REDACTED]. After the hearing, on February 15, 2019, Rick Gates was interviewed by the Special Counsel's Office and, as discussed below, Gates confirmed that [REDACTED].
They said their revised account should not change the recent ruling by Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Mr. Manafort had been untruthful about his interactions with the Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, because they had presented sufficient other evidence of Mr. Manafort’s lies.
Nonetheless, the filing was a rare admission of a mistake by the special counsel’s office, which is winding up a nearly two-year investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone tied to the Trump campaign conspired in the effort to influence the outcome of the vote.
The filing could give new ammunition to Mr. Manafort’s defense team, which has argued that prosecutors overreached in accusing Mr. Manafort of lying because they were too eager to believe Mr. Gates. Lawyers for Mr. Manafort have repeatedly contended that Mr. Gates, who has been cooperating with Mr. Mueller’s team for the past year, is not a credible witness ...
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The subject in dispute was unclear from the filing, but one issue that prosecutors have said that Mr. Manafort lied about was whether he ordered Mr. Gates to give Trump campaign polling data to Mr. Kilimnik before the election. Court records suggest that prosecutors relied heavily on Mr. Gates for evidence of data transfers.
Mr. Manafort pleaded guilty last September to two conspiracy counts and, like a number of former Trump aides, agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s investigation. But after a lengthy closed hearing on Feb. 13, Judge Jackson agreed with prosecutors that Mr. Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about three matters, including his relationship with Mr. Kilimnik.
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Like other court filings discussing Mr. Manafort’s interactions with Mr. Kilimnik, the latest one, filed before Judge Jackson, was heavily redacted to protect active federal investigations. Even so, it makes clear that the prosecutors were trying to defend Mr. Gates’s credibility while at the same time correcting the record on which Judge Jackson relied in determining that Mr. Manafort had lied to them.
According to a footnote, news media coverage of the broken plea agreement led Mr. Gates’s lawyer to contact the special counsel’s office. Prosecutors followed up by interviewing Mr. Gates again on Feb. 15 and obtained new evidence, they said. But they said the new information does not “undermine the court’s conclusion as to the subject matter area as a whole.”
Mueller’s Team Acknowledges New Information in Allegations That Manafort Lied (NYT)