CNN reports that Special Counsel Robert Mueller may be more interested in what Rick Gates can tell him about possible Trump campaign collusion than what he can spill on Paul Manafort's dirty deeds.
In a court filing earlier this week, the public saw the first signs of how the Mueller team plans to use information from Gates to tie Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, directly to a Russian intelligence agency. Mueller's team alleges that Gates was in contact with a close colleague of Manafort's who worked for a Russian intelligence agency -- and that Gates knew of the spy service ties in September and October 2016, while he worked on the Trump campaign. Gates would have to talk about the communication with the man if prosecutors wanted, according to his plea deal.
That's in line with what prosecutors told Gates months ago during high-stakes negotiations, CNN has learned. They told him they didn't need his cooperation against Manafort, according to a person familiar with the investigation, and instead wanted to hear what he knew about contact between the Trump campaign and Russians.
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Mueller's court filing Tuesday night, in a separate case for a lawyer whose firm did legal work for Gates and Manafort, made public the most direct effort yet by Mueller's team to draw a line between Manafort and the Trump campaign to Russian operatives.
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The alleged Russian intelligence agent, referred to as "Person A" in the court filing, appears to be Konstantin Kilimnik, a former employee who worked with Manafort's firm and lived in Kiev and Moscow, according to sources familiar with the investigation. In December, the Mueller prosecutors made a similar unnamed reference to Kilimnik, saying he is "assessed to have ties to a Russian intelligence service." ...
The criminal allegations facing Gates and Manafort encompass work they did in the years prior to the 2016 election ...
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A chief criticism from President Donald Trump and his defenders has been that the charges brought so far by the special counsel don't relate directly to Mueller's central mission investigating possible illegal coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, which the President and others often shorthand using the term collusion. The accusation related to Kilimnik and ties to Russian intelligence, made in Mueller's Tuesday filing, begins to answer that criticism, but so far without actually making the charge in Manafort's case.
Read more: Source: Mueller pushed for Gates' help on collusion (CNN)