There are conflicting reports that Gates fired his lawyer in the wake of the new indictments, perhaps indicating that plea negotiations became complicated again, which may relate to the charging of Alex Van Der Zwaan for lying to investigators.
Meanwhile Manafort falls further into the barrel even to the extent that a bank loan may have been acquired in exchange for a WH job.
Agent Orange’s talks about arming teachers is not enough to distract from this.
On Thursday, the special counsel’s team filed a new indictment against Gates and Manafort in federal court in Virginia. It alleges that Gates and Manafort lied to lenders about their finances and concocted a real estate scheme so they would have more liquidity. By deceiving lenders, they received millions of dollars in loans, according to the indictment.
Significantly, this new indictment documents allegedly illicit financial activity from the time Gates and Manafort both worked on the Trump campaign.
[...]
By then, however, Manafort and Gates were rich men off work they had done for Ukraine’s pro-Russia Party of Regions. Among their assignments was to commission a report from a Democratic-connected law firm, Skadden Arps, whitewashing the party-controlled government’s decision to jail a political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko. Skadden lawyers formally received the conspicuously small fee of $13,000 for transcontinental work. Mueller’s October indictment of Manafort and Gates alleged that the two men “used one of their offshore accounts to funnel $4 million to pay secretly for the report.”
Just days before Mueller’s new indictments, Mueller secured a different plea from a Skadden attorney named Alex van der Zwaan. He worked on Skadden’s Manafort-funded Tymoshenko report. And one thing van der Zwaan lied about to the Bureau: communications he had with Rick Gates.
The new indictments place new pressure on Gates and Manafort.
(CNN) Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed new charges against former Donald Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates.
In the
37-page indictment in Virginia, prosecutors describe a "scheme" in which the two longtime business partners allegedly laundered $30 million, failed to pay taxes for almost 10 years and used real estate they owned to fraudulently secure more than $20 million in loans.
Squid pro quo...
The indictment appears to reference two additional conspirators. In two instances, Manafort and Gates coordinated with an individual or individuals listed only as “another conspirator” to misrepresent DMI’s income. (It is not clear whether these references are to two separate people or whether one person helped in both cases.) Additionally, the indictment references a conspirator working at one of the lenders, who helped Manafort and Gates falsify the income records in 2016. None of these individuals is named.
Notably, NBC recently reported that the special counsel’s office is investigating the possibility of a “quid pro quo agreement” between Manafort and Federal Savings Bank President Stephen Calk. Reportedly, Mueller is examining whether Calk gave Manafort $16 million worth of loans in exchange for a promised White House post. Manafort received the loans from December 2016 to January 2017.
lawfareblog.com/...
The new timeline flies in the face of White House officials’ previous attempts to distance themselves from the allegations facing Manafort, which centered primarily on the fact that the illegal activity preceded Manafort joining Trump’s campaign.
As the president tweeted last October — around the same time Gates was allegedly lying to his tax preparer — Manafort’s crimes took place “years ago.”