Manafort trying to tamper with witnesses: Mueller

Bloomberg

Special Counsel Robert Mueller accused Paul Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, of attempting to tamper with witnesses in the federal case charging him with money laundering and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Ukraine.
Manafort and a longtime associate tried to contact two witnesses to secure false testimony about work that a group of former senior European politicians secretly did on behalf of Ukraine, Mueller’s prosecutors claimed in court papers.
The witness contacts came after Manafort was indicted in Washington for a second time on Feb. 23, when he faced fresh claims of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act, prosecutors said. According to the filing, Manafort tried to contact two public relations executives who were associated with a group of former European politicians known as the Hapsburg group. The group was paid more than $2.34 million from overseas accounts Manafort controlled to lobby and conduct public relations work in Europe and the US in 2012 and 2013, according to the filing. Those executives, referred to in court papers as Persons D1 and D2, received contacts from Manafort a day after his superseding indictment in Washington, prosecutors said.
“Manafort and Person A — who is a longtime associate of Manafort’s — repeatedly contacted Persons D1 and D2 in an effort to secure materially false testimony concerning the activities of the Hapsburg group,” according to the filing. “Person D1 has told the government that he understood Manafort’s outreach to be an effort to ‘suborn perjury,’ because Person D1 knew that the Hapsburg group worked in the United States — not just Europe.”
The description of Person A matches earlier ones in court filings of Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national who worked for Manafort in Ukraine. Prosecutors have said he was a former military intelligence officer, something that he denies. He has not been charged in the case.
The tampering accusation, if true, would be a crime and violate the terms of Manafort’s pre-trial release. Prosecutors asked US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson to schedule a court hearing that could lead to Manafort, 69, going to jail before his trial begins on September 17 in Washington.
Manafort, who is confined to his home on $10 million bond, faces a separate trial on July 24 on bank and tax fraud charges in Alexandria, Virginia.
Both Persons D1 and D2 received encrypted messages from Manafort, which they preserved and gave to the government.
Person D2 told investigators that he believed that Manafort and Person A contacted him to deliver a message to the Hapsburg group — if they were contacted by anyone, they should say that their lobbying and public relations work was exclusively in Europe, according to the filing.