The new charges track track with allegations special counsel Robert Mueller's team leveled earlier this week. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Mueller hits Manafort with new obstruction of justice charges The longtime Manafort aide Kilimnik is also charged for the first time.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office obtained a new indictment Friday against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, adding a pair of charges that he and a longtime aide alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence, Konstantin Kilimnik, obstructed justice by attempting to tamper with witnesses.

The new criminal charges — the first public ones against Kilimnik — track with allegations Mueller’s team leveled earlier this week that Manafort and an associate tried to influence the testimony of two men involved in a public relations campaign several years ago to buff up the image of Ukraine and its president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych.


Legal experts said Mueller’s latest move could be particularly damaging for Manafort, predicting that the judge could soon rescind the former campaign chairman’s current house arrest arrangement.

“The heat is being turned up on Paul Manafort,” said Robert Ray, a former independent counsel who succeeded Kenneth Starr in the investigation of multiple scandals involving President Bill Clinton.

Manafort’s legal team fired back at the prosecution in a court filing Friday night, accusing Mueller’s lawyers of “heavy-handed tactics” and of distorting the significance of Manafort’s effort to reach out to former colleagues in his Ukraine-related work.

“From a scant record, the Special Counsel conjures a sinister plot to ‘corruptly persuade’ two of Mr. Manafort’s former business associates to perjure themselves at the upcoming trial in September,” Manafort’s attorneys wrote. “Mr. Manafort asked no one to provide a false affidavit or false testimony at trial, or perjure themselves, and he has not given — nor offered to give — any potential witness anything in exchange for false testimony.”

Manafort’s lawyers Kevin Downing, Thomas Zehnle and Richard Westling said prosecutors’ public airing of the tampering allegations earlier this week sabotaged the veteran lobbyist and political consultant’s right to a fair trial and amounted to a last-ditch effort to torpedo their client’s long-delayed release from home detention.

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“The Court should not condone such heavy-handed gamesmanship by the Special Counsel,” the defense team wrote. “The new charge of witness tampering made by the Special Counsel should be seen for what it is: an attempt to derail the modified conditions of release at the eleventh hour.”

The defense also noted that Manafort was never told he could have no contact with witnesses in the case. “The communications and conduct alleged by the Special Counsel in this case come nowhere near the conduct discussed in the cases supporting witness tampering charges,” Manafort’s lawyers wrote.

A source familiar with the case, however, called the addition of the tampering charges to the existing indictment “brutal” for Manafort.

“Paul’s problem is he doesn’t actually have anything to trade,” the source added. “Cooperating isn’t an option because he really didn’t collude with the Russians at the Trump campaign’s request.”

A notice posted outside a courtroom at a federal courthouse near Capitol Hill said one of Mueller's top deputies, Andrew Weissmann, was scheduled to present the indictment at 12:30 p.m. to U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Robin Meriweather. The indictment was made public by the court a short time later.

The indictment does not name the targets of the alleged witness tampering, but POLITICO reported Wednesday that the effort appeared connected to work performed by individuals connected to a now-defunct European public relations firm, FBC Media.

The company was run primarily by a high-profile journalist and political commentator based in Italy, Alan Friedman, and a former CNN business news producer, Eckart Sager.

A contract Mueller’s team filed with the court on Monday bore significant similarities to those written by FBC for other clients. A source also told POLITICO the contract matched subsequent contracts for the Ukraine work-related carried out by Friedman and Sager.

Friedman and Sager did not respond to multiple emails and phone messages seeking comment.

Prosecutors said the pair of men working on the public relations and lobbying contract reported that they received phone and encrypted messages from Manafort and a man now identified in the new indictment as Kilimnik.

The recipients viewed the messages as part of an attempt to persuade them to say that the Ukraine-related PR effort focused on Europe, not the U.S., even though they knew influencing opinion in the U.S. was part of the plan, prosecutors said in court filings. One of the men said he regarded the outreach as an attempt by Manafort to “suborn perjury,” Mueller’s team said.

The new indictment came on the same day Manafort’s defense team was scheduled to respond to the startling claims of witness tampering Mueller’s office leveled Monday in a request to a federal judge in Washington to tighten the conditions of the house arrest Manafort has been under — or revoke his pretrial release altogether.

While the superseding indictment includes ample detail about Manafort’s Ukraine-related lobbying, his financial dealings and offshore accounts, the portion about the alleged obstruction of justice is spare. The court submission earlier this week contained more information about the alleged effort to shape testimony.

The filing Monday said Manafort and Kilimnik began reaching out to the targets of the alleged tampering soon after a new indictment against Manafort was made public in February, alleging that he helped organize former European statesmen to promote Ukraine and Yanukovych through an effort known as the Hapsburg Group. Manafort allegedly tried to get messages to the men involved in the PR effort and to the Hapsburg Group principals that they should emphasize that the effort was focused on Europe.

Defense attorneys, however, said prosecutors were relying on the associate’s potentially overwrought reaction to Manafort’s outreach rather than on anything Manafort actually said. Manafort’s lawyers also filed a 2012 memo showing a detailed plan for the Hapsburg team to sway opinion in Europe. They offered no explanation for the meetings the group’s participants held in Washington the following year.

Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 amid widespread protests, is now living in exile in Russia and facing treason charges in Ukraine.

One of the people whom Manafort tried to call “sought to avoid Manafort” and “ended the call,” according to an FBI agent’s declaration. Manafort tried again with an encrypted text message, stating, “This is paul.” Two days later came another text with a news article describing the allegations and another message: “We should talk. I have made clear that they worked in Europe,” according to the declaration.

The filings allege that Kilimnik also reached out via text message and encrypted apps on Manafort’s behalf in an effort to deliver the same message. “Basically P wants to give him a quick summary that he says to everybody (which is true) that our friends never lobbied in the US, and the purpose of the program was EU,” Kilimnik allegedly wrote. Prosecutors say the P is an abbreviation for Manafort’s first name.

Kilimnik, who holds Russian and Ukrainian citizenship, is believed to be in Russia. Before Friday, he was identified in court filings simply as “Person A.” However, details about his background and his work for Manafort’s firm in Ukraine made it evident to associates that Kilimnik was the person in question.

Friday’s indictment followed a busy morning of activity at the courthouse, with reporters spotting prosecutors including Weissmann and FBI Special Agent Brock Domin moving about. Another prosecutor, Kyle Freeny, arrived early in the morning then left, accompanied by at least one FBI agent.

Trump personal lawyer Jay Sekulow declined comment on the new indictment. White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said the former Trump campaign chairman’s lawyers were reviewing the latest indictment and declined further comment.

Former federal prosecutor Peter Zeidenberg predicted Manafort’s current conditions of release “will almost certainly be revoked at the hearing next week, if not sooner.”

“Getting indicted for obstruction of justice while out on release and awaiting trial will lead almost any judge to order a defendant detained,” he added. “And defending this case while Manafort is in jail will be nearly impossible — not that they had an easy time of it before this.”

Mueller’s new charges, Zeidenberg said, also will go a long way toward arguing Manafort was conscious of his guilt. “That is an easy concept for a jury to understand,” he said.

One ex-prosecutor who expressed skepticism earlier this week that Mueller’s team had evidence to support an obstruction charge said Friday he now thinks prosecutors must have more.

“I stand by my assessment that what we’ve seen so far is light,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former senior counsel to Starr. But, he added, the new indictment indicates "they have evidence Kilimnik was acting for Manafort" — an important development.

Rosenzweig said he also now expects more drama at a hearing the judge scheduled for next week on the alleged tampering.

“Before this I would have bet against the judge jailing Manafort, but now I’m expecting them to put on a bit more of a show Friday,” said Rosenzweig, now a fellow at the R Street Institute think tank.

Manafort is facing two separate criminal cases: one in federal court in Washington, and the other across the Potomac, in Alexandria, Virginia.

The new charges Friday were brought in the D.C. case, which already charged Manafort with five counts related to money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent and making false statements to the Justice Department about the Ukraine-related lobbying work.

The Virginia case accuses Manafort of tax evasion, bank fraud and failing to report foreign bank accounts. The former Trump campaign chair is scheduled for trial first in that case, beginning July 24, followed by the trial in Washington, set for Sept. 17.

The new obstruction charges — which include one obstruction of justice count and one conspiracy to obstruct justice count — add a potential of up to 40 years to the already lengthy prison time Manafort, 69, could face.

However, some lawyers said the significance of the new indictment wasn't so much on how it would affect Manafort, but on how it undercut President Donald Trump's regular claims that Mueller is on a "witch hunt" that's straying far from his assigned focus on alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“If this isn’t ‘collusion,’ what is?” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who argued that Mueller’s latest charge marks the first time an American and a Russian have been charged together for conspiring to commit a crime.

“The lasting legacy of this indictment could be its political impact,” he added. “Specifically, he charged the former chair of Trump’s campaign and a suspected Russian intelligence operative with conspiring to obstruct justice.”

Theo Meyer contributed to this report.