Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 8 for his convictions for bank and tax fraud. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images mueller investigation Mueller: Manafort worked behind scenes to stock Trump administration

Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, was working through mystery intermediaries in January 2017 to get people appointed in President Donald Trump’s new administration, according to a court filing released Tuesday.

Manafort described the hiring effort to Rick Gates, his longtime deputy, who in turn revealed the clandestine outreach to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team after pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate with investigators to lessen his own sentence.


According to Gates, Manafort continued speaking with the unidentified people — their names are redacted in the court filing submitted by Mueller’s prosecutors — through about February 2018, several months after the longtime GOP operative had first been indicted in the special counsel’s Russia inquiry on charges of money laundering, making false statements and other crimes.

Manafort was convicted on eight felony charges in August and is awaiting sentencing. In a deal with Mueller, he also pleaded guilty to other charges in September and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel.

It’s unclear whether Manafort was successful in his effort to stock the Trump administration with allies. But the new detail, which Mueller’s office indicated in a Tuesday court filing has been relayed to a federal grand jury, adds to the potential legal quagmire already swirling around Trump and his associates.

Mueller accused Manafort of lying to his prosecutors in late November and since then has been providing the court with evidence about a new suite of charges, which are expected to be a factor when a Washington-based federal judge sentences Manafort in March.

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In Tuesday’s court filing, FBI special agent Jeffrey Weiland provided more information about the fact-challenged statements Manafort allegedly made over the course of 12 meetings with Mueller’s prosecutors and in two visits last fall to the grand jury. Mueller’s team also produced a 157-page document of exhibits making their case, though nearly everything in the file is blacked out.

Much of Weiland’s 31-page statement includes redactions that make it difficult to fully decipher what Manafort is accused of lying about to the Mueller team, though previous court filings indicate the breaches include his contacts with the Trump administration and Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian associate who has ties to Russian intelligence.

Weiland’s statement does provide additional details surrounding a May 26, 2018, text exchange that Manafort had with an unidentified third party who was asking permission to use Manafort’s name as an introduction in case the person met Trump.

“If I see POTUS one on one next week am I ok to remind him of our relationship?” the person texted Manafort, according to Weiland’s statement.

Manafort responded “yes” and “even if not one on one,” according to Weiland’s statement, which also said Manafort confirmed the interactions in his own grand jury testimony.

Also Tuesday, Mueller reported to the court that Gates “continues to cooperate with respect to several ongoing investigations” and again asked for a delay in the former Trump deputy’s sentencing. The federal judge presiding over Gates’ case agreed to the special counsel’s request to circle back on March 15 with another status update.

Attorneys for Manafort are not directly challenging Mueller’s charges that their client lied during his cooperation with the special counsel. Instead, they maintain that all of his misstatements “were not intentional” and happened only because he wasn’t prepared for his meetings with the special counsel, which began days before he pleaded guilty and continued after his Sept. 14 plea hearing.

Last week, Manafort’s lawyers failed to properly redact some of the sealed materials in their own filings and revealed details about what their client was accused of lying about, including his sharing of Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik that has raised alarm among legal experts about possible collusion between Russia and the campaign.

Manafort is known to have had other contacts with Trump’s team after his ouster from the campaign, despite the scrutiny he drew for his work for Kremlin-connected politicians and businessmen in Eastern Europe — the same issues on which he’d later face charges in the Mueller probe.

POLITICO previously reported that Manafort called Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, about a week after the presidential inauguration with strategic advice about how to fight back against the controversy swirling around the new administration over its campaign contacts with Russia.

It’s also not the first time Manafort has been linked to discussions of trying to help people get jobs in a Trump administration.

During his trial last summer in Virginia on bank and tax fraud charges, Mueller’s prosecutors presented evidence that the Federal Savings Bank of Chicago agreed to lend Manafort $9.5 million following an unusual dinner in New York between Manafort and the bank CEO, Stephen Calk.

The bank’s senior vice president, Dennis Raico, testified with a grant of immunity from Mueller’s team that Calk had asked him to contact Manafort after the dinner to inquire about a possible senior role in Trump’s administration, including secretary of Treasury or the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

While a jury in Alexandria, Va., convicted Manafort on five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and a count of failing to file foreign bank account reports, the jury deadlocked on the count related to the Chicago bank loan.

Manafort is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 8 by U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis for his convictions stemming from the Northern Virginia trial. He also faces a March 5 sentencing in Washington for his separate guilty plea with Mueller on conspiracy against the U.S. and conspiracy to obstruct justice.