Robert Mueller’s team did not name the individuals they said Paul Manafort sought to influence, but they said both people rejected his outreach. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Mueller probe appears to link Manafort, European PR firm

Individuals connected to a now-defunct European public affairs firm appear to have been the targets of what prosecutors contend was a witness-tampering effort by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's office alleged in a court filing Monday night that Manafort reached out earlier this year in an improper effort to influence the testimony of two unnamed individuals he worked with between 2011 and 2014 on a public relations campaign aimed at burnishing the image of Ukraine's government and then-President Viktor Yanukovych.


The name of the company involved and some other facts were deleted from a contract Mueller’s team submitted describing the pro-Ukraine work. But some potentially identifying details were left visible in the public filing.

The contract says that, in addition to working with reporters on news stories and interacting with Ukrainian blogs, the company could ensure “guaranteed TV reports” from a program called "World Business."

"World Business," a series of half-hour features that aired on CNBC in Europe, was produced at the time by the public relations company FBC Media. It was canceled after reports that FBC was working for governments with checkered human-rights records at the same time that it produced TV segments related to those governments.

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A person familiar with the media company told POLITICO the document filed by prosecutors matched other contracts drafted by FBC and its successor firms.

The Guardian newspaper reported in April that FBC worked with Manafort on a paid campaign to try to generate positive media coverage about Yanukovych and to amplify negative stories about his most prominent opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko. The person familiar with the business told POLITICO that two FBC principals led the work with Manafort: the firm's founder, longtime journalist Alan Friedman, and former CNN business news producer Eckart Sager.

Mueller’s team did not name the individuals they said Manafort sought to influence, but they said both people rejected his outreach.

Manafort said through a spokesman Tuesday that he is innocent of all the charges against him and will respond to the prosecutors' latest allegations in court. A judge has demanded an explanation by Friday. Manafort’s spokesman declined to comment on whether FBC was the company cited in Mueller’s documents.

Friedman and Sager did not respond to multiple email and phone messages seeking comment, nor did a law firm that previously represented FBC, which went into liquidation in 2012. A spokesman for Mueller declined to comment.



Friedman, a former columnist for the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal and a former editor for the International Herald Tribune, told the Guardian his work with Manafort was standard business. "It was not a secret or covert plan. We had PR people proposing interviews and features to newspapers very openly," he told the newspaper.

Friedman also said his work didn't require registering in the U.S. "I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one," he told the newspaper. “I was a communications guy, doing PR media strategy work in Europe for a client, like dozens of London PR companies that work for a variety of governments.”

Prosecutors labeled one of the two individuals Manafort allegedly contacted as "Person D1," identifying him as the key person involved in framing the PR company's work. The other person, "D2," is described as "a longtime partner of Person D1."

Mueller’s team says the entreaties by Manafort and a longtime associate appeared aimed at urging the pair to back his contention that their work was focused on Europe, not the U.S. But prosecutors said one of the unnamed people accompanied a former Italian prime minister who held meetings in Washington as part of the pro-Yanukovych campaign; the filings said the two also met Manafort at the Willard Hotel for drinks one evening after meeting with members of Congress.

"Person D1 stated that after answering the call and after the caller identified himself as Manafort, Manafort stated that he wanted to give Person D1 a heads-up…Person D1 immediately ended the call because he was concerned about the outreach," FBI agent Brock Domin said in a written declaration filed with the court. Person D1 said he saw the outreach as an effort to "suborn perjury," the agent said.

Person D2 didn't even open the messages he got from a longtime Manafort associate, out of fear that person would know the messages were received, Domin added.

The contract released by Mueller’s team showed similarities to FBC’s work. The document shows that the unnamed company promised “guaranteed” distribution of programs related to Ukraine as in-flight entertainment on a series of airlines, which are listed in the contract. The list is similar to a group of airlines on which FBC had previously promised to place programs as part of an unrelated contract, which was published online in 2013 by Sarawak Report, an environmental blog.

An email between company officials, included in Mueller’s filings and dated July 21, 2011, describes it as “urgent” that the Ukraine contract be finalized, repeating the word multiple times. The message suggests the PR firm would receive a bank wire for several hundred thousand Euros within an hour if the contract was promptly signed.

Friedman told the Guardian that his work with Manafort began in late summer 2011.

Around that time, FBC was hit by a firestorm that would destroy the 15-year-old company.

In August 2011, the Sarawak Report blog reported that FBC Media was on the payroll of the Malaysian government while producing TV segments and documentaries about the country that aired on CNBC, CNN and the BBC. The report triggered investigations and led the news outlets to suspend their relationships with FBC.

FBC officials said through their attorneys that the company's journalistic products and its work for government and corporate clients "are and always have been quite separate and distinct," The Independent reported at the time.

The negative publicity ultimately forced FBC, which stands for Fact-Based Communications, into bankruptcy. Friedman's career also took a hit, with the Atlantic launching an inquiry into blog posts he wrote for the publication.

Some of those involved with FBC later continued similar work through new companies, according to the person familiar with the business. At various times, FBC also involved affiliates and subsidiaries in different countries, records show.

Friedman has continued to write columns for Italian newspapers and to provide TV commentary. He is fluent in Italian and has lived in Italy for years. He's also close to various Italian politicians and spent 18 months shadowing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for a biography published in 2015.

In July 2016, Friedman scored an interview in Texas with then-candidate Donald Trump. The sit-down aboard the plane known as "Trump Force One" came during the several months that Trump's campaign was being managed by Manafort, Friedman's former colleague on the Ukraine work.

Friedman now appears to be a critic of Trump, lamenting the president's impact on U.S. society and decrying his judicial picks.

"Even more alarming to me is the way our culture is being changed—the basic decency.....There is a resistance. There are at least half of the Americans, maybe more, who don't want to see this destruction of basic American values," he said during a recent appearance at a TEDx event in Oxford, England.

At the same conference, Friedman also offered words of praise for Mueller, saluting "his valiant attempt to bring people to justice."