Manafort’s noncooperation

The Special Counsel filed a 10-page memo yesterday supporting its determination that Paul Manafort has breached his cooperation agreement with the office. The heavily redacted document is posted below. The memo notes that the Special Counsel has supporting material to be filed under seal.

Manafort met with the prosecutors as well as the FBI on twelve occasions and testified twice to the grand jury. The Special Counsel asserts that Manafort has lied “in multiple ways on multiple occasions” about his continuing contacts with Trump administration officials and his interactions with Konstantin Kilimnik, among other things.

Kilimnik is not further described in the memo. He is said elsewhere to be a Russian-Ukrainian political consultant and suspected Russian intelligence operative. The New York Times story by Adam Goldman and Sharon LaFraniere on the memo states that Kilimnik is a Russian citizen now living in Moscow. Manafort’s interactions with Kilminik appear to be related to the 2016 campaign.

The redactions in this document make it difficult to say more about it. The Times asserts that the memo finds Manafort to have breached his obligation to cooperate on the subject of the Trump campaign’s conspiracy with the Kremlin’s operations (“They also claimed he misled investigators…whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin’s operations”). Manafort’s four areas of noncooperation (i.e., lying) are summarized at page 4 of the memo. I may be missing something, but I can’t find support for that specific assertion of the Times in the memo itself.

Man a Fort Sentencing by Scott Johnson on Scribd

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