By Tierney Sneed | February 22, 2018 4:31 pm
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has announced a new indictment against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former campaign aide Rick Gates.
In a court document filed in the case Mueller previously brought against Manafort and Gates in Washington D.C., prosecutors indicated that a 32-count indictment had been filed against two men in the Eastern District of Virginia, with a copy of thenew indictment attached.
The new charges include making false statement on tax returns, failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts, and bank fraud.
The indictment alleges that Gates and Manafort avoided paying taxes on money they earned lobbying in Ukraine by funneling it through real estate, contractors and in other payments, and even disguising it as loans. Later on, when their Ukraine project dried up — because their client, Victor Yanukovych had fled to Russia — Manafort, with help from Gates, used his real estate properties, as well as falsified income statement to extract more money through loans, the indictment alleged. In seeking some of those loans, some as recent as in 2017, Manafort allegedly misled bankers through falsified documents and other means to pump up the loans, according to the indictment.
“Manafort and Gates fraudulently secured more than twenty million dollars in loans by falsely inflating Manafort’s and his company’s income and by failing to disclose existing debt in order to qualify for the loans,” the indictment said.
Their scheme allegedly involved the use of offshore accounts, and included misleading their tax preparers, the indictment said. It alleged that more $75 million flowed through the offshore accounts and that $30 million was laundered by Manafort with assistance from Gates.
Not long after the new indictment dropped, the Daily Beast reported that Gates had fired Tom Green, an attorney who was believed to be working on a plea deal with Mueller. About an hour later, however, a document was filed in Gates’ case officially adding Green to his representation. Green then filed a motion on Gates’ behalf saying that Gates did not opposed his old legal team’s move to withdraw from the case. The judge then approved of the old team withdrawing.
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