Rick Gates, Trump Campaign Aide, to Plead Guilty in Mueller Inquiry and Cooperate
www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/us/politics/rick-gates-guilty-plea-mueller-investigation.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
WASHINGTON — A former top adviser to Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign indicted by the special counsel was expected to plead guilty as soon as Friday afternoon, according to two people familiar with his plea agreement, a move that signals he is cooperating with the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
The adviser, Rick Gates, is a longtime political consultant who once served as Mr. Trump’s deputy campaign chairman. The plea deal could be a significant development in the investigation — a sign that Mr. Gates plans to offer incriminating information against his longtime associate and the former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, or other members of the Trump campaign in exchange for a lighter punishment.
The deal comes as the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has been raising pressure on Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort with dozens of new charges of money laundering and bank fraud that were unsealed on Thursday. Mr. Mueller first indicted both men in October, and both pleaded not guilty.
Mr. Gates’s primary concern has been protecting his family, both emotionally and financially, from the prospect of a drawn-out trial, according to a person familiar with his defense strategy who was not authorized to publicly discuss the case and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
If Mr. Manafort continues to fight the charges in a trial, testimony from Mr. Gates could give Mr. Mueller’s team a first-person account of the criminal conduct that is claimed in the indictments — a potential blow to Mr. Manafort’s defense strategy.
It was unclear exactly what Mr. Gates might have to offer the special counsel’s team, whether about Mr. Manafort or about other members of the Trump campaign. Neither indictment indicated that either Mr. Gates or Mr. Manafort had information about the central question of Mr. Mueller’s investigation — whether President Trump or his aides coordinated with the Russian government’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election.
But Mr. Gates was present for the most significant periods of activity of the campaign, as Mr. Trump began developing policy positions and his digital operation engaged with millions of voters on platforms such as Facebook. Even after Mr. Manafort was fired by Mr. Trump in August 2016, Mr. Gates remained on in a different role, as a liaison between the campaign and the Republican National Committee. He traveled aboard the Trump plane through Election Day.
The indictments detailed a wide-ranging scheme by Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort to hide from American authorities millions of dollars they had earned as political consultants in Ukraine. The men worked in various capacities with Viktor F. Yanukovych, the onetime Ukrainian president and a longtime ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Mr. Mueller’s team found that more than $75 million passed through offshore accounts, and that Mr. Manafort laundered more than $30 million to pay for real estate and luxury goods in the United States. Mr. Gates transferred more than $3 million from the offshore accounts, court documents show.
After their work was disclosed in news reports in August 2016, when the two men were working for the Trump campaign, they “developed a false and misleading cover story” to distance themselves from Ukraine, according Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors.
The court papers unsealed Thursday describe an intricate scheme by Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates, trying to shield tens of millions of dollars from the American tax authorities by transferring the funds through foreign bank accounts, including in Cyprus and the Seychelles.
“Manafort and Gates hid the existence and ownership of the foreign companies and bank accounts, falsely and repeatedly reporting to their tax preparers and to the United States that they had no foreign bank accounts,” the new indictment said.
The work the two men did for their firm, Davis Manafort, connected them to numerous people with ties to the Kremlin. One was Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate and an ally of Mr. Putin. Mr. Deripaska has been denied a visa to travel to the United States because of allegations that he is linked to organized crime operations, claims he has denied.
In 2008, Mr. Gates took over the firm’s duties in Eastern Europe, where he worked on business development and contract negotiations.
Besides the charges against Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates, the special counsel’s team has secured guilty pleas from two of Mr. Trump’s advisers. Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, and George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide during the campaign, have both pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and agreed to cooperate with the inquiry.