Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement by lying to investigators, prosecutors said Monday, as another former aide began serving a jail sentence for making false statements to the FBI.
Manafort had agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia as part of a plea deal in September.
“After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement,” prosecutors said in a court filing.
“A breach relieves the government of any obligations it has under the agreement.” In the same joint status report filing, Manafort’s legal team pushed back against the government’s assertion.
“Manafort has provided information to the government in an effort to live up to his cooperation obligations,” it said.
“He believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement.”
Manafort, who worked for the Trump campaign for nearly six months in the middle of 2016, agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and another count of obstruction of justice in a deal to avert a second trial on money laundering and illegal lobbying charges.
He was already convicted in a separate jury trial on eight counts related to financial fraud in August, but those charges, as well as the counts covered in the plea deal, were unrelated to the campaign.
Instead, they derived from his work for former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Moscow political party between about 2005-14.
As prosecutors accused Manafort of lying, George Papadopoulos — the former Trump campaign aide whose Russia contacts set off the collusion investigation -- entered a minimum security unit to start serving out his two-week jail sentence at the Oxford, Wisconsin federal prison.
Papadopoulos was an obscure oil industry analyst when he joined the Trump campaign’s foreign policy advisory team in March 2016.Based in London, he made contacts with what he believed were important