WASHINGTON -- The office of special counsel Robert Mueller said Friday that it is weighing additional charges against Paul Manafort after accusing President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman of lying to investigators and breaking his plea agreement.
Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson at a hearing in Washington, D.C., that the special counsel's office has not yet decided exactly how to handle what it said was a breach of Manafort's plea agreement. He said Mueller's office was weighing options that might increase the sentence Manafort will ultimately receive.
"With respect to whether there will be additional charges, we have not made that determination yet," Weissmann said.
What precisely Manafort is accused of lying about remains unclear. Jackson directed the government to file by Dec. 7 a document backing up its assertion.
Friday's hearing was the first in Manafort's case since special counsel prosecutors accused him Monday of repeatedly lying to investigators and breaking his plea agreement. Manafort, 69, denied being intentionally untruthful. In a joint filing late Monday, defense attorneys and prosecutors both asked the judge to immediately set a sentencing date.
Manafort's plea in the Washington, D.C., case would cap his sentence at 10 years in prison, though that could come in addition to his punishment for separate convictions in Virginia on tax- and bank-fraud charges. The charges there carry a possible maximum penalty of 85 years, though federal sentencing guidelines would probably call for a term somewhere between seven and 10 years, legal analysts have said.
Prosecutors said they would have to consider whether charging Manafort with additional crimes is worthwhile, given that he already faces more than a decade behind bars and they could note his alleged lies during the sentencing process.
Kevin Downing, Manafort's defense attorney, told Jackson that there were "a lot of unknowns for us, but we do think it's going to take some time to respond to whatever it is they're going to file with respect to the breach agreement." Jackson set a tentative sentencing date of March 5 to permit probation officials to begin preparing a pre-sentencing report.
Manafort will have time to respond to the government's filing, Jackson said, and she will set a hearing date over any disputes early next year, if necessary. The judge will ultimately decide whether Manafort breached the agreement.
The lawyers did not discuss the substance of prosecutors' allegations against Manafort, and there was some dispute over how much Manafort's team had been told. Early in the hearing, Downing said he was not sure how long it would take to respond to prosecutors' allegations, "not knowing the details of what constitutes the breach." Weissmann said they had "lengthy discussions" on the issue.
Outside the courthouse, Downing again claimed Manafort's team did not know the details of what Manafort was accused of lying about. "We look forward to litigating this in court," he said. He did not respond when asked why Weissmann said they had discussed the facts of the dispute before this week's filing.
Manafort, who is jailed in Alexandria, Va., waived his right to appear in court and was not there Friday.
Under a plea agreement in September, Manafort pledged to tell the government about "his participation in and knowledge of all criminal activities" in exchange for prosecutors' recommendation of leniency after he admitted cheating the Internal Revenue Service, violating foreign-lobbying laws and attempting to obstruct justice.
In the joint filing this week, prosecutors alleged Manafort breached his agreement, committing "federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel's Office on a variety of subject matters" in their investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. They did not elaborate but said they would detail "the nature of the defendant's crimes and lies" in a future sentencing document. They added that Manafort's actions relieved the government of any obligation to seek less prison time.
Manafort denied lying or violating the deal.
Given their deadlock, the two sides jointly asked Jackson to set the sentencing date and schedule any other motions, which led to Friday's hearing.
The plea agreement states that if prosecutors show in good faith that Manafort breached its terms, he cannot seek to withdraw his guilty plea.
The agreement also states that if Manafort violated the deal, he could face prosecution for crimes to which he did not plead guilty, and all his statements could be used against him by other parties, including state prosecutors, in criminal or civil proceedings.
If Manafort were found to have broken the deal, he would lose any sentencing credits for acceptance of responsibility, prosecutors said.
Evidence of other crimes could also subject Manafort to an increase in his sentence for the convictions in Virginia. His sentencing in that case is set for Feb. 8 before U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III.
Manafort joined Trump's campaign in March 2016 and served as its chairman into August, making him a top campaign official present during discussions of events at the heart of Mueller's inquiry to determine whether any Americans conspired with Russia's efforts to influence the election.
The terms of Manafort's cooperation were laid out in a 17-page agreement entered Sept. 14 in Washington when he pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States by hiding years of income and undisclosed lobbying work for a pro-Russia political party and politician in Ukraine. He also pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice by attempting to tamper with witnesses in the case.
TRUMP'S ASSOCIATES
None of the recent moves by Mueller definitively answered the question of whether Trump or his associates coordinated with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. And they don't directly accuse the president of any criminal wrongdoing or indicate that the president faces legal jeopardy.
But Trump has surfaced in Mueller's investigation, with references to him in a draft plea offer extended to conservative writer and conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and made public this week. Corsi rejected the plea deal.
Trump has expressed sympathy for Manafort, Corsi and longtime confidant Roger Stone, telling The New York Post this week that they were "very brave" for resisting the Mueller investigation.
Corsi has said he expects to be charged by Mueller with lying to investigators as part of the investigation's scrutiny of WikiLeaks and whether he or Stone had advance knowledge of the group's release of thousands of hacked emails stolen from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. Mueller's office and U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia was the source of the material provided to WikiLeaks.
Both Corsi and Stone have denied having any contact with WikiLeaks or having any foreknowledge of its plans. Corsi also denies making false statements to investigators.
Trump has also been playing down the significance of the guilty plea of his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, for lying to Congress.
Cohen admitted in court on Thursday that he had lied about the extent of the Trump Organization's pursuit of an agreement to build a tower in Moscow. Cohen said that, to help Trump politically, he had falsely testified that the Russia efforts had been dropped by January 2016, when they had in fact continued until June. By that point, Trump had clinched the Republican presidential nomination.
Speaking to reporters Thursday as he left Washington for an economic summit in Buenos Aires, Trump said Cohen was weak and had lied to prosecutors so he could get a reduced sentence for other crimes to which he has pleaded guilty.
In a tweet early Friday, Trump defended his decision to continue pursuing business deals as he ran for president in 2016.
"Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail," Trump wrote. "Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn't do the project. Witch Hunt!"
The tweets echoed what one of Trump's personal lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, said a day earlier about the prospective Russia deal. Giuliani said Trump's written answers to questions posed by Mueller were consistent with what Cohen said in court Thursday.
"The president said there was a proposal, it was discussed with Cohen, there was a nonbinding letter of intent and it didn't go beyond that," Giuliani said Thursday.
The president's answers, submitted to the special counsel last month, have not been made public.
Giuliani also called Cohen a liar. "He has so many different versions of the same stories, so by definition he is a liar and we can't trust him," Giuliani said. "Given the fact that he's a liar, I can't tell you what he's lying about."
Information for this article was contributed by Spencer S. Hsu, Rachel Weiner, Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post; by Chad Day, Eric Tucker and Michael Balsamo of The Associated Press; and by Eileen Sullivan of The New York Times.
A Section on 12/01/2018