Former Kyiv political consultant Rick Gates pled guilty to perjury and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government today, suggesting that he has struck a deal to cooperate with U.S. federal law enforcement against his former boss Paul Manafort.
Gates’s long-rumored plea comes one day after special prosecutor Robert Mueller, appointed to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, indicted Gates and Manafort on new charges of bank and real estate fraud.
The money that Gates and Manafort are accused of using to commit the frauds allegedly came from their time working as advisers to Ukraine’s Party of Régions until the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution that drove their former patron, President Viktor Yanukovych, from power. The pair is also accused of laundering money until 2017 of what was earned from their work for Opposition Bloc, the political party formed from the ashes of the Party of Regions.
The special counsel released a criminal information legal filing today, a kind of charging document used by federal prosecutors when a defendant has agreed to plead guilty.
The document allows Gates to admit to six counts of wrongdoing outlined in the October 2017 indictment against him and Manafort.
The pair stand accused of violating U.S. law to engineer a series of complex frauds to move more than $75 million earned in Ukraine into the United States, and of failing to register as foreign agents while lobbying on behalf of the government of exiled former President Viktor Yanukovych.
The charges to which Gates pleaded guilty are significantly lighter than those for which he was indicted. Prosecutors typically offer lighter charges – and, by extension, sentencing – in exchange for a defendant agreeing to testify as a witness against another target of law enforcement.
Manafort wasn’t pleased with the development.
“Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me,” Manafort said in a statement.
Gates is expected to a series of specific schemes outlined in the initial indictment, including an episode that saw him use an offshore to secretly wire $4 million to law firm Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom to pay for a report whitewashing the imprisonment of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a case widely seen as politically motivated.
An attorney who helped compile the report, Alex van der Zwaan, pleaded guilty to perjury earlier this week, over lying to federal law enforcement about his contacts with an associate of Manafort and Gates’s.
Gates is also expected to admit to helping Manafort launder millions of dollars into the U.S. through home renovations and expensive domestic purchases – cash earned through the pairs work on behalf of the Party of Regions.
The charging document also suggests that Gates plans to plead guilty to lying to the special counsel’s office as recently as Feb. 1, when he claimed that Manafort had denied Ukraine was discussed at a March 2013 lobbying meeting.
In fact, Gates helped Manafort with a Ukraine-related report as a direct result of the meeting, the charging document states.
