WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly lied to federal investigators in breach of a plea agreement he signed two months ago, the special counsel’s office said in a court filing late Monday.
Prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, said Manafort’s “crimes and lies’’ about “a variety of subject matters relieve them of all promises they made to him in the plea agreement. But under the terms of the agreement, Manafort cannot withdraw his guilty plea.
Defense lawyers disagreed that Manafort has violated the deal. In the same filing, they said that Manafort has met repeatedly with the special counsel’s office and “believes he has provided truthful information.’’
But given the impasse between the two sides, they asked Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to set a sentencing date for Manafort, who has been in solitary confinement in a detention center in Alexandria, Va., since June.
The dramatic development in the 11th hour of Manafort’s case is a fresh sign of the prosecutors’ aggressive approach in investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race and whether anyone in the Trump campaign knew about or assisted Moscow’s effort.
Manafort had hoped that, in agreeing to cooperate with Mueller’s team, prosecutors would argue that he deserved a lighter punishment. He is expected to face at least a decade-long prison term for 10 felony counts ranging from financial fraud to conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Instead, after at least a dozen sessions with him, federal prosecutors have not only decided Manafort does not deserve leniency, but also could seek to refile other charges that they had agreed to dismiss as part of the plea deal.
The prosecutors did not describe what Manafort lied about, saying they would set forth “the nature of the defendant’s crimes and lies’’ in an upcoming sentencing memo.
A jury in Northern Virginia convicted Manafort, 69, of eight counts of financial fraud in August stemming from his work as a political consultant in Ukraine. The jury deadlocked on 10 other charges.
Faced with a second trial in the District of Columbia on related charges in September, he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts and to an open-ended arrangement requiring him to answer “fully, truthfully, completely and forthrightly’’ questions about “any and all matters’’ of interest to the government.
It was unclear at that time how much information Manafort had to offer prosecutors. Legal experts suggested that if he was able to significantly further Mueller’s inquiry, he could have negotiated a more favorable deal.
As it is, the plea agreement specifies that if prosecutors decide that Manafort has failed to cooperate fully or “given false, misleading or incomplete information or testimony,’’ they can prosecute him for crimes to which he did not plead guilty in the District of Columbia. They could also conceivably pursue the 10 charges on which the Virginia jury failed to reach a consensus.
