Mueller hits Manafort, Gates with new federal indictment

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Paul Manafort and Richard Gates arrive at the Prettyman Federal Courthouse for a bail hearing November 6, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office on Thursday disclosed a new set of criminal charges filed against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates.

The 32-count indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in Virginia contains 20 more criminal charges against Manafort, 68, and Gates, 45, who also had been a top Trump campaign official, than did the original indictment lodged against them last fall.

The charges filed Thursday include:

• 16 counts related to false individual income tax returns

• seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts

• five counts of bank fraud conspiracy

• four counts of bank fraud

As in the first indictment, the new charges stem from lobbying and consulting work that Manafort and Gates did on behalf of the government of Ukraine and its then-president Victory Yanukovych.

As part of the new indictment, prosecutors claim that after Manafort and Gates saw their income dwindle from 2015 to at least January 2017 as a result of the loss of Yanukovych as a client, they “extracted money” from Manafort’s U.S. real estate by using that property to obtain loans from multiple financial institutions.

“Manafort and Gates fraudulently secured more than twenty million dollars in loans by falsely inflating Manafort’s and his company’s income and by failing to disclose existing debt in order to qualify for the loans.