Paul Manafort Surrenders To The FBI While Investigations Into Trump Heat Up

Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is getting heated after CNN reported on Friday that he’d filed the first charges in the Russia probe and arrested would by made by Monday.

Turns out, The New York Times reported the first Trump associate to face indictment is his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Video was later found of Manafort surrending to the FBI, accompanied by his lawyer.

Manafort joined his former business associate Rick Gates on the indictment. The Times reports that Rock is a longtime protege of Paul’s whose “name appears on documents linked to companies that Mr. Manafort’s firm set up in Cyprus to receive payments from politicians and businesspeople in Eastern Europe.”

Paul was reportedly under investigation for violations of federal tax law, money laundering, and inappropriately reporting his foreign lobbying activity.

As Marie Claire reports, “Manafort departed the campaign in the late summer of 2016 amid reports a secret ledger had surfaced indicating he’d been earmarked for $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments by Ukraine’s former prime minister, Victor Yankuvich, who had close ties to the Kremlin. Manafort also attended an infamous meeting at Trump Tower, along with Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner, with a Kremlin-linked lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. The participants claim that lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, ultimately wanted to talk about Russian adoption policies, which were severely restricted by Vladimir Putin in retaliation to an American sanctions bill targeting Putin and his Russian oligarch allies called the Magnitsky Act. Putin and those allies want the Magnitsky Act repealed.”

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