In a tiny font at the top of the 82nd page of a lengthy document filed in court this week by special counsel Robert Mueller is a key clue to his ongoing interest in Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman.
The four words of unredacted text suggest that in February 2018 — four months after Manafort first was charged with crimes related to his work as a consultant in Ukraine — he still appears to have been working on a peace initiative for Ukraine, a topic of intense interest to Russia.
And it suggests he was doing so in concert with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian employee of his consulting firm who is alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence.
The potentially inadvertent revelation comes as Manafort and Mueller’s legal team have been battling in court over whether Manafort lied to prosecutors after he pleaded guilty in September to conspiring against the United States with his Ukraine work and agreed to cooperate with the probe.
Mueller’s team on Tuesday filed a 32-page declaration — along with dozens of heavily redacted exhibits — intended to provide evidence of Manafort’s lies to a judge.
Nearly half of the filing is devoted to Manafort’s interactions with Kilimnik, including a section related to their communications in 2018, a sign of Mueller’s ongoing interest in what Manafort discussed with his younger Russian employee.
According to court documents, the FBI has assessed that Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence as recently as 2016. In a 2017 statement to The Post, Kilimnik denied any connection to intelligence services.
Manafort’s attorneys first revealed prosecutors’ interest in Manafort’s work in a Ukraine peace plan in a filing last week. They had intended to file the information under seal but it became public because of a formatting error. That filing showed that investigators had asked Manafort about “one or more” conversations he had with Kilimnik about a Ukraine peace plan, as well as polling data Manafort passed to Kilimnik while working for Trump.
Based on their description in the filing, Manafort appeared to have discussed both topics with Kilimnik in 2016 while he was serving as Trump’s campaign chairman.
But a tiny detail in the heavily redacted declaration filed by prosecutors on Monday indicates that Manafort was working on a possible Ukrainian plan as late as 2018.
In February last year, Manafort emailed to two unnamed people a Microsoft Word document related to a topic that prosecutors wrote that Manafort “had not mentioned … during any of his twelve interviews” with investigators this fall after he agreed to cooperate.
To demonstrate that Manafort was personally involved in the writing of the document, prosecutors explained that metadata associated with the document showed that it had been altered by Manafort. To prove the point, they attached a picture of the metadata as an exhibit.
They redacted a number of details on that exhibit, but at the top of the page, in text that was perhaps inadvertently left visible, was the title of the document: “New initiative for Peace.”
Spokesmen for Mueller and Manafort declined to comment.