Róbert Mueller’s Moves Signal Broad Scope

Guilty plea shows special prosecutor has the ability to flip people

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort leaves federal court Monday in Washington.

anager Paul Manafort and his associate Richard Gates surprised some experts, who had been following the investigation of Mr. Manafort in the media.

“There’s a ton that we don’t know,” said Paul Fishman, who was U.S. attorney in New Jersey from 2009 until this year.

Prosecutors alleged Mr. Manafort laundered $18 million he received for political consulting work for Ukrainian politicians to avoid reporting it to U.S. tax authorities. He spent more than $12 million in untaxed income on home improvements, antique rugs, luxury clothing, cars and landscaping from 2008 to 2014, according to the indictment.

The guilty plea by George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign-policy adviser to President Donald Trump during the campaign, may prove to be more significant than the indictment against Messrs. Manafort and Gates, revealing that Mr. Papadopoulos had been cooperating with federal authorities for months.

The unsealing of the Papadopoulos case shows that Mr. Mueller “has the ability to flip people without word leaking out,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine. “This can promote further cooperation with his probe,” he said.

The one-two timing of the indictment and the guilty plea quickly became a point of intrigue among legal experts.

Some suspected that Mr. Mueller didn’t want the first public move in the investigation to be completely disconnected from Mr. Trump’s campaign. So, they believe, he chose to unseal simultaneously the Papadopoulos plea, which is closer to the heart of his mandate to investigate potential collusion between Russia and Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

Russian officials have denied meddling in last year’s election, and Mr. Trump has denied any collusion by him or his associates with Moscow.

The charges against Messrs. Manafort and Gates gave heft to Mr. Mueller’s probe, alleging a massive tax-fraud case against the two men, said Solomon Wisenberg, a longtime white-collar defense lawyer in Washington. But “nothing on the face of it relates to Russian interference in the 2016 election,” he said.

Prosecutors allege that Messrs. Manafort and Gates, in their work for Ukraine, conspired to evade reporting requirements for lobbyists who represent foreign powers, and to avoid paying U.S. taxes on their profits through the use of shell companies. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

Hours after the indictment became public, a federal judge in Washington, at the request of Mr. Mueller’s team, unsealed a plea agreement that spoke directly to long-simmering allegations of collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia.

In the plea agreement, Mr. Papadopolous admitted that he lied to federal agents about his contacts with a Kremlin-connected academic who told him the Russians had “dirt” on 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Mueller has taken heat from Trump allies in recent months for, among other things, casting too wide a net in his investigation.

But Monday’s revelations revealed that the probe “didn’t start with Bob Mueller, ” said Mr. Fishman. The financial records necessary to weave together the charges against Messrs. Manafort and Gates and the complexity of other evidence show Mr. Manafort had been under investigation long before Mr. Mueller inherited the probe, he said.

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