them and trying to work this out so manafort can stop lying, so he can clean up what he s been lying to them about. but according to prosecutors, quote, in none of the communications with manafort s counsel was any factual or legal argument made as to why the government s assessment of manafort s credibility was erroneous or made without good faith. okay. so what this is this is mueller s office, the special counsel s office saying paul manafort keeps lying to us. we ve got him before the grand jury. we can t have a lying witness before the grand jury. we confronted him. we confronted his defense counsel with the fact that he s been lying. they were not able to talk us out of that determination or fix it in any way, so now, judge, we are ready to tell you, we are ready to prove it in court if you need us to, we are ready to maintain to you that he has been lying to us about five different things. and this is the part of this ten-page filing about manafort where you end up seeing some o
special counsel with useful information concerning certain discrete russia related matters core to his investigation that he obtained by virtue of his regular contact with trump organization executives during the campaign. so we don t know what this is, but cohen gave the special counsel useful information about certain discrete russia-related matters core to mueller s investigation. he obtained this information because of his contact with people who worked a the trump organization. so presumably, that means the president. that could also mean anybody else who was involved both in the campaign and the trump organization who had anything to do with russia. we do know that the president s eldest son don jr. did go to the trump tower meeting with russian lawyers promising dirt on hillary clinton. the special counsel also says that cohen provided relevant and useful information regarding his contacts with persons connected to the white house during 2017 and 2018. so apparently cohen s help
the redactions here. it starts to look like this. but even with the redactions, you can still get the basics of this sort of five-part list of things that they say they re lying about. mueller s office says manafort lied to them about his interactions with konstantin kilimnik. remember that name? kilimnik was sort of manafort s right-hand man in his business in ukraine, and prosecutors have already said in other court filings that they believe konstantin kilimnik is associated with the interactions. lying about the fact and frequency of what appear to be his interaction was kilimnik. but again, there are a whole bunch of redactions there. then there is an intriguing subheading in this part of the filing where mueller s office also said manafort lied about his knowledge of what appears to be somebody else meeting with kilimnik. see that line there next to the bullet point? redacted, redacted, recontacted the, meeting with kilimnik that name is blacked out. there is open source reporting
bullpucky, and then he tried to change it back to original bullpucky story number one, because he hadn t been able to keep straight the first set of lies in what that had been. so this is the part of manafort s filing, which suggests that, yeah, prosecutors maybe had good reason to feel not at all comfortable with him providing anything that was supposed to be factual information about anyone. he is lying about his lying. but the final point in this manafort filing today is perhaps more serious for people other than paul manafort. and that s because mueller s team says manafort has been lying to them about his communications with people in the trump administration. quote, the evidence demonstrates that manafort lied about his contacts. what the prosecutors are saying here is that manafort tried to downplay the fact of his ongoing communications with people in the trump administration. in at least one instance, he tried to secretly communicate with a member of the administration by auth
from mueller and from how cohen s about how cohen s case fits into the overall scandal. so remember here what happened is that cohen initially plead guilty to eight felonies in federal district court in new york. that was a deal he worked out with prosecutors in the southern district of new york. we know from today s other filing in the cohen case that they ended up subsequently not that happy with the cooperation they got from him as a witness, and they think that the judge should put him in jail for a long time. thereafter, cohen plead guilty to another explain based on his work with prosecutors from the special counsel s office. they got him to plead guilty to lying to congress about the trump tower moscow project. and so essentially what they re saying here is yes we got him to plead guilty to an additional felony, but we don t think that that should give him any additional jail time. so this is from the filing. quote, special counsel s office provides this memorandum in connecti