In court filings Friday, attorneys for Rick Gates indicated that they had not come to a bail deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, but were seeking a federal judge’s approval anyway to be released from home confinement.
In bail package proposal offered to the judge, Gates is putting up $5.8 million in assets, according to his lawyers. The court documents contained many redactions obscuring the financial details of the proposed bail package and the identities of the two people serving as Gates’ bail guarantors.
The judge overseeing his case, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, had previously signaled that Gates would need to put up at least $5 million in assets before she would release him from home confinement. Gates has been under house arrest since Oct. 30, when he turned himself into the FBI on charges of tax evasion, money laundering, and failure to disclose foreign lobbying. Gates has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which are being brought as part of Mueller’s Russia probe.
Gates attorneys are seeking for Gates to be allowed to travel from Richmond, where he lives, to Washington, D.C. and New York. They cited the numerous occasions Gates had been granted permission to leave house arrest to attend family events to argue that he “can be relied on to leave home confinement without making any attempts to flee.”
Gates has faced a number of obstacles in securing release from home arrest — including concerns raised by prosecutors about his connections to a defendant in a New York-based film fraud case, with whom Gates also shares an attorney.
Earlier Friday, the judge signaled she was ready to grant Paul Manafort — Gates’ business partner who joined him on the Mueller indictment — release from home confinement.
Read the full Gates filing below:
