Special Counsel Robert Mueller obtained a search warrant for phone records linked to Paul Manafort last month, a filing in one of Mueller’s criminal criminal cases against Manafort revealed Thursday.
The warrant, for a “Search Of Information Associated With Five Telephone Numbers Controlled By AT&T,” was obtained by Muller on March 9. He turned over to Manafort a redacted version of the warrant affidavit on Wednesday, according to the court document, which was filed by Mueller.
The filing was part of a back-and-forth over Manafort’s request that Mueller turn over unredacted versions of affidavits used to obtain search warrants. Some of the warrants in question have been unredacted, according to Thursday’s filing, but four remain redacted either because the redacted information pertains to an informant, or because the information is related to “ongoing investigations that are not the subject of the current prosecutions involving Manafort.”
Manafort faces charges of bank fraud, tax fraud, money laundering and failure to disclose foreign lobbying in indictments filed by Mueller in Washington, D.C., and Virginia. The former Trump campaign chairman has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
His longtime business partner Rick Gates, who also worked on the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty in February to a narrower set of charges and now is cooperating with Mueller’s probe.
Manafort’s attorneys have sought to attack Mueller’s investigation by arguing the charges brought so far have focused on his consulting work in Ukraine, which pre-dated the 2016 campaign, and thus are beyond the scope of the investigation Mueller was appointed to lead.
The federal judge overseeing the D.C. criminal case, as well as a civil lawsuit brought against the Justice Department by Manafort, so far hasn’t appeared sympathetic to that argument.
On Monday evening, in a seperate filing, Mueller revealed that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — who is overseeing the investigation because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself — wrote a letter in early August specifically authorizing Mueller to probe both Manafort’s Ukraine work, as well as allegations of crimes committed by “colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States.”
Mueller has not yet brought charges directly linked to the collusion aspect of his investigation into Manafort. It’s not clear if the March search warrant falls under that line of inquiry, or has to do with other targets of Mueller’s investigation.
In addition to the phone warrant, Mueller’s filing Tuesday laid out six other warrant affidavits that have been turned over to Manafort in redacted or unredacted form. The other redacted warrants include searches of premises and of a storage locker in Alexandria, Virginia, as well as a search of one of Manafort’s email accounts.
Read Thursday’s filing below:
