Richard Gates has long been the man beside Paul Manafort.
That held true Monday when the former business partners surrendered to the FBI as the first to be indicted by the Department of Justice on charges related to foreign interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Gates, 45, served as deputy chair of the Trump campaign and Manafort's right-hand man for day-to-day operations for part of the election cycle. After Manafort left the campaign, Gates remained on as liaison to the Republican National Committee and was later hired by Trump's longtime friend, Tom Barrack, to help with the inauguration, according to New York Magazine.
Gates, along with Manafort, was charged with conspiracy against the United States in an indictment unsealed Monday. Gates was also separately charged with failure to disclose accurate information to government agencies.
Barrack's Colony NorthStar ended its consulting agreement with Gates on Monday following reports of the indictment, a spokesman confirmed to CNBC.
The indictment by the Department of Justice — originally filed Friday — outlines Gates' ties to a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. His work with Ukraine ended in 2015, before he started with the Trump campaign. In 2017, Gates retroactively registered some of that service under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but allegedly falsified information in doing so, according to the indictment.
Gates was charged with operating as an agent of Ukraine for at least nine years, ending in 2015, and laundering "tens of millions of dollars in income" during and after that time, according to the indictment.
Gates maintained a direct relationship with former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the government of Ukraine, at times explicitly purporting to represent the government of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., without properly registering those activities with the U.S. government, the indictment charges.
Gates and Manafort continued to "defraud" the U.S. government after the election and into 2017 through money laundering and tax evasion, according to the indictment.
"Everything was done legally and with the approval of our lawyers," Gates told The New York Times in June. "Nothing to my knowledge was ever done inappropriately."
Before heading up the Trump campaign, Gates and Manafort worked side by side at Manafort's consulting firm, Davis Manafort Partners, according to the indictment. The two men first met more than 30 years earlier when Gates was an intern at a separate consulting firm — Black, Manafort, Stone, Kelly — according to the Times and New York Magazine.
Gates was reportedly not particularly close with, or even well-liked, by Trump. New York Magazine reports Trump often confused Gates with a different "Rick," for example, and yet he maintained ties to the Trump campaign and administration after Manafort was excused.
Manafort left the campaign in August 2016 after it was revealed he had accepted payments from Yanukovych. The speculation of influence from Eastern Europe didn't catch up to Manafort's protege until earlier this year, though, when Gates was removed from a post at the pro-Trump advocacy group "America First Policies," New York Magazine reports.
A spokesman for Gates could not immediately be located.
WATCH: Manafort & Rick Gates indicted
