Special counsel Robert Mueller's office on Thursday disclosed a new set of criminal charges — including tax and bank fraud counts — filed against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his business associate Rick Gates.
The 32-count indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in Virginia contains 25 brand new criminal charges against Manafort, 68, and Gates, 45, who also had been a top Trump campaign official.
Seven of the charges in the new indictment replicate counts that were already pending in the earlier indictment lodged against both men in Washington federal court last October.
The charges stem from alleged conduct that does not relate to work that Manafort and Gates performed for the Trump campaign. However, some of their alleged crimes occurred while they were working for Trump and afterward.
A spokesman insisted that Manafort is innocent of the charges. "The new allegations against Mr. Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion," the spokesman said. "Mr. Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied."
Manafort is now accused of laundering $30 million worth of money through offshore accounts, up from the original allegation which accused him of laundering $18 million. Gates is still accused of launder the same amount as in the original indictment, $3 million.
Mueller's office in a court filing said they obtained the indictment in Virginia because a number of the charges could not have been lodged in Washington without the defendants' approval.
The charges filed Thursday include:
• 16 counts related to false individual income tax returns
• seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts
• five counts of bank fraud conspiracy
• four counts of bank fraud
As in the first indictment, the new charges stem from lobbying and consulting work that Manafort and Gates did on behalf of the government of Ukraine and its then-president Viktor Yanukovych.
As part of the new indictment, prosecutors claim that after Manafort and Gates saw their income dwindle from 2015 to at least January 2017 as a result of the loss of Yanukovych as a client, they "extracted money" from Manafort's U.S. real estate by using that property to obtain loans from multiple financial institutions.
"Manafort and Gates fraudulently secured more than twenty million dollars in loans by falsely inflating Manafort's and his company's income and by failing to disclose existing debt in order to qualify for the loans," the indictment says.
Mueller's office declined to comment. A lawyer for Gates did not immediately return a request for comment from CNBC.
Additional reporting by Kevin Breuninger and Jacob Pramuk
