On October 5, 2021, Judge Amy Berman Jackson unsealed a key filing in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s election case against Donald Trump. The filing included details regarding Paul Manafort’s former deputy, Rick Gates, testifying that he suspected he had been used to funnel Russian intelligence to the Trump campaign.
The document is a summary of Gates’ cooperation with the Mueller investigation in 2018. Gates admitted to being in contact during the 2016 presidential election with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian political consultant who Mueller’s team has claimed was linked to Russian intelligence.
It was also revealed that Manafort had passed on campaign polling data to Kilimnik with Gates’s assistance. However, both the purpose and recipient of this data still remain unclear.
The unsealing of this document increases the amount of publicly available information on the probe into connections between Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign. However, large portions of the document relating to Gates’s cooperation in other unspecified criminal investigations were left redacted.
