The FBI believes a business associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had ties to Russian intelligence, including during the 2016 presidential race, prosecutors said in court documents filed Tuesday.
The documents, filed by special counsel Robert Mueller's team, allege that Rick Gates, a longtime business partner of Manafort and President Trump's former deputy campaign manager, was aware that an unidentified associate "was a former Russian Intelligence Officer."
The documents also allege that Gates and the individual continued to communicate with one another in the months before the 2016 presidential election. Such communication "was pertinent to the investigation," prosecutors said.
The FBI's assessment was made public in a sentencing memo filed late Tuesday in the case of Alex van der Zwaan, a London-based lawyer, who pleaded guilty last month to lying to investigators about his contacts with Gates and the unidentified associate.
In the memo, prosecutors said that van der Zwaan acknowledged to special counsel investigators in an interview that Gates had told him of the associate's ties to a Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU.
