Manafort’s legal team paints the evidence as confirmation that journalists were given inside information about the investigation in violation of Justice Department policies and, perhaps, legal prohibitions on disclosure of grand jury secrets.
“The meeting raises serious concerns about whether a violation of grand jury secrecy occurred,” Manafort's lawyers wrote in a filing Friday with U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis, who’s set to oversee an upcoming trial of Manafort on bank and tax fraud charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. “Now, based on the FBI’s own notes of the meeting, it is beyond question that a hearing is warranted.”
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One of memos also says the purpose of the meeting was for the FBI to “obtain documents from the AP reporters,” although it’s unclear any documents were shown or changed hands.
The memos also show that one of the AP journalists gave the FBI an unusual detail about a storage unit in Alexandria, Virginia that Manafort used to keep records of his worldwide business dealings. Both memos say the AP revealed a code number to access the unit, although one memo says the reporters declined to share the unit number of the locker or its street address. (The memos give two slightly different versions of the code, with one suggesting it was to access a locked parking lot at the storage facility.)
The FBI agent who wrote one of the memos, Jeff Pfeiffer, testified last week that the tip from the AP may have led to discovery of the locker, although he said there was a possibility he had heard about the storage site before the April 2017 meeting. The FBI later found a Manafort aide who led them to the spot where Manafort’s records were stored. After looking in with the aide, the FBI got a search warrant and seized many of the records.
One journalism expert said he was taken aback by the AP sharing the code with the FBI, but he cautioned that the FBI's accounts are only their perspective on the meeting.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/unde.../manafort-justice-department-reporters-701906
“The meeting raises serious concerns about whether a violation of grand jury secrecy occurred,” Manafort's lawyers wrote in a filing Friday with U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis, who’s set to oversee an upcoming trial of Manafort on bank and tax fraud charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. “Now, based on the FBI’s own notes of the meeting, it is beyond question that a hearing is warranted.”
[clip]
One of memos also says the purpose of the meeting was for the FBI to “obtain documents from the AP reporters,” although it’s unclear any documents were shown or changed hands.
The memos also show that one of the AP journalists gave the FBI an unusual detail about a storage unit in Alexandria, Virginia that Manafort used to keep records of his worldwide business dealings. Both memos say the AP revealed a code number to access the unit, although one memo says the reporters declined to share the unit number of the locker or its street address. (The memos give two slightly different versions of the code, with one suggesting it was to access a locked parking lot at the storage facility.)
The FBI agent who wrote one of the memos, Jeff Pfeiffer, testified last week that the tip from the AP may have led to discovery of the locker, although he said there was a possibility he had heard about the storage site before the April 2017 meeting. The FBI later found a Manafort aide who led them to the spot where Manafort’s records were stored. After looking in with the aide, the FBI got a search warrant and seized many of the records.
One journalism expert said he was taken aback by the AP sharing the code with the FBI, but he cautioned that the FBI's accounts are only their perspective on the meeting.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/unde.../manafort-justice-department-reporters-701906