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Manafort Lawyers Accuse Rick Gates of Having Four Affairs

In an effort to catch Gates in a lie and jeopardize his plea deal.

At the Paul Manafort trial Wednesday, Rick Gates was accused by Manafort’s lawyers of having four different extramarital affairs. CNN reports that attorney Kevin Downing asked Gates, Manafort’s former deputy, if he had disclosed his four affairs to special counsel Robert Mueller. Prosecutor Greg Andres then objected, and Downing told U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis that the question was necessary to establish whether or not Gates lied to special counsel Robert Mueller, which would hurt Gates’ credibility and put his plea agreement in jeopardy. Judge Ellis did not permit the “affairs” question to be asked again, so Downing asked Gates if his “secret life span[ned] over many years?” Gates told the court that he had “made many mistakes over many years.” This comes as Gates disclosed at trial on Tuesday that he had an extramarital affair about a decade ago, and often flew first class and kept a London apartment to facilitate trysts. However, he denied using funds he embezzled from Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, to pay for those expenses. Gates also told the court about Manafort’s use of off-shore “shelf” companies to get payments from Ukrainians, and his penchant for altering documents in order to obtain bank loans after his political consulting firm stopped making money in late 2015.