From HuffPo, just a few minutes ago: (Link is HERE):
The indictment alleges that Manafort and Kilimnik “knowingly and intentionally attempted to corruptly persuade” two people “with intent to influence, delay, and prevent the testimony of any person in an official proceeding.”
From my diary about Manafort earlier this year:
Manafort has also had a working relationship with Konstantin Kilimnik, who has a background with the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Kilimnik worked with Manafort to rehabilitate Viktor Yanukovych's reputation in Ukraine. [Politico, August 18, 2016] Manafort used Kilimnik to make Oleg Deripaska a startling offer. From Business Insider September 21, 2017:
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a top ally of President Vladimir Putin, reportedly stopped trying to recover money he said had been taken from him in 2014 by Paul Manafort after President Donald Trump won the GOP nomination last year.
The detail, first reported by The Associated Press in March, may shed light on an email Manafort — then Trump's campaign chairman — sent last July from his campaign email address. In the email, he asked his longtime employee Konstantin Kilimnik to offer Deripaska "private briefings" about the campaign.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote.
And then there is this: (Link HERE)
The [2016] emails are among the documents turned over by lawyers for Trump’s presidential campaign to investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election. In one email from July 7, two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort’s efforts to please Deripaska were succeeding.
“I am carefully optimistic on the issue of our biggest interest,” Kilimnik went on. “Our friend V said there is lately significantly more attention to the campaign in his boss’s mind, and he will be most likely looking for ways to reach out to you pretty soon, understanding all the time sensitivity. I am more than sure that it will be resolved and we will get back to the original relationship with V.’s boss.”
Subsequent emails became more cryptic. On July 29, Manafort received another email from Kilimnik, this one with the subject line “Black Caviar,” in which Kilimnik said: “I met today with the guy who gave you your biggest black caviar jar several years ago.” Kilimnik went on the say: “We spent about 5 hours talking about his story, and I have several important messages from him to you. He asked me to go and brief you on our conversation. I said I have to run it by you first, but in principle I am prepared to do it, provided that he buys me a ticket. It has to do about the future of his country, and is quite interesting. So, if you are not absolutely against the concept, please let me know which dates/places will work, even next week, and I could come and see you.”
According to The Washington Post, Manafort and Kilimnik then met on August 2 at the Grand Havana Club, a Manhattan cigar club. Although we don’t yet know what the two spoke about at that meeting, we can assume that “Black Caviar” probably referred to the millions Manafort had received from Deripaska through shell corporations in Cyprus.