![]() “At least for posterity, I had all the members. Manafort and Kilimnik were later involved in polling about a peace plan that “Manafort conceded constituted backdoor means for Russia to take over eastern Ukraine,” the report says.Ī top deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, revealed in a book published in 2020 that the team he headed prepared a summary of all its work - apparently including details not contained in the final report Mueller submitted and the Justice Department made public in 2019. election, the men allegedly discussed by email the possibility of getting Trump to offer “a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push)” that could launch a peace process in Ukraine with Manafort as a U.S. Mueller’s prosecutors contend in the report that Manafort and Gates worked closely during the period with a Russian-Ukrainian political adviser the FBI has contended had close ties to Russian intelligence services, Konstantin Kilimnik.Īfter the U.S. It argues that Manafort, who worked for Trump’s campaign without pay, expected to improve his financial situation as a result of his ties to a potential Trump administration. The report details contacts between Manafort, his campaign deputy and longtime business partner Rick Gates and pro-Russian business figures. Or otherwise risk becoming the subject of late-night comedy routines.The report focuses on the work of what was known within Mueller’s office as “Team M” a group of investigators and prosecutors focused on connections between Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and businessmen and politicians friendly to Russia. At a minimum, if a law firm is going to insist on using Acrobat Pro-generally from a misguided effort to save money-a substantial investment must be made to train users to avoid this critical error. Using litigation support software (and not using Acrobat Pro for redactions) is a sensible approach. If the program saves a file when the user hits the delete button, that’s an issue. But ultimately, it is a real problem when users *think* they used a feature in software when what happened is opposite of the user intention. Additionally, it does have warning dialog boxes when users access features that could be mistaken for fully redacting. The software does provide alternative tools that meet these requirements. And, it’s fair to debate what Adobe could do to prevent users from making this mistake. Lawyers often ask us how we can help prevent this from happening during eDiscovery. It’s an educated guess but given the ubiquity of Acrobat Pro usage in law firms, it makes sense. The proper workflow is to use Acrobat’s purpose-built Redaction tools Adobe provides in the Protection menu. Examining the underlying document, it appears the law firm used Adobe Acrobat Pro’s markup tools to draw a black box over the text. Did they want the information out? Perhaps, seems like an awfully blunt method to leak information. Why did Manafort’s lawyers fail to redact properly? Not insurmountable, but a curve nonetheless. The images can be produced as is or combined into a new PDF file.Īlternatively, Acrobat Pro does offer tools to redact PDFs properly - but as we have seen these are hardly failsafe. When this isn’t feasible, it is possible to export the PDF into an image file format (aka going from vector to raster), redact the image, and produce the flattened image. When lawyers need to redact parts of documents, the best, most foolproof way to do so is to delete the text in the underlying document and replace it by typing in. It has been and remains the standard format for electronically sending a document. PDFs have played a critical role in the move from physical paper to digital formats. It is designed to be a software agnostic format to view documents as they were initially designed and intended by their authors. PDF is the file extension and abbreviation for Portable Document Format. This format was developed by the Adobe Software corporation in the early 1990s. We do not know who prepared the PDF and what method was used to finally render it. They submitted a PDF that had black boxes drawn over the text to be redacted but without deleting the actual text underneath it. But it’s Manafort’s lawyers who made a mistake here. ![]() It is now well-established that Paul Manafort is not good with technology. The admissions contain facts that the OSC alleges Manafort continued to make false statements after signing the plea deal. The admissions are located deep in a court filing prepared in response to Special Counsel ripping up the plea agreement. The lawyers did not intend to release this evidence. Lawyers working for former Trump Campaign manager and convicted felon, Paul Manafort filed a document yesterday that contains the clearest public evidence to date of coordination between the Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russians. ![]()
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