The FBI team under special counsel Robert Mueller raided the house of Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman of U.S. President Donald Trump on July 26. It was the next day that Manafort met with the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of the Russian investigation.

The Washington Post reported that the FBI raiding team came without advanced warning before dawn. However, they had a search warrant and left the house in Alexandria with a lot of records.

Same materials turned over

Some of the materials that the FBI agents confiscated from Manafort’s house were the same documents he gave to the investigators from the committee.

The raid made an adviser close to the White House state that the raid was unnecessary because Manafort could turn it over to probers had they requested the documents.

The documents that Manafort handed over to the committee include notes that he made about June 9, 2016, meeting that he, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner had at Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. The president’s son initially told media the meeting discussed the adoption of Russian kids – which it turned out was dictated by Trump to be the only agenda they discussed. Donald Jr., however, later admitted that Veselnitskaya offered the Trump campaign a political dossier on the Democratic Party to help Trump, the Russian government’s choice for the 2016 election, win over rival Hillary Clinton.

Despite Manafort’s cooperation, the investigators could have convinced the judge who issued the search warrant that they believe the former campaign chairman of Trump would not hand over all the records to a grand jury subpoena. It is possibly the Mueller team’s way of telling Manafort he should not expect special treatment from the probers just because he was connected once to Trump.

Wider investigation includes aspects of Manafort’s personal and professional life

The Washington Post noted that Mueller had expanded the Russian probe to include Manafort’s personal life and his other business dealings. The newspaper possibly sees the FBI building another case against the lobbyist to pressure him to yield information on other members of Trump’s circle as leverage to reduce the ex-campaign chairman’s legal exposure.

ABC reported that the Trump campaign had turned over more than 20,000 pages of documents to the committee on Aug. 2. Manafort handed about 400 pages, which includes paperwork on his foreign agent advocacy. Manafort’s spokesman who confirmed the FBI raid on July 26, revealed that his boss had registered as a foreign agent for his past work on behalf of Ukraine, but he only did it in July.