Trump campaign chairman quits after Ukraine details payments
MOSCOW — Once-secret accounting documents of Ukraine’s proKremlin party were released Friday, purporting to show payments of $12.7 million US earmarked for Paul Manafort, who resigned as U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign chairman after the revelations.
Manafort’s resignation came a day after the Associated Press reported that confidential emails from his firm contradicted his claims that he had never lobbied on behalf of Ukrainian political figures in the U.S.
The AP found that Manafort helped Ukraine’s Party of Regions secretly route at least $2.2 million to two Washington lobbying firms. Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under U.S. federal law.
Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which was set up in 2014 to deal with high-profile corruption cases, is studying the so-called black ledgers of the Party of Regions which investigators believe are essentially logs of under-the-table cash payments that the party made to various individuals.
The bureau on Friday released 19 pages of the logs which contain 22 line-item entries where Manafort is listed as the ultimate recipient of funds totalling $12.7 million. The bureau said, it cannot prove that Manafort received the money because other people, including a prominent Party of the Regions deputy, signed for him in those entries.
Trump praised Manafort’s work on the campaign and called him a “true professional.” But his son, Eric Trump, made clear the controversy was behind the resignation. His father didn’t want to be “distracted by whatever things Paul was dealing with,” the younger Trump told Fox News.
Campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Gates would remain on the campaign team.