Manafort rap revives Russian meddling in US poll claim
NEW CORRUPTION allegations lodged in Ukraine against US President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, have thrust Manafort back into the forefront of ongoing scrutiny over whether the Trump team co-ordinated with the Russian government to influence the US election.
The allegations were disclosed on Tuesday at a news conference by a Ukrainian MP who said he had obtained documents showing Manafort had tried to hide payments he had received from the party of Ukraine’s former president, who is living in Russia and wanted on corruption charges at home.
A spokesman for Manafort called the claims “baseless” and said some of the documents released appeared to be fabricated because the letterhead and signatures did not match those of Manafort.
The spectacle in Kiev came just hours after FBI director James Comey confirmed a federal probe into possible links between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin.
It also followed an apparent effort by the White House to distance Trump from the man who helped lead his campaign during five critical months last year, with White House press secretary Sean Spicer declaring Manafort had played a “limited role for a very limited amount of time” in the campaign.
Manafort, 67, a longtime lobbyist and Republican strategist, was hired by the Trump campaign in March 2016, a time when Trump was winning primaries but feared he could still lose the nomination if his team failed to properly master arcane convention rules and wrangle votes from Republican delegates. In May, Manafort was named campaign chairperson.
From the start, the focus was on Manafort’s ties to pro-Russian figures, given Trump’s repeated calls to forge closer relations to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s emerging role in seeking to meddle in the US election.
US intelligence officials have said that the Kremlin orchestrated the politically damaging hacks of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
Manafort had done business with Putin-aligned moguls and worked in Ukraine for ex-president Viktor Yanukovych’s political party from 2004. Yanukovych fled the country in 2014 amid violent street protests. During the campaign, Trump expressed openness to consider easing US sanctions on Moscow imposed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine.