CYBERIAN RUSSKY
Manafort e-offer to brief Vlad pal on campaign
Former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort reportedly offered a private campaign briefing to a shady Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin two weeks before Trump won the GOP nomination.
The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Manafort made the offer in an e-mail to an intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum kingpin with whom he had done business.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, e-mail, some of which was read to the newspaper along with other documents from the same period.
Manafort was forced out the following month after his overseas business dealings became a campaign issue.
The e-mail was among thousands of documents special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of in- vestigators has compiled in its probe of Russian meddling in the US election and possible ties to the Trump campaign.
Deripaska is one of Russia’s wealthiest men, and an ally of President Vladimir Putin.
There was nothing in the documents that suggested Deripaska saw Manafort’s offer or that any briefings ever took place.
A spokeswoman for Deripaska slammed the e-mail exchanges as a plan by “consultants in the notorious ‘beltway bandit’ industry” to make a quick buck.
But investigators believe that the e-mails show Manafort’s willingness to cash in on his ties to Donald Trump and grant Russian interests access to the presidential campaign.
In one April exchange with Deripaska days after Trump named Manafort as a campaign strategist, Manafort boasted about his great press and asked, “How do we use [it] to get whole?” the paper reported.
Deripaska reportedly owed Manafort’s firm money from earlier work.
A Manafort rep said that the e-mail exchanges reflected an innocent effort to collect past debts and that no briefings took place.
The e-mails are not evidence of crimes by themselves, one legal expert said, but could still be valuable to prosecutors.
“It could be an ‘overt act,’ ” white-collar criminal-defense lawyer Henry Mazurek told The Post, citing the legal term for activity leading to the commission of a crime.
“But in itself, this [the e-mails] is not a crime. It doesn’t sound like he’s [Manafort] asking for a quid pro quo. It doesn’t sound like he’s attempting to solicit a bribe.”