The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Report: Manafort met with Assange ahead of leaks
A British newspaper alleges that Paul Manafort, a New Britain, Conn., native, secretly met WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London within days or weeks of being brought aboard Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Lawyers for Assange and Manafort denounced the report as false.
If confirmed, the report Tuesday would suggest a direct connection between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which released tens of thousands of emails stolen by Russian spies during the 2016 election. The campaign seized on the emails to undermine Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton.
The Guardian, which did not identify the sources for its reporting, said that Manafort met with Assange “around March 2016” — the same month that Russian hackers began their all-out effort to steal emails from the Clinton campaign.
“This story is totally false and deliberately libelous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to Wikileaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or Wikileaks on any matter. We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false,” Manafort said.
Assange’s Ecuadorean lawyer, Carlos Poveda, said the Guardian report was false.
And WikiLeaks said on Twitter that it was “willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” It later tweeted that Assange had instructed his lawyers to sue the Guardian for libel.
The Guardian cited two unidentified sources as saying Manafort first met Assange at the embassy in 2013, a year after Assange took refuge there to avoid being extradited to Sweden over sex crime allegations. The Guardian said Manafort returned there in 2015 and 2016 and said its sources had “tentatively dated” the final visit to March. The newspaper added that Manafort’s visit was not entered into the embassy’s log book and cited a source as saying Manafort left after 40 minutes.
There was no detail on what might have been discussed.
The Trump campaign announced Manafort’s hire on March 29, 2016, and he served as the convention manager tasked with lining up delegates for the Republican National Convention. He was promoted to campaign chairman in May 2016.
An AP investigation into Russian hacking shows that government-aligned cyberspies began an aggressive effort to penetrate the Clinton campaign’s email accounts on March 10, 2016.
The special counsel in the Russia investigation is accusing Manafort of violating his plea agreement by repeatedly lying to federal investigators, an extraordinary allegation that could expose him to a lengthier prison sentence — and potentially more criminal charges.
The torpedoing of Manafort’s plea deal, disclosed in a court filing Monday, also results in special counsel Robert Mueller’s team losing a cooperating witness from the top of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign who was present for several key episodes under investigation. That includes a Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer he was told had derogatory information on Hillary Clinton.