Just weeks before leaving office, President Donald Trump issued a full and complete pardon just before Christmas 2020 to his one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort. It might not have been a hush money payment, but the pardon likely encouraged Manafort to remain silent and not make any damaging revelations about Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign.
Trump’s press secretary issued a statement that accused special counsel Robert Mueller of engaging in “blatant prosecutorial overreach” that “was premised on the Russian collusion hoax.” It described Manafort as “one of the most prominent victims of what has been revealed to be perhaps the greatest witch hunt in American history.”
A grateful Manafort responded by tweeting: “Mr President, my family & I humbly thank you for the Presidential Pardon you bestowed on me. Words cannot fully convey how grateful we are."
After the pardon was issued, a federal judge also ruled that Manafort could keep nearly $20 million worth of real estate in New York City and the Hamptons that had been subject to a forfeiture action. Manafort wrote a book titled “Political Prisoner,” published in 2022, in which he praised Trump and criticized federal prosecutors. He also predicted that Trump would run in 2024 and win the election. And Manafort, who has been referred to as a “grave counterintelligence threat,” could end up being very involved in that campaign.
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Manafort served as Trump’s campaign manager from June to August 2016, reportedly at no salary. He was forced to resign from the campaign after the Associated Press and The New York Times reported that Ukrainian investigators had discovered a so-called “Black Ledger” that detailed millions of dollars in off-the-books cash payments from 2007 to 2012 that Manafort had received from former President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party.
Manafort had worked for years as a political consultant for Yanukovych, rebranding the corrupt politician to help him win the 2010 presidential election. Manafort lost the high-paying gig when the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution ousted Yanukovych from power. The revelations about the ledgers ultimately led to Mueller bringing charges against Manafort and his jailing.
In 2019, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., sentenced Manafort to a total of 7.5 years in prison in two federal cases. A jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found him guilty of tax and bank fraud. And he pleaded guilty in a Washington court to charges that he misled the U.S. government about his lobbying work on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and encouraging witnesses to lie on his behalf.
In May 2020, Manafort was released from prison to serve the remainder of his sentence in home confinement because of concerns over the coronavirus. And months later he was pardoned.
Now, despite Manafort’s considerable baggage, Trump is expected to bring him back as a campaign adviser later this year to “play a role in fundraising,” The Washington Post reported, citing four people familiar with the talks.
The Post wrote, “Trump has told advisers that he feels loyal to Manafort because he served prison time, and Manafort has continued to stay loyal and praise Trump in public and private appearances.” Trump apparently also feels the “prosecution of Manafort was unfair.”
Should Trump hire Manafort that would likely revive scrutiny of Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. A bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee released in August 2020 found “that Manafort’s presence on the [2016] Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.”
New reporting by Casey Michel for The New Republic describes just how corrosive Manafort’s influence was in fostering Trump’s anti-Ukraine animus. Trump’s hostility to Kyiv was most recently manifested in his efforts to block the desperately needed $61 billion aid package that the Republican-controlled House finally passed after a months-long delay.
The New Republic story takes us back to 2016 when questions were first raised about Russia’s meddling in the 2016 campaign on behalf of Trump. Manafort joined the campaign in March 2016 right after Trump had unexpectedly become the front-runner for the nomination. Russian intelligence operatives hacked the computers of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, using proxies to release the stolen documents. That came right after Trump called on Russia to “find” emails missing from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s server.
The New Republic wrote that it was Manafort, in his capacity as Trump’s campaign manager, who “first planted the idea in Trump’s mind that Ukraine, rather than Russia, sought to destabilize American elections and thwart Trump’s rise.”
Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, who cooperated with the Mueller probe, told FBI investigators in a 2018 interview that after the Trump campaign learned the DNC had been hacked, Manafort pushed the theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had been responsible, BuzzFeed News reported in November 2019, Manafort claimed that the Russians were being unfairly slandered. It’s an unfounded conspiracy theory that Trump brought up in his “perfect” July 2019 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Manafort was “the first member of Trump’s orbit to push an anti-Ukraine agenda—an agenda that later blossomed not only into Trump’s fealty toward Putin, but toward his willingness to bar aid to Ukraine, damn the consequences,” The New Republic wrote.
But what’s even more alarming is that the first person to come up “with the Ukraine-as-anti-Trump theory” that Manafort peddled was Konstantin Kilimnik, a dual Russian-Ukrainian citizen, according to The New Republic. The Treasury Department, in an April 2021 sanctions announcement, described Kilimnik as a “known Russian Intelligence Services agent implementing influence operations on their behalf.” It said Kilimnik ”sought to promote the narrative that Ukraine, not Russia, had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.”
The FBI has offered a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Kilimnik, who was indicted in 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice regarding unregistered lobbying work conducted by Manafort’s firm.
In late 2004, a pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov asked Manafort to work as a consultant and conduct a makeover of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions. Shortly afterward, Kilimnik began working for Manafort and ended up running the consulting firm’s Kyiv office. During the 2016 campaign, Manafort gave internal Trump campaign polling data and details on the campaign’s strategy to Kilimnik, who then shared the information with Russian intelligence services, the Associated Press reported.Manafort told Kilimnik how Trump planned to win the election in such swing states as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The pair met privately at least twice in New York and used encryption applications when messaging each other. Russia could have used such inside information to conduct social media influence campaigns targeting voters in swing states, which turned out to be the case. Kilimnik was also a link between Manafort and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who is close to President Vladimir Putin. Manafort owed about $20 million to Deripaska when he joined the Trump campaign.
Kilimnik was also named in an unclassified March 2021 report by the U.S. National Intelligence Council on foreign threats to the 2020 presidential election. The report found that Kilimnik was involved in a network that took steps “to damage U.S. ties to Ukraine, denigrate President Biden and his candidacy, and benefit former President Trump’s prospects for reelection.” It said the network also sought “to falsely blame Ukraine for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” The report added that Kilimnik and his associates “sought to use prominent U.S. persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to U.S. officials and audiences.”
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon recently wrote a letter to Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asking that details of Manafort’s relations with Kilimnik be declassified and “made public to the greatest extent possible” given reports that Manafort is expected to take a position in Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Wyden wrote that redacted portions of the Senate Intelligence Committee report includes evidence linking Kilimnik to Russian military intelligence’s hack-and-leak operation, as well as indications of Manafort’s own connections to these operations.
“In this case, a known ‘grave counterintelligence threat’ is reportedly joining a presidential campaign,” Wyden wrote. “Only by understanding the details of that threat can the public guard against a malign foreign influence effort that could once again threaten an American election.”