Former Trump Campaign Manager Once Had Secret $10 Million Contract to Advance Putin’s Interests

White House Refuses to Comment

Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign manager from March of 2016 until his untimely resignation in August, once had a secret $10 million contract with a Russian billionaire closely tied to Vladimir Putin to advance the interests of the Russian President. Manafort was forced to resign after reports in the press identified him as having “had orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation until 2014 on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling pro-Russian political party,” according to the Associated Press.

The AP Wednesday morning reports Manafort, who today says he continues to regularly speak with President Donald Trump and who owns an apartment in Trump Tower, “proposed in a confidential strategy plan as early as June 2005 that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.”

Manafort “pitched” his plan to “Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, a close Putin ally with whom Manafort eventually signed a $10 million annual contract beginning in 2006.”

Manafort’s former business partner, Rick Gates, also has ties to Trump. He “has been seen inside the White House on a number of occasions,” and “helped plan Trump’s inauguration and now runs a nonprofit organization, America First Policies, to back the White House agenda.” The AP did not state if any Trump or U.S. funds have ben paid to Gates or America First Policies.

According to the AP, “Manafort’s work with Deripaska continued for years, though they had a falling out laid bare in 2014 in a Cayman Islands bankruptcy court. The billionaire gave Manafort nearly $19 million to invest in a Ukrainian TV company called Black Sea Cable, according to legal filings by Deripaska’s representatives. It said that after taking the money, Manafort and his associates stopped responding to Deripaska’s queries about how the funds had been used.”

The White House, meanwhile, this week has been scrambling to distance itself from Manafort. In a press briefing on Monday, Sean Spicer ludicrously referred to Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager of six months as someone who “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.” 

Wednesday morning, NBC News National Correspondent Peter Alexander posted this to Twitter:

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