Paul Manafort

Paul John Manafort, Jr.^[1] (born April 1, 1949)^[2] is an American lobbyist and political consultant.^[3]

Manafort is best known for his lobbying efforts on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych as well as for dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos and Mobutu Sese Seko and guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi.^[3][4][5] He was an adviser to the presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, and (prior to being fired) was the national chairman of the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, as well as being a senior partner in the firm Davis, Manafort, and Freedman.

Early life and education

Manafort was born in New Britain, Connecticut, the son of Antoinette Marie (Cifalu) and Paul J. Manafort, Sr. (1923-2013).^[1][6] He is of Italian descent.^[7] He graduated from Georgetown University in 1971 with Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and from Georgetown University Law School in 1974 with a Juris Doctor degree. His grandfather James Manafort migrated to the United States from Italy in 1919 and founded construction company Manafort Brothers. His father served with the US Army combat engineers in World War II^[1] and was mayor of New Britain from 1965 to 1971.^[3]

Career

Between 1977 and 1980 Manafort practiced law with the firm of Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease in Washington, D.C.^[2]

Political activities

In 1976, Manafort was the delegate-hunt coordinator for eight states for the President Ford Committee; the overall Ford delegate operation was run by James A. Baker III.^[8] Between 1978 and 1980, Manafort was the southern coordinator for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, and the deputy political director at the Republican National Committee. After Reagan's election in November 1980, he was appointed Associate Director of the Presidential Personnel Office at the White House. In 1981 he was nominated to the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.^[2]

Manafort was an adviser to the presidential campaigns of George H. W. Bush in 1988^[9] and Bob Dole in 1996.^[10]

Chairman of Donald Trump's 2016 United States Presidential campaign

In March 2016, he joined the presidential campaign of Donald Trump to lead Trump's "delegate-corralling" efforts. In April 2016, Trump terminated campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and promoted Manafort to the position. Manafort gained control of the daily operations of the campaign as well as an expanded $20 million budget, hiring decisions, advertising, and media strategy.^{[11][12][13][14]}

In June 2016, a USA Today article reported that Donald Trump and his companies have been deleting emails and other documents on a large scale,^[15] including evidence in lawsuits, sometimes in defiance of court orders and under subpeona since as early as 1973.^{[16][17][18][19][20]} The findings were first published by Paul Singer^[21] on June 13, 2016^[22][23] and reported later in a new report in Newsweek on October 31, 2016.^[16] According to Newsweek, Trump and his companies "hid or destroyed thousands of documents" involving several court cases from as early as 1973.^[24]

On July 26, 2016, Donald Trump asked Russia to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails.^[25] This statement occurred at the same time that American intelligence agencies had told the White House they now have “high confidence” that the Russian government used Guccifer 2.0, a GRU agent, to hack emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee.^[26]

In August 2016, Manafort's connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions drew national attention in the USA, where it was reported that Manafort may have illegally received $12.7 million in off-the-books funds from the Party of Regions.^[27] On August 17, 2016, Donald Trump received his first security briefing.^[28] Also, on August 17, 2016, the New York Times reported on an internal staff memorandum from Manafort stating that Manafort would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision".^[29] However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign.^[30][31]

Lobbying career

In 1980 Manafort was a founding partner of Washington, DC-based lobbying powerhouse Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.^[32]

Manafort left BMSK in 1996 to join Richard H. Davis in forming Davis, Manafort, and Freedman.

Association with Jonas Savimbi

In 1985, Manafort's firm, BMSK, signed a $600,000 contract with Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the Angolan rebel group UNITA, to refurbish Savimbi's image in Washington and secure financial support on the basis of his anti-communism. BMSK arranged for Savimbi to attend events at the American Enterprise Institute (where Jeane Kirkpatrick gave him a laudatory introduction), the Heritage Foundation, and Freedom House; in the wake of the campaign Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars in covert American aid to Savimbi's group.^[33] Allegedly, Manafort's continuing lobbying efforts helped preserve the flow of money to Savimbi several years after the Soviet Union ceased its involvement in the Angolan conflict, forestalling peace talks.^[33]

Lobbying for other foreign leaders

Manafort's firm, BMSK, accepted $950,000 yearly to lobby for Ferdinand Marcos.^[34][35] He was also involved in lobbying for Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaïre,^[36] securing a 1 million dollar annual contract in 1989,^[37] and attempted to recruit Siad Barre of Somalia as a client.^[38] His firm also lobbied on behalf of the governments of the Dominican Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya (earning between $660,000 and $750,000 each year between 1991 and 1993), and Nigeria ($1 million in 1991). These activities led Manafort's firm to be listed amongst the top five lobbying firms receiving money from human-rights abusing regimes in the Center for Public Integrity report "The Torturer's Lobby".^[39]

Involvement in the Karachi Affair

Manafort wrote the campaign strategy for Edouard Balladur in the 1995 French elections, and admitted to having been paid ^[40] (at least $200,000). The money was transferred to him through his friend, Lebanese arms-dealer Abdul Rahman al-Assir, from middle-men fees paid for arranging the sale of three French Agosta-class submarines to Pakistan, in a scandal known as the Karachi Affair.^[33]

Association with Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency

Manafort received $700,000 from the Kashmiri American Council between 1990 and 1994, supposedly to promote the plight of the Kashmiri people. However, an FBI investigation revealed the money was actually from Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence agency as part of a disinformation operation to divert attention from terrorism. A former Pakistani ISI official claimed Manafort was aware of the nature of the operation.^[41] While producing a documentary as part of the deal, Manafort interviewed several Indian officials while pretending to be a CNN reporter.^[42]

HUD scandal

In the late 1980s, Manafort was criticized for using his connections at HUD to ensure funding for a $43 million rehabilitation of dilapidated housing in Seabrook, N.J.^[43] Manafort's firm received a $326,000 fee for its work in getting HUD approval of the grant largely through personal influence with Deborah Gore Dean, an executive assistant to former HUD Secretary Samuel R. Pierce, Jr.^[44]

Lobbying for Viktor Yanukovych and involvements in Ukraine

Manafort also worked as an adviser on the Ukrainian presidential campaign of Viktor Yanukovych (and his Party of Regions during the same time span) from December 2004 until the February 2010 Ukrainian presidential election^[45][46][47] even as the U.S. government (and US Senator John McCain) opposed Yanukovych because of his ties to Russia's leader Vladimir Putin.^[10] Manafort was hired to advise Yanukovych months after massive street demonstrations known as the Orange Revolution overturned Yanukovych's victory in the 2004 presidential race.^[48] Borys Kolesnikov, Yanukovich’s campaign manager, said the party hired Manafort after identifying organizational and other problems in the 2004 elections, in which it was advised by Russian strategists.^[46] Manafort rebuffed U.S. Ambassador William Taylor when the latter complained he was undermining U.S. interests in Ukraine.^[33] According to a 2008 U.S. Justice Department annual report, Manafort’s company received $63,750 from Yanukovych's Party of Regions over a six-month period ending on March 31, 2008, for consulting services.^[49] In 2010, under Manafort's tutelage, the opposition leader put the Orange Revolution on trial, campaigning against its leaders' management of a weak economy. Returns from the presidential election gave Yanukovych a narrow win over Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations. Yanukovych owed his comeback in Ukraine's presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona and, people in his party say, that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort.^[46]

In 2007 and 2008 Manafort was involved in investment projects with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (the acquisition of a Ukrainian telecoms company) and Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash (redevelopment of the site of the former Drake Hotel in New York City).^[50]

In 2013 Yanukovych became the main target of the Euromaidan protests.^[51] After the February 2014 Ukrainian revolution (the conclusion of Euromaidan) Yanukovych fled to Russia.^[51] On 17 March 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) by President Obama, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the United States.^{[52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62][lower-alpha 1]}

Manafort then returned to Ukraine in September 2014 to become an advisor to Yanukovych’s former head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Serhiy Lyovochkin.^[47] In this role he was asked to assist in rebranding Yanukovych's Party of Regions.^[47] Instead, he argued to help stabilize Ukraine, Manafort was instrumental in creating a new political party called Opposition Bloc.^[47] According to Ukrainian political analyst Mikhail Pogrebinsky, "He thought to gather the largest number of people opposed to the current government, you needed to avoid anything concrete, and just become a symbol of being opposed".^[47] According to Manafort, he has not worked in Ukraine since the October 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election.^[63][64] However, according to Ukrainian border control entry data, Manafort traveled to Ukraine several times after that election, all the way through late 2015.^[64] According to The New York Times, his local office in Ukraine closed in May 2016.^[27] According to Politico, by then Opposition Bloc had already stopped payments for Manafort and this local office.^[64]

In an April 2016 interview with ABC News Manafort stated that the aim of his activities in Ukraine had been to lead the country "closer to Europe".^[65]

Ukrainian government National Anti-Corruption Bureau studying secret documents claimed in August 2016 to have found handwritten records that show $12.7 million in cash payments designated for Manafort, although they had yet to determine if he had received the money.^[27] These undisclosed payments were from the pro-Russian political party Party of Regions (of Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine).^[27] This payment record spans from 2007 to 2012.^[27] Manafort’s lawyer, Richard A. Hibey, said Manafort didn’t receive “any such cash payments” as described by the anti-corruption officials.^[27] The Associated Press reported on 17 August 2016 that Manafort secretly routed at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012 on Party of Regions's behalf, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party's efforts to influence U.S. policy.^[66] Associated Press noted that under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department, which Manafort reportedly did not do.^[66] The lobbying firms unsuccessfully lobbied U.S. Congress to reject a resolution condemning the jailing of Yanukovych's main political rival, Yulia Tymoshenko.^[67]

Notes

References

External links

• Paul J Manafort at SourceWatch
• Appearances on C-SPAN