Paul Manafort

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby SonicG » Fri Mar 24, 2017 6:49 am

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Manafort, Stone and Atwater in the 70s
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:11 am

how can you not put your trust in those guys! :lol:

yea 40 years later and I have to relive Watergate on steroids with a dash of treason


GWB White House lawyer: 'FBI uncovering evidence of treason. There is no other word for it'

By Jen Hayden
Thursday Mar 23, 2017 · 8:14 AM CDT

On the news that the FBI is investigating the link between Russia's cyber operations and the role that far-right news sites, like Breitbart, may have played in aiding the spread of false information about Hillary Clinton, the former White House Chief Ethics Lawyer during the George W. Bush administration straight up called it what it is—treason:

Richard W. Painter @RWPUSA
FBI uncovering evidence of treason. There is no other word for it.http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politic ... 95453.html
10:58 PM - 22 Mar 2017
Photo published for FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at Breitbart, InfoWars news sites
FBI’s Russian-influence probe includes a look at Breitbart, InfoWars news sites
Federal investigators are examining whether far-right news sites played any role last year in a Russian cyber operation that dramatically widened the reach of news stories — some fictional — that...
mcclatchydc.com
10,163 10,163 Retweets 14,390 14,390 likes

And given Breitbart’s role in all of this, what a coincidence that key Breitbart players are now playing key roles in the White House:

Breitbart, which has drawn criticism for pursuing a white nationalist agenda, was formerly led by Stephen Bannon, who became chief executive officer of Trump’s election campaign last August and now serves as Trump’s strategic adviser in the White House. The news site’s former national security editor, Sebastian Gorka, was a national security adviser to Trump’s campaign and presidential transition team. He now works as a key Trump counterterrorism adviser.
The site’s owners were anonymous until employees recently applied for (and received!) White House Press credentials and the ownership of Breitbart was revealed:

Breitbart is partially owned by Robert Mercer, the wealthy co-chief executive of a New York hedge fund and a co-owner of Cambridge Analytica, a small, London-based firm credited with giving Trump a significant advantage in gauging voter priorities last year by providing his campaign with at least 5,000 data points on each of 220 million Americans.
The Mercer family is heavily involved in Republican politics and they aren’t shy about buying the party. In fact, Rebekah Mercer was one of Trump’s earliest and wealthiest backers. She brought Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway to Trump’s team:

Galvanized in part by the Republicans’ 2012 White House loss, the middle daughter of billionaire hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer has rattled the status quo by directing her family’s resources into an array of investments on the right. In the past six years, the Mercers have poured tens of millions into Republican super PACs, Washington think tanks, state policy shops, a film-production company, a data analytics operation and one of the country’s most provocative online conservative news outlets.

This year, Rebekah Mercer has emerged as a heavyweight presidential player, leading a super PAC financed by her father that was the biggest outside benefactor of Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) during the Republican primaries.

After Donald Trump clinched the nomination, the Mercers rallied to his side. Their imprint is now evident on the real estate developer’s campaign, which is led by three close associates who ran Mercer-funded enterprises: former Breitbart News executive chairman Stephen Bannon, pollster Kellyanne Conway and Citizens United President David Bossie.

Meanwhile, Rebekah Mercer has taken up the day-to-day management of her family’s super PAC, which is producing a string of searing ads attacking Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
A lot of wealthy dots are being connected as this investigation rolls on and oh the wicked, treasonous web they weaved.

Thursday, Mar 23, 2017 · 9:52:51 AM CDT · Jen Hayden
Several readers have pointed to an NPR segment on the Mercer family that aired yesterday. You can listen to it here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/03/2 ... ord-for-it


Paul Manafort funneled his Russian payments through bank owned by Trump’s pal Dmitry Rybolovlev
By Bill Palmer | March 23, 2017 | 0

Here’s a connection that perhaps we should all have seen coming. Just one day after it was finally confirmed that Paul Manafort had indeed taken millions of dollars in payments from a Kremlin intermediary, as had long been suspected, additional information is coming to light about how that money was funneled from Russia to Manafort. And it turns out to have been facilitated by one of Donald Trump’s Russian pals as well as one of Trump’s cabinet members.

The Associated Press is now reporting that the money flowed from Russia to Paul Manafort by way of the Bank of Cyprus. If the name of this bank sounds familiar, it’s because four weeks ago Palmer Report pieced together that Wilbur Ross and Dmitry Rybolovlev both have (or had) ownership stakes in that bank. Ross was also the vice chair of the bank.

Ross is now Donald Trump’s Secretary of Commerce. Rybolovlev has had suspicious real estate transactions with Trump, and he keeps flying in on a private plane to meet up with him in various cities. And now it turns out that, going back as long as twelve years, Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort was funneling his secret payments from the Kremlin through this same bank. But there’s much more to it.

As we reported six weeks ago, investigators for the state of New York busted Germany’s Deutsche Bank for laundering money from Russia through Bank of Cyprus into the hands of clients in New York City. In fact U.S. Attorney Preet Bhahara was pursuing a parallel federal investigation into Deutsche Bank for that same Russian money laundering scheme, when Donald Trump fired him earlier this month.
Deutsche Bank has also been notoriously loaning large amounts of money to Donald Trump in recent years, even though Deutsche has been struggling financially, and even though most banks view Trump as a poor loan risk due to his repeated use of corporate bankruptcy. These loans have never made sense, leading to the question of whether the Deutsche loans were a mere cover for Russia funneling money to Trump through Bank of Cyprus. And now it turns out Russia was in fact funneling money to Trump’s campaign chair through that same Bank of Cyprus, owned by Rybolovlev, who keeps flying in to meet with Trump.
http://www.palmerreport.com/news/paul-m ... vlev/2038/


Kenneth P. Vogel‏Verified account @kenvogel 15h15 hours ago
Putin critic who planned to testify vs pro-Russian ex-Prez Yanukovych (a former Manafort client) gunned down in Kiev

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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:41 pm

Why Manafort’s offer to cooperate in probe is less than meets the eye


Michael Isikoff
Chief Investigative Correspondent
Yahoo NewsMarch 24, 2017

Devin Nunes says Paul Manafort OKs interview by intel committee


WASHINGTON — A surprise offer by Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign manager, to “provide information” to congressional committees investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russia may be far more limited than it first appeared, according to congressional sources and others familiar with the matter.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., revealed the offer in a press conference Friday, saying that Manafort’s lawyer had contacted his panel and offered the committee “the opportunity to interview his client.”

That quickly led many to assume there had been a major breakthrough and that Manafort would soon be under the television lights raising his right hand to testify under oath about what he knew about contacts between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. “Paul Manafort to Testify Before House Intelligence Panel,” read the headline in the New York Times.

But congressional sources say that the offer by Manafort’s lawyer, Reginald Brown, a former White House lawyer under President George W. Bush, was carefully hedged. There was no explicit promise to testify in public or address a broad range of questions that have been raised about Manafort’s business and lobbying work over the years for figures closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This is an interview, not testimony,” Jason Maloni, Manafort’s spokesman, told Yahoo News. A statement by Maloni says only that Manafort is willing to provide information about “recent allegations about Russian interference in the election.” It says nothing about recent accusations regarding disguised payments made to Manafort from the political party of the pro-Putin former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, or his past work for Oleg Deripaska, a prominent pro-Putin oligarch — both of which have been cited by Democrats as evidence of close ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Moreover, there were immediate signs that the Senate intelligence committee, which is conducting its own investigation into the Russian matter, was in no rush to take up Manafort on his offer to talk behind closed doors.

“This is a PR stunt,” said one Senate source familiar with the offer made by Manafort’s lawyer. Although the panel will at some point want to hear from Manafort, the source added, “I doubt this will be on his terms.”

The limitation on Manafort’s offer is perhaps not surprising. His work for Yanukovych is reportedly under investigation by the FBI over questions about whether it was in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In addition, the AP this week reported that Treasury Department officials have obtained financial records from Cyprus relating to Manafort’s business dealings with Deripaska.

But whether Manafort will be willing to answer questions about those matters is far from clear. Asked whether Manafort will ask for immunity for anything he tells Congress, Maloni did not respond.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/less-than-me ... 20935.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34SlZH7r8LE

Rick Gates out at America First Policies over Manafort ties to Russia

By Elizabeth Landers and Jeremy Diamond, CNN
Updated 9:18 PM ET, Thu March 23, 2017

The longtime deputy to Paul Manafort has stepped down from a nonprofit
AP reported this week that Manafort had sought to further Russian government interests
Washington (CNN)Rick Gates, the longtime deputy to President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, was forced to leave his position with a nonprofit supporting Trump this week due to his longstanding relationship with Manafort, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Gates' exit from America First Policies came after the Associated Press reported this week that Manafort had sought to further Russian government interests in his work for a Russian businessman. Gates did not return CNN's requests for comment.
One administration source familiar with the matter called the departure "amicable." A second source told CNN that Gates was asked to leave after his name popped back into the news this week due to his connections to Manafort.
Gates previously served as Manafort's deputy when he was campaign chairman, and has long worked with him in the private sector, including in consulting work for foreign interests.
America First Policies confirmed the news Thursday on Twitter, tweeting: "Rick Gates is grateful @POTUS is standing up to #fakenews and supports agenda. @americanfirstpol is setup and strong- he's on to more ventures!"
Gates was one of six former Trump campaign aides who joined forces after the campaign to form the nonprofit after Trump was elected president in November. Gates was one of the group's top officials alongside the Trump campaign's digital director Brad Parscale and longtime Mike Pence aide Nick Ayers, both of whom remain at the helm of the nonprofit.
The Manafort ally's departure adds to the woes the nonprofit has faced in its first months.
Despite initially expecting to draw millions of dollars in funding from the wealthy family of Bob and Rebekah Mercer, America First Policies has floundered in its opening months amid squabbles between Rebekah Mercer and Parscale. The Mercers were among the top donors supporting Trump's presidential bid and maintain a close relationship with Trump advisers in the White House.
The nonprofit has not yet aired a single ad to boost Trump's health care push, the biggest legislative test of his presidency so far and an effort where pro-Trump outside groups had been expected to play a major role.
A spokesman for the group did not respond Thursday when asked if America First Policies planned to advertise for the bill.
Other group aides, beyond Gates, have even considered aiding multiple rival nonprofits at the same time, which would be a highly unusual relationship.
The Mercer family has yet to publicly commit to supporting the group.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/23/politics/ ... ssia-ties/



Treasury agents in recent months obtained information connected to Manafort's transactions from Cypriot authorities, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The request was part of a federal anti-corruption probe into Manafort's work in Eastern Europe. The Cyprus attorney general, one of the country's top law enforcement officers, was also aware of the American request.
http://tucson.com/news/national/govt-an ... 09129.html



Cris Van Hollen
Sessions must recuse from any investigations of Deutsche Bank ...Trumps $300 million MONEY
Cory Booker demanding Wilbur Ross turn over information about Cyprus by today....no response
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Mar 25, 2017 9:53 am

Krypt3ia
(Greek: κρυπτεία / krupteía, from κρυπτός / kruptós, “hidden, secret things”)
Cyber-Berkut Joining The Manafort Fray


https://krypt3ia.wordpress.com/2017/03/ ... fort-fray/


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Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 4:58 pm

Paul Manafort's Puzzling New York Real Estate Purchases

Property records show Paul Manafort owns three properties in New York City.

Mar 28, 2017 · by Ilya Marritz and Andrea Bernstein
Paul J. Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager facing multiple investigations for his political and financial ties to Russia, has engaged in a series of puzzling real estate deals in New York City over the past 11 years.

Real estate and law enforcement experts say some of these transactions fit a pattern used in money laundering; together, they raise questions about Manafort’s activities in the New York City property market while he also was consulting for business and political leaders in the former Soviet Union.

Between 2006 and 2013, Manafort bought three homes in New York City, paying the full amount each time, so there was no mortgage.

Then, between April 2015 and January 2017 – a time span that included his service with the Trump campaign – Manafort borrowed about $12 million against those three New York City homes: one in Trump Tower, one in Soho, and one in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.

Manafort’s New York City transactions follow a pattern: Using shell companies, he purchased the homes in all-cash deals, then transferred the properties into his own name for no money and then took out hefty mortgages against them, according to property records.

Buying properties using limited liability companies – LLCs – isn’t unusual in New York City, nor is borrowing against a home to extract money. And there’s no indication that Manafort’s New York real estate borrowing spree has come to the attention of investigators. In an emailed statement, Manafort said: “My investments in real estate are personal and all reflect arm's-length transactions.”

Three Purchases, Lots of Questions

Manafort’s 2006 purchase of a Trump Tower apartment for all cash coincided with his firm’s signing of a $10 million contract with a pro-Putin Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, that was revealed last week in an investigative report by The Associated Press.

For the Carroll Gardens home, a brownstone on Union Street, Manafort recently borrowed nearly $7 million on a house that was purchased four years ago for just $3 million. The loans – dated January 17, three days before President Trump’s inauguration – were made by a Chicago-based bank run by Steve Calk, a Trump fundraiser and economic advisor.

Nine current and former law enforcement and real estate experts told WNYC that Manafort’s deals merit scrutiny. Some said the purchases follow a pattern used by money launderers: buying properties with all cash through shell companies, then using the properties to obtain “clean” money through bank loans. In addition, given that Manafort is already under investigation for his foreign financial and political ties, his New York property transactions should also be reviewed, multiple experts said.

One federal agent not connected with the probes, but with experience in complex financial investigations, said after reviewing the real estate documents that this pattern of purchases was “worth looking into.” The agent did not want to speak for attribution. There are active investigations of Manafort’s Russian entanglements by the FBI, Treasury, and House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. Manafort has denied wrongdoing and has called some of the allegations "innuendo."

Debra LaPrevotte, a former FBI agent, said the purchases could be entirely legitimate if the money used to acquire the properties was “clean” money. But, she added, “If the source of the money to buy properties was derived from criminal conduct, then you could look at the exact same conduct and say, ‘Oh, this could be a means of laundering ill-gotten gains.’”

Last spring, the Obama Treasury Department was so alarmed by the growing flow of hard-to-trace foreign capital being used to purchase real estate through shell companies that it launched a special program to examine the practice within its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCen. The General Targeting Order, or GTO, required that limited liability company disclose the identity of the true buyer, or “beneficial owner,” in property transactions.

In February, FinCen reported initial results from its monitoring program: “about 30 percent of the transactions covered by the GTOs involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that is also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report,” it said. The Trump Treasury Department said it would continue the monitoring program.

Friends and Business Partners

According to reports, Manafort was first introduced to Donald Trump in the 1970s by Roy Cohn, the former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy who went on to become a prominent and controversial New York attorney.

Long active in GOP politics, Manafort also worked as a lobbyist for clients who wanted something from the politicians he helped elect. His former firm – Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly – represented dictators like Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire.

In the 2000s, Manafort created a new firm with partner Rick Davis. According to the recent investigative report by The Associated Press, Manafort and Davis began pursuing work in 2005 with Oleg Deripaska, one of the richest businessmen in Russia. Manafort and Davis pitched a plan to influence U.S. politics and news coverage in a pro-Putin direction, The AP said.

“We are now of the belief that this model can greatly benefit the Putin government if employed at the correct levels with the appropriate commitment to success,” Manafort wrote in a confidential strategy memo obtained by The AP.

In 2006, Manafort and Davis signed a contract to work with Deripaska worth $10 million a year, The AP reported.

Also that year, a shell company called “John Hannah LLC” purchased apartment 43-G in Trump Tower, about 20 stories down from Donald Trump’s own triplex penthouse. Manafort confirmed that “John Hannah” is a combination of Manafort’s and Davis’s respective middle names.

The LLC was set up in Virginia at the same address as Davis Manafort and of a Delaware corporation, LOAV, Ltd., for which there are virtually no public records. It was LOAV that signed the contract with Deripaska – not the “public-facing consulting firm Davis Manafort,” as the AP put it.

A lawyer for John Hannah LLC signed the deed on apartment 43-G for $3.675 million in November of 2006. But Manafort’s name did not become associated formally with the Trump Tower apartment until March of 2015, three months before Trump announced he was entering the presidential race in the lobby 40 stories down. On March 5, John Hannah LLC transferred the apartment for $0 to Manafort. A month later, he borrowed $3 million against the condo, according to New York City public records.

A year later, Manafort was working on Trump’s campaign, first as a delegate wrangler, then as campaign manager. Trump’s friend and neighbor had become a top advisor.

In a text message that was hacked and later obtained by Politico, Manafort’s adult daughter, Jessica Manafort, wrote last April: “Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together.”

In August 2016, The New York Times published a lengthy investigation of Manafort, alleging he’d accepted $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from a pro-Putin, Ukrainian political party between 2007 and 2012. Manafort resigned as campaign manager, but according to multiple reports, didn’t break off ties with Trump, who remained his upstairs neighbor.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said last week that Manafort “played a very limited role for a very limited period of time” in the Trump campaign.

Davis did not return WNYC’s calls for comment, but in an email exchange with The AP, he disavowed any connection with the effort to burnish Putin’s image. “My name was on every piece of stationery used by the company and in every memo prior to 2006. It does not mean I had anything to do with the memo described,” Davis said.

Buy. Borrow. Repeat.

Trump Tower 43-G was not Manafort’s only New York property.

In 2012, another shell company linked to Manafort, “MC Soho Holdings LLC,” purchased a fourth floor loft in a former industrial building on Howard Street, on the border of Soho and Chinatown, for $2.85 million. In April 2016, just as he was ascending to become Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort transferred the unit into his own name and borrowed $3.4 million against it, according to publicly available property records.

The following year, yet another Manafort-linked shell company, “MC Brooklyn Holdings,” purchased a townhouse at 377 Union Street in Carroll Gardens for $2,995,000. This transaction followed the same pattern: the home was paid for in full at the time of purchase, with no mortgage. And on February 9, 2016, just after Trump won decisive victories in Michigan and Mississippi, Manafort took out $5.3 million of loans on the property. (Some of these transactions were first reported by the blog Pardon Me For Asking, by two citizen journalists at 377union.com, and The Intercept.)

Though the deals could ultimately be traced to Manafort, his connection to the shell companies would not likely have emerged had Manafort not become entangled in multiple investigations.

Public records dated just days before Trump was sworn in as President show that Manafort transferred the Carroll Gardens brownstone from MC Brooklyn Holdings to his own name and refinanced the loans with The Federal Savings Bank, in the process taking on more debt. He now has $6.8 million in loans on a building he bought for $3 million, records show.

David Reiss, a professor of real estate law at Brooklyn Law School, initially expressed bafflement when asked about the transactions. Reiss then looked up the home’s value on Zillow, a popular source for estimating real estate values. The home’s “zestimate” is $4.5 to $5 million.

Reiss said unless there is another source of collateral, it is extremely unusual for a home loan to exceed the value of the property. “I do think that transaction raises yellow flags that are worth investigating,” he said.

Reached by phone, Federal Savings Bank President Calk, one of President Trump’s earliest fundraisers and now a Trump economic adviser, said he couldn’t discuss the loan. But he expressed confidence that it was “overcollateralized,” meaning more than sufficiently backed by the home’s value. In a statement, Manafort said, “As is standard, the loan amount is based on the appraised value of the property after renovation, not the value of the property as-is.”

It’s unclear where Manafort got the money to purchase the three New York City properties. It’s also not entirely clear why he borrowed about $12 million against those homes, which were already paid for. In his statement Manafort said the Brooklyn loans were for architectural and contracting work.

But as of February 1, New York City Department of Buildings records show that the “borough commissioner has ordered all worked stopped” at the Carroll Gardens address “due to applicant withdrawal.”

Editor's note: This story has been updated. David Reiss is a Professor of Real Estate Law at Brooklyn Law School, not Brooklyn College.
http://linkis.com/www.wnyc.org/story/KqazP
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 28, 2017 9:50 pm

Manafort-Linked Accounts on Cyprus Raised Red Flag
by AGGELOS PETROPOULOS and RICHARD ENGEL

LIMASSOL, Cyprus — A bank in Cyprus investigated accounts associated with President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, for possible money-laundering, two banking sources with direct knowledge of his businesses here told NBC News.

Manafort — whose ties to a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin are under scrutiny — was associated with at least 15 bank accounts and 10 companies on Cyprus, dating back to 2007, the sources said. At least one of those companies was used to receive millions of dollars from a billionaire Putin ally, according to court documents.

Play Exclusive: Manafort-Linked Accounts on Cyprus Raised Red Flag

Exclusive: Manafort-Linked Accounts on Cyprus Raised Red Flag 2:42

Banking sources said some transactions on Manafort-associated accounts raised sufficient concern to trigger an internal investigation at a Cypriot bank into potential money laundering activities. After questions were raised, Manafort closed the accounts, the banking sources said.

Offshore banking in Cyprus is not illegal, and the island has long been known as a hub for moving money in and out of Russia. Several U.S. lawmakers have raised questions about Manafort's business dealings in Cyprus.

Image: Donald Trump's campaign chair and convention manager Paul Manafort speaks at a press conference at the Republican Convention in Cleveland
Paul Manafort, then Donald Trump's campaign chair, speaks at a press conference at the Republican Convention on July 19, 2016. Carlo Allegri / Reuters, file
A spokesman for Manafort told NBC News in a statement that all the accounts were set up at the direction of clients in Cyprus, a common banking center for Russians and Ukrainians, "for a legitimate business purpose."

"All were legitimate entities and established for lawful ends," the statement said.

It added that Manafort "has no specific personal recollection" about the account closures, but understands that they were shut down just before a 2012 government takeover of the bank in the midst of a banking crisis.

Court documents and company registries reviewed by NBC News and interviews with banking sources indicate that Manafort's dealings in Cyprus began in 2007, when some of the accounts were opened and some companies were established.

One of the companies linked to Manafort, PEM Advisors Limited, was involved in a multimillion-dollar deal with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, according to court documents filed in the Cayman Islands.

Deripaska — described in U.S. diplomatic cables from 2006 as "one of 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis" — once was denied entry to the United States because of alleged organized crime ties, current and former officials have told NBC News.

He paid PEM $18.9 million to buy a television and media network in Ukraine, according to the Cayman Island court documents. But the deal fell through and the money was never accounted for, the documents say.


Donald Trump, flanked by campaign manager Paul Manafort and daughter Ivanka, checks the podium in preparation for accepting the GOP nomination in Cleveland on July 20. Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call,Inc.
NBC News traced PEM and a number of other Manafort-linked companies to a law office in Nicosia, the largest city in Cyprus. Managing partner Kypros Chrysostomides, who is also Cyprus' former minister of justice, declined to answer questions without what he called his clients' "express consent."

Banking sources said that in October 2009, one of the 15 Manafort-associated bank accounts in Cyprus received a payment of a million dollars and left the account on the same day. Experts said the way the multiple accounts and companies were used suggests they were set up to deliberately make it difficult for auditors to track the movement of funds.

"There are some red flags here," said Tom Cardamome, managing director of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington-based non-profit.

"It looks suspicious and any bank that wanted to address money laundering would certainly have looked into the ownership of the company who owned these accounts."

The bulk of the accounts associated with Manafort were held at the Cyprus Popular Bank. In 2012, under an anti-money-laundering procedure called Know Your Customer, the bank asked for more information on the accounts' activities, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the request. Those sources said that Manafort chose to close the accounts instead.

Image: Vladimir Putin attends a joint press conference with his Slovenian counterpart.
Vladimir Putin attends a joint press conference with his Slovenian counterpart. ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO / AFP - Getty Images
Most of the assets of the Cyprus Popular Bank were taken over by the Bank of Cyprus in 2013. In a statement, Bank of Cyprus appeared to distance itself from Manafort.

"Bank of Cyprus has never had an extensive relationship with Mr. Manafort or any entities connected to him," the statement said.

It said that while most of Cyprus Popular Bank's assets were assumed by Bank of Cyprus in 2013, "these did not include any accounts or activities relating to Mr. Manafort either directly or indirectly."

Cyprus' attorney general, Costas Clerides, told NBC News that the Unit for Combating Money Laundering in Cyprus has handed information about Manafort's financial activities to U.S. Treasury investigators.

Several U.S. senators have raised questions about Manafort's financial relationship with Deripaska and his business links to Cyprus.

Last week, the Associated Press reported Manafort was on a $10 million-a-year consulting contract with Deripaska and promised him in a 2005 memo to influence politics and news coverage "to greatly benefit the Putin government."

"Mr. Manafort cannot confirm the authenticity of the memo cited by AP," the statement from Manafort's representatives said. "His representatives believe that Mr. Manafort complied with any applicable reporting laws and note that his relationship with Mr. Deripaska was described contemporaneously in press accounts."

Image: -
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaks with Oleg Deripaska, head of "The base element" company at the International Investment Forum in Sochi on Sept. 19, 2008. ILIA PITALEV / AFP-Getty Images file
In a paid advertisement in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Deripaska disputed the AP report and threatened legal action.

"I want to resolutely deny this malicious assertion and lie," the ad said. "I have never made any commitments or contracts with the obligation or purpose to covertly promote or advance 'Putin's Government' interests anywhere in the world."

Manafort has repeatedly denied he ever worked for the Russian government.

He has agreed to appear before the House Intelligence Committee, which is running an inquiry into whether there were ties between Russia and Trump campaign officials and Russia's effort to influence the 2016 election.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/manaf ... ag-n739156
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 30, 2017 4:07 pm

NATIONAL
MARCH 30, 2017 6:00 AM
Paul Manafort’s finances, alliance with Trump draw Treasury, Justice, FBI eyes

Ukraine's ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, who hired Paul Manafort. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is facing questions from the federal Departments of Treasury, Justice and the FBI. He has offered to answer questions from House and Senate committees. A portion of the website for fara.gov, on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Paul Manafort is under investigation about whether he registered as required under federal law. Ukraine's ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych, who hired Paul Manafort. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is facing questions from the federal Departments of Treasury, Justice and the FBI. He has offered to answer questions from House and Senate committees.
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Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is facing questions from the federal Departments of Treasury, Justice and the FBI. He has offered to answer questions from House and Senate committees. Matt Rourke AP
BY PETER STONE AND GREG GORDON

The man who headed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last summer is in a squeeze.

Paul Manafort is not only a key figure in the FBI investigation of whether Trump associates knew of or colluded in Russia’s cyber meddling in last year’s U.S. elections, but he also faces legal issues about his business and personal finances that could give investigators leverage to compel his cooperation.

The FBI, Justice Department and Treasury Department are examining whether any of Manafort’s millions of dollars in consulting income from pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and oligarchs were laundered from corrupt sources, whether he properly disclosed all his foreign bank accounts each year to the U.S. government and whether he paid taxes on all foreign income, two sources familiar with the inquiry said.

Also at issue is whether Manafort needed to register as a foreign agent on behalf of Ukraine or Russia and failed to do so, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the sprawling inquiries are secret and ongoing.

Financial experts at the FBI, Justice Department and Treasury Department are trying to reconstruct the globe-trotting political and business strategist’s trail of cash, the sources said. Over most of a decade beginning in 2005, Manafort and his firm had lucrative consulting contracts with Ukraine’s pro-Russian former president, Viktor Yanukovych, and at least two Ukrainian billionaires with ties to the Kremlin.

Manafort abruptly ended a five-month stint with Trump’s campaign, three months as chairman, last Aug. 19 amid questions about his financial dealings.

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in trying to distance Trump from the Russian investigation, said March 20 that Manafort had “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”

Comey confirms FBI investigating Russia interference in 2016 U.S. presidential Election
FBI Director James Comey confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that his agency is investigating possible links between the Russia government and Donald Trump campaign associates in the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
C-SPAN
Manafort has hired a crisis public relations firm and a prominent criminal defense lawyer, Reginald Brown, who was a White House aide under President George W. Bush. Manafort also has offered to make himself available to the House of Representatives and Senate Intelligence committees for interviews – but not sworn testimony.

In 2006 and 2007 alone, Manafort bought nearly $8 million in real estate, including a $3.7 million condominium in New York’s Trump Towers, a Palm Beach, Florida, home and a Manhattan condo for his daughters. Property records show that Manafort paid cash for all three homes, two of which were purchased in corporate names.

Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, confirmed an NBC report that Manafort had 10 businesses and about 15 bank accounts in Cyprus. Maloni said the accounts had been opened at the request of clients and that “no actual legal authority in Cyprus has ever directly accused Mr. Manafort of wrongdoing, nor have U.S. authorities.”

Manafort denies receiving any payments that weren’t fully reported and said that whatever he had earned had been split with a small team he worked with in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev.

All the scrutiny could spell trouble for Manafort, said Louise Shelley, a specialist in international corruption and money laundering.

“The investigations of Paul Manafort are making him vulnerable to several areas of legal exposure,” said Shelley, who teaches at George Mason University. “His long-term association (with) Ukraine, a country that has endemic corruption, makes it problematic to stay clean. . . . Why was Manafort using Cyprus, which has long been associated with Russian money laundering?”

Last summer, a New York Times story exposed a secret ledger showing $12.7 million in allegedly off-the-books payments to Manafort from the party backing former President Yanukovych and, this month, more documents purported to show that $750,000 had been routed through an offshore account held by Manafort’s firm.

Manafort’s possible knowledge of Russia’s plan to unleash a cyber offensive targeting U.S. elections is murkier. U.S. intelligence agencies accused Russia President Vladimir Putin in January of directing the plan aimed at sowing chaos, defeating Hillary Clinton and putting Trump in the White House.

The FBI began investigating possible Trump campaign collusion in Russia’s scheme last July, FBI Director James Comey said in testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on March 20. In July, Christopher Steele — a widely regarded former British spy hired to gather opposition research for political opponents of Trump — notified the FBI that Trump associates, including Manafort, coordinated with Russian officials, though most of his report remains uncorroborated.

The New York Times lent credence to Steele when it reported Feb. 14 that U.S. intelligence intercepts had picked up numerous conversations last year between several Trump campaign aides, including Manafort, and officers of a Russian intelligence service, the FSB. However, the Times said those conversations did not produce evidence that the campaign officials colluded in the scheme. Former national intelligence director James Clapper later affirmed that, as of Jan. 20, when he left office, no evidence of collusion had been found.

Maloni, Manafort’s spokesman, said his client “had no role in Russia’s efforts to tamper with the elections, and no evidence exists to even suggest that.”

But the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, California Rep. Adam Schiff, said that even at the start of its inquiry, the panel was aware of “circumstantial evidence of collusion” and “direct evidence of deception” by Trump’s associates.

In his recent testimony, Comey added kerosene to that fire, disclosing that the bureau is investigating possible coordination and indicating the FBI had opened its inquiry because it had either “a credible allegation of wrongdoing or reasonable basis to believe that an American may be acting as an agent of a foreign power.”

Manafort, a onetime political aide to Ronald Reagan, first took a consulting gig in Ukraine in 2005 for the country’s richest oligarch, mining billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, who has been credited with introducing him to Yanukovych.

Manafort also forged business ties with Dmytro Firtash, a billionaire gas mogul who supported Yanukovych. Firtash once acknowledged to the U.S. ambassador in Kiev that early in his career he had gotten a helping hand from Semyon Mogilevich, a powerful mob boss. The United States is seeking Firtash’s extradition on unrelated corruption charges.

Following Yanukovych’s unsuccessful 2006 run for Ukraine’s presidency, Manafort helped remake his image, and Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010. But his pro-Russian tilt, human rights abuses and alleged funneling of billions in public dollars to enrich local oligarchs — and himself — led his own Party of Regions to strip him of power in 2014, and he fled to Russia.

Questions about moving money

Manafort’s biggest legal risk could relate to scrutiny about how he moved his money.

U.S. money-laundering laws bar movements of funds that originated from a criminal enterprise or from an individual sanctioned by the State Department or that were stolen from a foreign government.

Earlier this month, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament, Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist, alleged that Manafort had signed a phony $750,000 invoice in 2009 that billed an offshore company in Belize for Yanukovych’s political party to buy 501 computers. The money was to be routed through a Kyrgyzstan bank, according to The Washington Post. The $750,000 payment was among 22 entries associated with Manafort in a ledger recovered a few months after Yanukovych was ousted from power in 2014.

Belize records obtained by McClatchy show that the offshore company allegedly was used to bill Yanukoyich’s party. Neocom Systems Limited was registered in the Central American nation on Feb. 11, 2005, and ceased operating on March 1, 2011 – dates corresponding with several of the years Manafort worked for Ukrainian clients.

Maloni said “the legislator who is making these allegations (Leshchenko) is suspected separately of trying to blackmail Manafort and his family” – an accusation Leshchenko denies.

That type of transaction draws the attention of federal money-laundering investigators, said Stefan Cassella, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section.

“You’re looking for transactions that are unusually or unnecessarily complicated” and make no business sense, he said.

“In general, if someone is conducting transactions in a complicated way, using shell corporations, using offshore bank accounts or using accounts in countries where they otherwise aren’t doing any business, it suggests that there may be a motive to conceal or disguise something,” Cassella said, “and that bears investigating.”

Investigators are also digging into real estate acquisitions Manafort made in New York and Florida a decade ago, to see whether these properties were bought with ill-gotten money, the sources said.

Following that kind of trail can be time-consuming, involving requests for assistance from countries that have signed an international treaty committing them to share financial records and hitting impasses with tax havens that don’t play by those rules. Since most international money moved to the United States must go through a New York bank, grand jury subpoenas for bank records and emails are commonly needed, Cassella said.

Tax issues from offshore accounts

Earlier this year, Treasury obtained Manafort’s records from his Cyprus bank accounts, a development first reported by The Associated Press and confirmed by McClatchy.

U.S. residents with foreign bank accounts must file annual statements showing their taxable income, said Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer and an expert in offshore money laundering.

“The penalties are huge if you file a false statement,” said Jonathan Winer, a Washington lawyer who was the State Department’s chief money-laundering specialist during the Clinton administration.

If the violations are determined to be willful, “they can grab half your assets” in each account, Winer said in a phone interview. A conviction could bring up to 10 years in prison, he said.

In a statement to McClatchy, Manafort defended his use of offshore bank accounts.

“Like many companies doing business internationally, my company was paid via wire transfer, typically using clients’ preferred financial institutions and instructions.”

Maloni, his spokesman, declined to address questions about whether Manafort had filed proper annual tax forms on his offshore accounts or paid taxes on them. He reiterated that Manafort “looks forward to meeting with those conducting serious investigations of these issues to discuss the facts.”

Requirements to register as agent

The Justice Department and FBI are looking into whether some of Manafort’s political and business consulting in Ukraine and for a Russian oligarch ran afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the sources said.

The 79-year-old law requires individuals who are paid to advocate on behalf of foreign governments, state-controlled businesses or foreign political parties to register with the Justice Department and regularly report on their activities.

The Justice Department rarely pursues foreign agents registration cases, except those with national security implications or “larger foreign policy issues,” said Joe Sandler, a lawyer with expertise in the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Last week, The Associated Press reported that Manafort had also signed a contract in 2006 to consult for a Russian billionaire, aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, worth $10 million annually. Deripaska is known to have close ties to Putin.

Manafort said he assisted Deripaska on business and personal issues, but that his work “did not involve representing Russian political interests.” In ads in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post this week, Deripaska denied asking Manafort to do work at the Kremlin’s behest.

KEVIN G. HALL CONTRIBUTED TO THIS REPORT.

Stone is a McClatchy special correspondent.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation- ... rylink=cpy
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 10, 2017 11:44 am


Paul Manafort and his “Olig-Daddy”

When Oleg Deripaska and Paul Manafort hooked up in 2004, Deripaska was richer, and doing more deals, than anyone alive.

In the winter of 2004, The Ukraine, Russia’s next-door neighbor, had a revolution, or a putsch, depending on your point of view. It was either a peaceful “Orange Revolution” which overthrew the corrupt Putin-backed Viktor Yanukovich, or a diabolical opening gambit of the Fourth Reich.

Yanukovich’s opponent was pro-Western opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko was poisoned, almost died, but held on to win. Afterwards, a murder investigation was launched against Yanukovich’s main backer, who then turned to Paul Manafort for a little image adjustment.



Paul Manafort worked on the presidential campaign of the candidate whose side poisoned the other guy. Remember? The one with the hideous huge bumps on his face?

After that, Manafort’s work as Trump’s unpaid campaign chairman last year must have seemed a piece of cake, at least until Trump asked him to resign after revelations that Manafort orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation until 2014 on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling pro-Russian political party.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, people who lobby in the U.S. on behalf of foreign political leaders or political parties must provide detailed reports about their actions. Reportedly, Manafort did not disclose any details of his lobbying work to the Justice Department.

If Manafort rolls (turns state’s evidence), as now seems likely, and eventually goes into witness protection to fend off Russian assassins…For the sake of anonymity, will they make him give up the pink ties?
http://www.madcowprod.com/2017/03/31/ru ... more-13773
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 10, 2017 12:47 pm

This Article Doesn't Talk It Screams

Tom Williams
ByJOSH MARSHALLPublishedAPRIL 10, 2017, 11:06 AM EDT
9762Views
Glenn Thrush of The New York Times has a very interesting article out on Paul Manafort over the weekend. It contains no one blockbuster piece of information. In fact, it is oddly understated, leaving it to the reader to draw what I think is a fairly straightforward conclusion. The article is based on access Thrush received to a series of emails and memos from Manafort (Glenn, WTF? Please publish the actual memos and emails.)

The upshot is that Manafort aggressively courted Trump for the job, sold himself creatively and - key for Trump, one imagines - offered to work for free.

I'm pretty sure we knew that Manafort wasn't being paid. This was the case for several key people on the campaign, if memory serves. What we didn't know was the full mix of facts - most notably, how much Manafort sought the gig.

Remember that Manafort was first brought on board not as campaign manager but - notionally - to manage the delegate hunt and wrangling in the lead up to the GOP convention and at the convention itself. It later became clear that he served as de facto campaign manager pretty much from the start when he came on board in March 2016. On its face, this delegate wrangling role had a certain logic to it since Manafort had been involved in wrangling delegates at the semi-contested 1976 GOP convention in which incumbent Gerald Ford saw off a challenge from Ronald Reagan. It was commonly said that Manafort was the only GOP player with experience at a contested convention - thus making him a key asset for Trump who looked likely to face just such a challenge in Cleveland.

In fact, this really made very little sense. The nominal rules of conventions may be broadly similar. But the actual rules of presidential politics are profoundly different. What's more, delegate wrangling is in many ways an exercise in patronage and intra-party factional politics. On those fronts, Manafort had been out of the game for a very, very long time. The idea that Manafort was a silver bullet for a contested convention or even a key asset was never really credible.

This isn't to say that hiring Manafort was crazy. He had a rather storied career as a campaign operative. He brought some ability and level of experience. But he hadn't been in the business for something like 20 years. Manafort was mainly the thousandth person you would have thought of for the job. Bannon was a crazy pick in a totally different way. But he came with the Mercer imprimatur and to his credit perhaps no one had a better feel for the contemporary xenophobic hard right than he did.

So why Manafort get hired? That's a very good question. The upshot of the story, though it doesn't say so directly, is that there's no clear explanation at all. The go between, according to Thrush's article, was Tom Barrack, a mutual friend who seems like a surprisingly normal figure for the Trump world. Who knows whether there's a story there. The key thing seems to be though that Manafort really, really wanted the gig. And he was willing to do it for free, even though there's nothing in Manafort's history that suggests any interest in doing anything for free ever.

Why was Manafort so focused on getting in with Trump?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thi ... it-screams



To Charm Trump, Paul Manafort Sold Himself as an Affordable Outsider
By GLENN THRUSHAPRIL 8, 2017


Paul Manafort, then Donald J. Trump’s campaign manager, and Stephen Miller, one of the president’s current advisers, before a speech at the Trump SoHo in Manhattan in June. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort is the rarest of professional pitchmen: one who knows how to sell to a salesman.

That was evident by the effort he made last year to gain a foothold in President Trump’s campaign, a successful pitch documented by letters and memos that were made available by a former Trump associate.

On Feb. 29, 2016, Mr. Manafort, the former lobbyist and Republican operative who now sits at the nexus of investigations into Russia’s meddling in the presidential election, reached out to Mr. Trump with a slick, carefully calibrated offer that appealed to the candidate’s need for professional guidance, thirst for political payback — and parsimony.

The letters and memos provide a telling glimpse into how Mr. Trump invited an enigmatic international fixer, who is currently under investigation by United States intelligence services, a Senate committee and investigators in Ukraine, to the apex of his campaign with a minimum of vetting. The answer? Through family and friends, handshakes and hyperbole.

Mr. Manafort, who has not been accused of any crimes — and who denies any wrongdoing in his political, business and investment dealings — is nonetheless a central figure in the investigation into the interactions of Trump campaign officials with foreign governments. How he got to know Mr. Trump, and how he rose from overseeing the candidate’s operations at the Republican convention to the entire campaign, is very likely to be a focus during coming Senate hearings about possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

“Donald Trump and I had some business in the 1980s but we had no relationship until the Trump campaign called me,” Mr. Manafort, who did not dispute the substance of the documents, wrote in an email forwarded by a spokesman. “A role at the convention was all I was ever interested in; the fact that this role expanded was quite unexpected.”

But it was Mr. Manafort who initiated the process for getting a job on the campaign, the documents show. It began when he sent two succinct memos to Mr. Trump through Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a mutual friend.

A couple of weeks earlier, Mr. Barrack met with Mr. Manafort for “coffee and snacks” at the Montage hotel in Beverly Hills, according to Jason Maloni, Mr. Manafort’s spokesman. He added that Mr. Barrack wanted his old friend to help the struggling campaign deal with potential challenges at the convention.

Mr. Maloni said that the memos were intended only to be talking points for Mr. Barrack’s pitch to the Trump family, but that after reading the packet, the candidate requested a one-on-one meeting with Mr. Manafort.

Mr. Manafort, for his part, was eager to join up: At the time, he had told another friend, who was also close to the campaign, that he was eager to get back into the game of presidential politics.

Mr. Barrack, in turn, appended an effusive cover letter to the memos that described Mr. Manafort in terms that Mr. Trump would like, calling him “the most experienced and lethal of managers” and “a killer.”

Mr. Manafort touted his overseas work, now the subject of investigations in the United States and Ukraine, as proof he was not part of the Washington establishment that Mr. Trump hated.

“I have managed Presidential campaigns around the world,” Mr. Manafort wrote. “I have had no client relationships dealing with Washington since around 2005. I have avoided the political establishment in Washington since 2005.”

“I will not bring Washington baggage,” he added.

Mr. Barrack passed Mr. Manafort’s pitch to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, who were Mr. Trump’s closest advisers, as they are now.

Ms. Trump printed it out for her father — who hates reading documents online — along with Mr. Barrack’s recommendation that Mr. Manafort be hired to manage the Trump operation at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Mr. Manafort was brought onto the campaign by the end of March.

Photo

Thomas J. Barrack Jr., who recommended that Mr. Manafort be hired to manage the Trump operation at the Republican convention in Cleveland. Credit Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press
Mr. Manafort and Mr. Trump, who were not close until the campaign, had brushed shoulders over the years. In one of his memos Mr. Manafort refers vaguely to work he performed, years ago, to clear noisy airspace over Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago — which he incorrectly spells “Mar a Largo.”

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, has tried to minimize Mr. Manafort’s relationship with the president.

“There is a fine line between people who want to be part of something that they never had an official role in, and people who actually played a role in either the campaign or transition,” he said, amid a smattering of laughter in the briefing room last month. He added, “Obviously there has been discussion of Paul Manafort, who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”

But Mr. Manafort and Mr. Trump worked closely for about six months during the crucial middle passage of the campaign, when Mr. Manafort urged the recalcitrant candidate to restrain his attacks on fellow Republicans, to stick to a script and, above all, to spend more money on organizing and ads.

At the time Mr. Manafort was brought on, Mr. Trump was surging — and flailing. He had won the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, but he was deeply worried about an establishment-strikes-back scenario that could result in his defeat at the Republican convention.

He decided that Mr. Manafort should replace Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager, in June after a push by Mr. Trump’s adult children and Mr. Kushner. But Mr. Trump thought Mr. Manafort was not tough enough, and he was gone by the fall, replaced by Stephen K. Bannon, who was much more of a raw-rage outsider.

Still, Mr. Manafort made a good first impression. Mr. Trump, several aides said, reacted favorably to Mr. Manafort’s initial pitch and his experience, and he also remarked on Mr. Manafort’s tanned, no-hair-out-of-place appearance — telling staffers that his new associate looked much younger than a man in his late 60s.

In five single-spaced pages of punchy talking points, Mr. Manafort showed how as a onetime lobbyist he had adeptly won over rich and powerful business and political leaders, many of them oligarchs or dictators, in Russia, Ukraine, the Philippines and Pakistan.

He began by telling the candidate he lived on an upper floor of Trump Tower. This was no trivial point: It signaled his wealth and a willingness to work 15-hour days in a building that housed both his lavish apartment and Mr. Trump’s bare-bones campaign. It also meant Mr. Manafort had already put his money — in the form of an apartment purchase — into Mr. Trump’s brand, which meant a lot to the candidate, a transactional developer and politician, aides said.

Mr. Manafort’s friendship with Mr. Barrack, the private equity investor, helped, too. Mr. Barrack, who did not respond to a request for comment, is one of the few people whom Mr. Trump trusts.

Regarding politics, Mr. Manafort cast himself as a onetime insider who had turned on the establishment — and a tough guy who would go after Mr. Trump’s harshest critics among the Republican elite.

At one point, he described Karl Rove, a former adviser to George W. Bush who was organizing an anti-Trump effort, as “my blood enemy in politics, going back to the College in the 1960s.”

Mr. Rove said Mr. Manafort was referring to a bitter fight for leadership of the College Republicans that pitted a candidate backed by Mr. Manafort and his close friend Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, against Mr. Rove and Lee Atwater.

Mr. Rove said he did not view Mr. Manafort as an enemy. “Jeez, it seems sorta silly,” Mr. Rove wrote in an email. “I frankly haven’t had any dealings and only rare sightings of him in the years since.”

Mr. Manafort also cast himself as a warrior against the party’s conservatives, even at a time when Mr. Trump was reaching out to the right wing and courting evangelical Christians. Speaking of his previous experience as a convention manager for several Republican presidential candidates, Mr. Manafort wrote, “I have had to confront the Extreme Right, Tea Party, Rush Limbaughs etc.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/t ... .html?_r=0
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 12, 2017 9:27 am

AP confirms Manafort's 'Black Ledger' Ukraine payouts
http://thehill.com/policy/international ... uts-report



There’s proof that ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort lied about not being paid by Russia proxies: report
The Manafort report was one of two pieces of evidence that revealed Trump's campaign downplayed Russia connection
TAYLOR LINK

There's proof that ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort lied about not being paid by Russia proxies: report

Paul Manafort and Carter Page, two advisers of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, are officially in the thick of the Russia investigation. The Washington Post confirmed late Tuesday that the FBI obtained a secret court order last summer to monitor the communications of Page, while the Associated Press reported that payments Manafort has received in the past can be traced back to a “black ledger” that surfaced last year in Ukraine.

In August, Manafort denied ever receiving payments from the Russian or Ukranian government, and said that the suggestion he had accepted cash payments was “unfounded, silly and nonsensical.” Now, the AP has obtained financial records that show that at least $1.2 million in payments that were listed in the ledger next to Manafort’s name were indeed received by his consulting firm in the United States. The payments came in 2007 and 2009 and provide the first evidence that support the credibility of the black ledger.

Manafort told the AP that any money he received was through legitimate political consulting work and that there was nothing unlawful about it. Last month, a Ukranian lawmaker said that one of the payments listed in the black ledger, for $750,000, was part of a money-laundering scheme that would interest U.S. authorities.

While Manafort insists he never did work for the Russian government, the Department of Justice sought and received a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on another Trump associate, Page. By granting the warrant, the judge found there was probable cause to believe Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power, in this case Russia, U.S. officials told The Post. It is the clearest evidence yet that the FBI had reason to believe that a Trump campaign adviser was communicating with Russia.

Page says that the existence of the FISA warrant proves Trump’s claim that former President Barack Obama “tapped” Trump Tower.
http://www.salon.com/2017/04/12/theres- ... ia-report/


APRIL 12, 2017, 5:18 A.M.
REPORTING FROM WASHINGTON
Records show ex-Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort's firm received payout from Ukraine ledger under investgation
Associated Press

Last August, a handwritten ledger surfaced in Ukraine with dollar amounts and dates next to the name of Paul Manafort, who was then chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Ukrainian investigators called it evidence of off-the-books payments from a pro-Russian political party — and part of a larger pattern of corruption under the country's former president. Manafort, who worked for the party as an international political consultant, has publicly questioned the ledger's authenticity.

Now, financial records newly obtained by the Associated Press confirm that at least $1.2 million in payments listed in the ledger next to Manafort's name were actually received by his consulting firm in the United States. They include payments in 2007 and 2009, providing the first evidence that Manafort's firm received at least some money listed in the so-called Black Ledger.

The two payments came years before Manafort became involved in Trump's campaign, but for the first time bolster the credibility of the ledger. They also put the ledger in a new light, as federal prosecutors in the U.S. have been investigating Manafort's work in Eastern Europe as part of a larger anti-corruption probe.

Separately, Manafort is also under scrutiny as part of congressional and FBI investigations into possible contacts between Trump associates and Russia's government under President Vladimir Putin during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. The payments detailed in the ledger and confirmed by the documents obtained by the AP are unrelated to the 2016 presidential campaign and came years before Manafort worked as Trump's unpaid campaign chairman.

In a statement to the AP, Manafort did not deny that his firm received the money but said "any wire transactions received by my company are legitimate payments for political consulting work that was provided. I invoiced my clients and they paid via wire transfer, which I received through a U.S. bank."

Manafort noted that he agreed to be paid according to his "clients' preferred financial institutions and instructions."

Previously, Manafort and his spokesman, Jason Maloni, have maintained that the ledger was fabricated and said no public evidence existed that Manafort or others received payments recorded in it.

The AP, however, identified in the records two payments received by Manafort that aligned with the ledger: one for $750,000 that a Ukrainian lawmaker said last month was part of a money-laundering effort that should be investigated by U.S. authorities. The other was $455,249 and also matched a ledger entry.

The newly obtained records also expand the global scope of Manafort's financial activities related to his Ukrainian political consulting, because both payments came from companies once registered in the Central American country of Belize. Last month, the AP reported that the U.S. government has examined Manafort's financial transactions in the Mediterranean country of Cyprus as part of its probe.

Federal prosecutors have been looking into Manafort's work for years as part of an effort to recover Ukrainian assets stolen after the 2014 ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, who fled to Russia. No charges have been filed as part of the investigation.

Manafort, a longtime Republican political operative, led the presidential campaign from March until August last year when Trump asked him to resign. The resignation came after a tumultuous week in which the New York Times revealed that Manafort's name appeared in the Ukraine ledger — although the newspaper said at the time that officials were unsure whether Manafort actually received the money — and after the AP separately reported that he had orchestrated a covert Washington lobbying operation until 2014 on behalf of Ukraine's pro-Russian Party of Regions.

Officials with the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau, which is investigating corruption under Yanukovich, have said they believe the ledger is genuine. But they have previously noted that they have no way of knowing whether Manafort received the money listed next to his name. The bureau said it is not investigating Manafort because he is not a Ukrainian citizen.

Still, Manafort's work continues to draw attention in Ukrainian politics.

Last month, Ukrainian lawmaker Serhiy Leshchenko revealed an invoice bearing the letterhead of Manafort's namesake company, Davis Manafort, that Leshchenko said was crafted to conceal a payment to Manafort as a purchase of 501 computers.

The AP provided to Manafort the amounts of the payments, dates and number of the bank account where they were received. Manafort told the AP that he was unable to review his own banking records showing receipt of the payments because his bank destroyed the records after a standard seven-year retention period. He said Tuesday the "computer sales contract is a fraud."

"The signature is not mine, and I didn't sell computers," he said in a statement. "What is clear, however, is individuals with political motivations are taking disparate pieces of information and distorting their significance through a campaign of smear and innuendo."

Leshchenko said last month the 2009 invoice was one of about 50 pages of documents, including private paperwork and copies of employee-issued debit cards, that were found in Manafort's former Kiev office by a new tenant.

The amount of the invoice — $750,000— and the payment date of Oct. 14, 2009, matches one entry on the ledger indicating payments to Manafort from the Party of Regions. The invoice was addressed to Neocom Systems Ltd., a company formerly registered in Belize, and included the account and routing numbers and postal address for Manafort's account at a branch of Wachovia National Bank in Alexandria, Va.

The AP had previously been unable to independently verify the $750,000 payment went to a Manafort company, but the newly obtained financial records reflect Manafort's receipt of that payment. The records show that Davis Manafort received the amount from Neocom Systems the day after the date of the invoice.

Leshchenko contended to AP that Yanukovich, as Ukraine's leader, paid Manafort money that came from his government's budget and was "stolen from Ukrainian citizens." He said: "Money received by Manafort has to be returned to the Ukrainian people."

Leshchenko said U.S. authorities should investigate what he described as corrupt deals between Manafort and Yanukovich. "It's about a U.S. citizen and money was transferred to a U.S. bank account," he said.

A $455,249 payment in November 2007 also matches the amount in the ledger. It came from Graten Alliance Ltd., a company that had also been registered in Belize. It is now inactive.

The AP reported last month that federal prosecutors are looking into Manafort's financial transactions in Cyprus, an island nation once known as a favored locale for money laundering.

Among those transactions was a $1-million payment in October 2009 routed through the Bank of Cyprus. The money was deposited into an account controlled by a Manafort-linked company, then left the account on the same day, broken into two disbursements of $500,000, according to documents obtained by the AP.

The records of Manafort's Cypriot transactions were requested by the U.S. Treasury Department Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which works internationally with agencies to track money laundering and the movement of illicit funds around the globe.

Dozens of Ukrainian political figures mentioned in the Black Ledger are under investigation in Ukraine. The anti-corruption bureau, which has been looking into the Black Ledger, publicly confirmed the authenticity of the signature of one top official mentioned there. In December, the bureau accused Mykhaylo Okhendovsky of receiving more than $160,000 from Party of Regions officials in 2012, when he was Ukraine's main election official.

The bureau said it would identify more suspects in the coming months.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/washing ... story.html



The day Paul Manafort stepped down, he received $13 million from Donald Trump’s associates
By Bill Palmer | April 12, 2017 | 0

One day after his bank records were found to have aligned with Ukrainian records asserting that he was paid tens of millions of dollars by a Kremlin intermediary (link), Paul Manafort announced today that he’ll be retroactively registering as a foreign agent (link). But now another shoe has dropped. According to the New York Times, the day Manafort stepped down from the Donald Trump campaign, he created a shell company which Trump’s allies filled with $13 million in “loans.”

The stunning new revelation suggests that Donald Trump may have had his financial associates pay the radioactive Paul Manafort to go away, after allegations of the Kremlin payments surfaced during the height of the 2016 campaign. Manafort had been running the Trump campaign while taking no salary, so his departure from the campaign would not have placed any sudden financial strain on him. Yet nonetheless, Manafort instantly borrowed millions from Trump associate Alexander Rovt, who has a long financial association with Trump hotels.

At the time Manafort resigned from the Donald Trump campaign, he had been its chairman for several months, and had also briefly served as campaign manager. The cynical interpretation would be that Trump had his associates funnel the money to Manafort in exchange for stepping down quietly and keeping any campaign secrets to himself. This part is not proven. However, a number of other Trump campaign advisers having secretly met with Russian government officials during the election, and at least two of them having acted so suspiciously that the FBI was able to obtain FISA surveillance warrants on them. So there was quite a lot of dirt for a departing campaign chairman to have kept quiet about.

It’s not yet clear if the loans to Manafort (source: NY Times) have been paid back, or if they will be paid back — or if they were merely “loans” in the sense that Deutsche Bank keeps mysteriously funneling money into Donald Trump’s hands even though he tends not to pay his loans back. Deutsche, in turn, was recently busted by the State of New York for laundering Russian money into clients in New York City.
http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/day ... ates/2295/


Last 72 hrs:
1 Russian hacker arrested in Spain.
2 Page had FISA warrant on him.
3 Manafort received $1.2M payment from pro-Putin stooge.
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They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 19, 2017 11:32 am

POLITICS 04/17/2017 09:46 pm ET
Report: Paul Manafort Now Advising Chinese Billionaire On Trump Infrastructure Contracts
Pacific Construction Group wants in on the president’s $1 trillion plan, the Financial Times reports.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/pau ... mg00000004
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 16, 2017 2:27 pm

MAY 16 2017, 7:38 AM ET
Manafort Got $3.5M Mystery Mortgage, Paid No Tax
by TOM WINTER and KENZI ABOU-SABE

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort took out a $3.5 million mortgage through a shell company just after leaving the campaign, but the mortgage document that explains how he would pay it back was never filed — and Manafort's company never paid $36,000 in taxes that would be due on the loan.

In addition, despite telling NBC News previously that all his real estate transactions are transparent and include his name and signature, Manafort's name and signature do not appear on any of the loan documents that are publicly available. A Manafort spokesperson said the $3.5 million loan was repaid in December, but also said paperwork showing the repayment was not filed until he was asked about the loan by NBC News.

News of the missing documents comes as New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is taking a "preliminary look" at Manafort's real estate transactions, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Image: A satellite view of Paul Manafort's home in Bridgehampton, N.Y.
A satellite view of Paul Manafort's home in Bridgehampton, N.Y. Google Maps
Related: Former Trump Aide Manafort Bought New York Homes With Cash

On August 19, 2016, Manafort left the Trump campaign amid media reports about his previous work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine, including allegations he received millions of dollars in payments.

That same day, Manafort created a holding company called Summerbreeze LLC. Several weeks later, a document called a UCC filed with the state of New York shows that Summerbreeze took out a $3.5 million loan on Manafort's home in the tony beach enclave of Bridgehampton.

Manafort's name does not appear on the UCC filing, but Summerbreeze LLC gives his Florida address as a contact, and lists his Bridgehampton home as collateral.

A review of New York state and Suffolk County records shows the loan was made by S C 3, a subsidiary of Spruce Capital, which was co-founded by Joshua Crane, who has partnered with Donald Trump on real estate deals. Spruce is also partially funded by Ukrainian-American real-estate magnate Alexander Rovt, who tried to donate $10,000 to Trump's presidential campaign on Election Day but had all but the legal maximum of $2,700 returned.

Related: FBI Making Inquiries Into Ex-Trump Campaign Manager's Foreign Ties

The mortgage notice for the loan, however, was never entered into government records by the lender. A mortgage notice normally names the lender, and gives the interest rate, the frequency with which payments must be made, and the length of the mortgage.

Real estate experts contacted by NBC News called the omission "highly unusual," though not illegal.

David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in real estate law, said, "It would be totally ill-advised to not record the loan on the property that is being secured. … Recording the mortgage on the property protects the lender."

Without it, there's no public record that the borrower owes money.

Play Exclusive: Manafort-Linked Accounts on Cyprus Raised Red Flag Facebook TwitterEmbed
Exclusive: Manafort-Linked Accounts on Cyprus Raised Red Flag 2:42
The mortgage notice would also show the mortgage tax has been paid. A party who does not file a mortgage notice but does pay tax would have to file a separate affidavit, which would be in the county's property file. Suffolk County records do not show that the tax was paid.

Suffolk County charges a 1.05 percent tax rate on mortgages. Absent any exemptions, the amount owed would be about $36,750.

Manafort's spokesperson, Jason Maloni, said the loan was only meant to serve as a bridge loan. A copy of another required filing, the UCC 3, made available to NBC News by Maloni shows that the loan was repaid in December. Maloni said the UCC 3 was not filed until May 2, after NBC News asked about the loan. The UCC 3 has not yet appeared in state or Suffolk County records.

Why was there no mortgage notice? Manafort's real estate attorney, Bruce Baldinger, said that the loan was sent for recording, "in due course," by the title company but was returned by the county recording clerk "due to deficiencies in accompanying documents. Mr. Manafort had no role in this process other than assisting counsel in remedying the deficiencies."

Suffolk County does not keep records of failed or improper mortgage filings.

Play Navigating Manafort's Web of Ties to Russia and Ukraine Facebook TwitterEmbed
Navigating Manafort's Web of Ties to Russia and Ukraine 8:34
Baldinger said Spruce Capital had required that Manafort create the LLC to receive the loan, and that the Hamptons property had previously been held in the name of Kathleen Manafort, Paul's wife. Baldinger said that Manafort himself was never the borrower.

The deed for the Bridgehampton house was transferred from Kathleen Manafort to Summberbreeze LLC in December 2016.

There is also a question as to how the loan came about and how the lender and borrower were introduced. Two people involved say that independent broker Millenium Estates LLC brought the deal to Spruce.

However, Manafort's spokesperson Maloni said Millenium wasn't the independent broker.

Baldinger said that the relationship with Spruce Capital originated with an independent mortgage broker who was introduced to Manafort by Manafort's son-in-law. "The broker then introduced me to Spruce Capital," said Baldinger.

"Prior to the transaction, Mr. Manafort had no knowledge of either the broker, Spruce Capital, or its principals. After the repayment of the loan, Mr. Manafort had no further dealings or contact with Spruce Capital or its principals, nor had he any reason to be in any contact with them."

Image: Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort smiles during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio on July 19, 2016. Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, file
A spokesperson for Spruce Capital said the loan came from an unnamed independent broker. Asked about Spruce backer Alexander Rovt and whether he had any role in the deal, the spokesperson said "We are unaware of any connection to Alexander Rovt."

Related: Trump Aide Manafort Scrutinized for Foreign Business Ties

Rovt is a Ukrainian émigré to the U.S. who earned more than $1 billion selling fertilizer in Ukraine and buying real estate in New York. In 2011, he sold all his overseas interests to Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch who had been Manafort's business partner in a failed $850 million hotel redevelopment deal.

Firtash is under U.S. indictment in an unrelated case and facing extradition from Vienna, Austria.

A spokesperson for Alexander Rovt said, "As far as he knows, [Manafort's loan] came to Spruce through an unrelated broker like any other deal."

Manafort's LLC, Summerbreeze, took out a new $9.5 million loan in December using the Hamptons property as part of the collateral. The lender is Federal Savings Bank of Chicago, whose chief executive Steve Calk was an economic adviser to the Trump campaign.

NBC News and other media outlets reported in March that Manafort had used LLCs to buy four properties in New York City between 2006 and 2014 for cash, and had then taken out mortgages on them.

Manafort said through a spokesman at the time that his real-estate transactions were "executed in a transparent fashion and my identity was disclosed — in fact my name is right there on the documents in one of today's news reports."
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man ... ax-n759866
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 16, 2017 9:10 pm

Justin Miller‏Verified account @justinjm1 1m1 minute ago
More
NBC News: Subpoena issued for Manafort loan taken out after he resigned from Trump campaign
2 replies 54 retweets 44 likes



Image

Schneiderman, Vance conducting separate probes into Manafort’s real estate deals
Authorities said to be investigating former Trump campaign manager for possible money laundering, fraud
May 15, 2017 08:34AM


From left: Paul Manafort, Eric Schneiderman and Cyrus Vance
New York state’s attorney general and Manhattan’s district attorney have reportedly opened investigations into former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s real estate deals.
Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. are in the early stages of separate investigations into Manafort’s dealings, Bloomberg reported.
Manafort bought condos and apartments in New York – including a $3.7 million condo at Trump Tower – Los Angeles, Virginia and Florida, and used many of those properties as collateral as he borrowed from companies with ties to the president.
Soon after leaving the campaign, Manafort received a $3.5 million loan from Spruce Capital Partners, which has Ukrainian ties through one of its backers, billionaire Alexander Rovt.
Schneiderman’s office is likely focusing on whether any of the deals were used for money laundering, while Vance is most likely looking into whether there was any fraud committed, the Wall Street Journal reported.
A spokesperson for Manafort told Bloomberg, “If someone’s leaking information about an investigation, that’s a crime.”
The Justice Department last month requested banking records for Manafort as part of the growing probes related to possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 elections.
Investigators requested Manafort’s banking records from Citizens Financial Group, which gave him a $2.7 million loan last year to refinance a Manhattan condo. [Bloomberg, WSJ] — Rich Bockmann
https://therealdeal.com/2017/05/15/schn ... ate-deals/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue May 23, 2017 2:19 am

NBC: Manafort, Stone Turn Docs Over To Senate Intel Committee In Russia Probe

By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published MAY 22, 2017 5:04 PM
Two former Trump allies have turned over documents requested by the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of its probe into possible collusion by Trump campaign officials and Russian operatives interfering in the U.S. election, NBC News reported Monday.

An anonymous congressional source aware of the investigation told NBC that former campaign manager Paul Manafort and longtime ally Roger Stone have turned over documents that the committee asked for in early May. The requested material includes information about Russia-related real estate transactions, email or other written communications with Russians, and in-person meetings and phone calls with Russian officials or businesspeople.

The source said told NBC it was unclear if the documents fully complied with the committee’s inquiry.

Manafort spokesperson Jason Maloni confirmed to NBC that Manafort submitted documents, but later would not confirm in an email to TPM that Manafort did so.

Stone told NBC News via email: “I gave them all documents that were consistent with their specific request.”

Short-lived campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page has yet to respond to a similar request, per the report. And former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on Monday announced that he would not do so.

In a letter to the committee obtained by the Associated Press, Flynn’s legal team said that “escalating public frenzy against him” and the special counsel probe into Russia’s election meddling (and “related matters”) have prompted him to invoke his Fifth Amendment protection.

“Any testimony he provides could be used against him,” the letter reads, according to the AP
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/p ... ssia-probe
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 25, 2017 7:02 pm

Manafort called Priebus over Russia allegations: report
http://thehill.com/homenews/news/335080 ... ons-report


Report: Manafort Advised Trump Camp On Russia Firestorm After Parting Ways

Douliery Olivier/Sipa USA USA
By ALLEGRA KIRKLAND Published MAY 25, 2017 10:02 AM

As the rumors of Trump campaign staffers’ ties to Russia piled up in the days before inauguration, the team got a call offering advice from a rather unlikely source: former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Despite being forced out of his role because of his own ties to businessmen and politicians close to the Kremlin, Manafort called Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus to push back on the ballooning scandal, four people familiar with the conversation told Politico.

The call reportedly focused on an explosive, yet largely unverified, dossier compiled by a former British intelligence officer detailing allegedly compromising ties between Trump associates—including Manafort—and Russian officials.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” a person close to Manafort told Politico.

That was only one of a handful of conversations Manafort had with members of Trump’s campaign and Trump himself after leaving the campaign in August, according to the report.

The GOP operative is now one of the central figures in federal and congressional investigations into potential collusion between the Trump team and Russian operatives trying to swing the election.

According to a Wednesday New York Times report, U.S. intelligence officials intercepted communications in which Russian officials bragged about their ability to use Manafort and ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn to influence Trump during the campaign.

Manafort, who has denied any wrongdoing, appears to be cooperating with investigators. This week, he complied with the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to turn over records detailing any Russia-related meetings, communications and real estate holdings.

A federal grand jury has also issued a subpoena for some of Manafort’s bank records.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/manafor ... ia-scandal


Manafort advised Trump team on Russia scandal
Former campaign chief remained in contact with the president and his aides after the FBI launched its Russia probe.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL 05/25/2017 05:22 AM EDT
In this July 17, 2016 photo, Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort talks to reporters on the floor of the Republican National Convention at Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Paul Manafort was forced to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman due to his ties to Kremlin-aligned politicians in Europe. |

Months after the FBI began examining Paul Manafort as part of a probe into ties between President Donald Trump’s team and Russia, Manafort called Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to push back against the mounting controversy, according to four people familiar with the call.

It was about a week before Trump’s inauguration, and Manafort wanted to brief Trump’s team on alleged inaccuracies in a recently released dossier of memos written by a former British spy for Trump’s opponents that alleged compromising ties among Russia, Trump and Trump’s associates, including Manafort.

“On the day that the dossier came out in the press, Paul called Reince, as a responsible ally of the president would do, and said this story about me is garbage, and a bunch of the other stuff in there seems implausible,” said a person close to Manafort.

Manafort had been forced to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman five months earlier amid scrutiny of his work for Kremlin-aligned politicians and businessmen in Eastern Europe. But he had continued talking to various members of Trump’s team and had even had at least two conversations with Trump, according to people close to Manafort or Trump.

While the people say the conversations were mostly of a political or, in some cases, personal nature, the conversation with Priebus, described by the four people familiar with it, was related to the scandal now consuming Manafort and the Trump presidency.

It suggests that Manafort recognized months ago the potentially serious problems posed by the investigation, even as Trump himself continues to publicly dismiss it as a politically motivated witch hunt while predicting it won’t find anything compromising.

The discussion also could provide fodder for an expanding line of inquiry for both the FBI and congressional investigators. They’ve increasingly focused on the Trump team’s handling of the investigations, including evolving explanations from the White House, and the president’s unsuccessful efforts to get the FBI to drop part of the investigation, followed by his firing of FBI Director James Comey. All that has led to claims that the president and his team may have opened themselves to obstruction of justice charges.

According to a GOP operative familiar with Manafort’s conversation with Priebus, Manafort suggested the errors in the dossier discredited it, as well as the FBI investigation, since the bureau had reached a tentative (but later aborted) agreement to pay the former British spy to continue his research and had briefed both Trump and then-President Barack Obama on the dossier.

Manafort told Priebus that the dossier was tainted by inaccuracies and by the motivations of the people who initiated it, whom he alleged were Democratic activists and donors working in cahoots with Ukrainian government officials, according to the operative.

Manafort discussed with other Trump allies the possibility of launching a countervailing investigation into efforts by Ukrainian government officials who allegedly worked in conjunction with allies of Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to damage Trump’s campaign, according to the operative. The operative added that Manafort saw such an investigation as a way to distract attention from the parallel FBI and congressional Russia probes.

Priebus and the White House press office declined to comment, as did the Ukrainian presidential administration, though it previously challenged the notion it meddled in the U.S. presidential election.

Priebus did, however, alert Trump to the conversation with Manafort, according to the operative familiar with the conversation and a person close to Trump.

But someone else familiar with the call described it as “a very vague topline discussion” that lasted two or three minutes and was short on details. “The only thing discussed was that the dossier was incorrect, full of lies, and was a joke. They never discussed ways to push back on it,” the person said. “Manafort said if you want any additional details, give me a call, and Reince never called him back.”

There’s no evidence that Trump’s team considered an investigation into Ukrainian meddling or acted on Manafort’s recommendations, though Trump did blast the dossier as “fake news” gathered by “a group of opponents that got together — sick people — and they put that crap together.”

A Manafort spokesman declined to comment for this story.

But Manafort, a 68-year-old veteran of five U.S. presidential elections and many overseas campaigns, has emerged as a focal point in the escalating investigations. His representatives say he is cooperating with investigators. This month, he voluntarily provided documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee, while also offering to be interviewed by the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Meanwhile, a federal grand jury empaneled as part of the FBI’s investigation reportedly has issued a subpoena for records related to Manafort, as well as Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

In addition to Manafort and Flynn, others being scrutinized in the various investigations include occasional Trump confidant (and former Manafort business partner) Roger Stone and former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who had only a fleeting association with the campaign.

Of that quartet, though, Manafort has by far the deepest — and most lucrative — connections to politicians, parties and businessmen associated with Russia whose president, Vladimir Putin, is reported to have personally overseen his country’s efforts to meddle in the U.S. presidential election to boost Trump.

Manafort was paid millions of dollars for work on behalf of oligarchs from Ukraine and Russia, as well as Russia-aligned Ukrainian political parties, including one helmed by former Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych. He fled Ukraine for Russia in 2014 amid street protests over government corruption and a pivot away from the European Union.

The New York Times in August revealed that the FBI and Ukrainian investigators were looking into a recently unearthed ledger detailing alleged off-the-books payments to Manafort by Yanukovych’s party totaling $12.7 million.

Manafort was forced to resign from the campaign less than a week after the story.

He has defended his work for Yanukovych as fully aboveboard and consistent with U.S. foreign policy objectives, as well as completely distinct from his work for Trump (though the Times reported Wednesday evening that top Russian officials discussed “leveraging” their ties to Yanukovych to exert influence over Manafort). Manafort also has questioned the authenticity of the ledger.

The dossier, prepared by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, claims that the day after the Times’ report on the ledger, Yanukovych secretly met with Putin near Volgograd, Russia, to discuss the matter.

“Yanukovych had confided in Putin that he did authorise and order substantial kick-back payments to Manafort as alleged but sought to reassure him that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide clear evidence of this,” one memo in the dossier claims. The memo continues that “Putin and others in the Russian leadership were sceptical [sic] about the ex-Ukrainian president's reassurances on this.”

After the dossier’s publication by BuzzFeed in January, Manafort in his conversation with Priebus challenged the dossier’s characterization of the payments from Yanukovych, according to the operative familiar with the conversation.

In conversations with other associates, Manafort singled out the dossier’s use of the term “kickback,” explaining “Yanukovych would never use that term,” according to the operative. Additionally, Manafort questioned whether any of Steele’s sources would be in position to know the contents of a meeting between Putin and Yanukovych. “This stuff would never see light of the day,” Manafort told the associates, according to the operative.

In his conversation with Priebus, Manafort also disputed the assertion in the Steele dossier that Manafort managed relations between Trump’s team and the Russian leadership, using Page and others as intermediaries.

Manafort told Priebus that he’d never met Page, according to the operative.

Manafort has said he severed ties with Yanukovych when he fled Ukraine. But Manafort continued advising the successor party to Yanukovych’s through late 2015.

And two operatives familiar with his work in Eastern Europe say he remained in contact during Trump’s presidency with associates in Ukraine, including one who is widely believed to have a background in Russian intelligence.

Trump’s aides now say privately that the campaign wasn’t fully aware of the extent of Manafort’s connections to Russia-linked figures and entities when he was brought on board.

And White House aides and allies express mounting frustration that Manafort’s past work in Eastern Europe — which they see as entirely unrelated to his work on the Trump campaign — is dogging Trump’s presidency.

“His problems are his problems. They would have existed independent of the campaign,” said someone who worked on the Trump campaign with Manafort.

Trump’s aides and allies have sought to minimize Manafort’s role on the campaign, with White House press secretary Sean Spicer in March describing Manafort as someone “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time” in the effort.

The former Trump campaign worker said “because Paul was initially brought on to secure the delegates and work with the establishment figures that the initial campaign team didn’t have relationships with, he was primarily based in New York, D.C. and then Cleveland setting up the convention. Whereas Mr. Trump and the core campaign team were traveling all over the country campaigning.” As a result, the campaign hand said, “we didn’t really have that much interaction with Paul. He wasn’t part of the core campaign team.”

And the former campaign worker asserted that Trump and Manafort “didn’t have a relationship” before a mutual friend, California real estate investor Tom Barrack, recommended that Trump bring Manafort on board as a volunteer.

In fact, though, Manafort’s lobbying firm worked for Trump in the 1980s and 1990s fighting the expansion of Indian casinos that could compete with his Atlantic City gambling business, and trying to change the flight path of planes that Trump said disturbed guests at his newly purchased Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

And, while it’s true that Manafort joined the campaign in March 2016 to handle delegate strategy, he quickly exerted his influence over the entire campaign, which was headquartered at Manhattan’s Trump Tower, where he owns an apartment.

Days after Manafort joined the campaign, one of his daughters, in a text message to her sister that was later hacked and posted in an online data tranche, wrote: “Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together.”

Manafort eventually forced out his internal rival, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, in June, leaving Manafort with almost complete control over the operation for two months until August, when he was layered over, and then forced to resign.

Even after that, Manafort continued discussing campaign strategy with people on the campaign, including a few calls with Trump’s influential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and more regular contact with key state directors, according to a Trump campaign consultant.

Manafort was spotted in the part of the Trump Tower lobby that led to Trump’s transition headquarters in the weeks after Trump’s victory, though a source close to Manafort suggested he may have been coming from or going to his apartment, as opposed to meeting with anyone on the transition team.

Likewise, there is some confusion about whether Manafort has spoken to Trump since he was sworn in as president.

Three Manafort associates said he indicated that he spoke to the president periodically until the Russia investigation started heating up about two months ago. But two sources close to Trump said there haven’t been any conversations at all since the inauguration.

One Manafort friend said Manafort had been offering Trump “general political input, just like he still talks to Corey [Lewandowski], and he still talks to Stone occasionally. Guys that he thinks are smart, he talks to.”

The friend said “Paul and Trump are still on good terms,” and suggested that Manafort would be unlikely to turn on Trump to help himself. “If he feels burned, it’s because of the trail of things he’s left behind over time, not because of anything Trump did,” the friend said. “He still pulls for him and wants to help him.”
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/2 ... ise-238803
Last edited by seemslikeadream on Fri May 26, 2017 7:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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