Donald Trump is receiving a warm reception as he tours a heavily-damaged portion of East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana. The largest single payment was $3.5 million.
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People with direct knowledge of Gates’ work told the AP that, during the period when Gates and Manafort were consultants to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, Gates was also helping steer the advocacy work done by a pro-Yanukovych nonprofit that hired a pair of Washington lobbying firms.
Yet the trip did little to obscure the turmoil in Trump’s campaign, punctuated early Friday when Trump announced that he’d accepted campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s offer to resign.
No reason has been given for the veteran election campaign manager’s departure, but it comes just days after Manafort was effectively demoted in a shake-up of Trump’s team as he slipped behind Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in opinion polls.
The relative steadiness of Trump’s message was all the more surprising given that one of the staffing changes he made this week was bringing on Stephen Bannon, the combative head of Breitbart News, a pro-Trump website that frequently targets Republican leaders and promotes false conspiracy theories about Clinton.
Leshchenko also said Manafort continued to work in Ukraine after Yanukovych fled and a new pro-European government stepped in and that Manafort consulted the Party of Regions for the 2014 parliamentary election and visited Ukraine previous year. Manafort’s role had been diminished, and Bannon is expected to encourage Trump to embrace the hyper-aggressive attitude that won him the primary.
Trump, who has never held elected office, did not refer to his staffing changes, but in an interview earlier on Friday his son Eric Trump said unflattering headlines about Manafort had taken a toll.
Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign amid scrutiny of his Ukrainian work – but others involved in the once-secret influence campaign remain working for Trump in senior roles, including Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates.
“Paul Manafort’s resignation is a clear admission that the disturbing connections between Donald Trump’s team and pro-Kremlin elements in Russian Federation and Ukraine are untenable”, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement.
The lobbying included attempts to gain positive media coverage of Ukrainian officials in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press.
While it remains too early to tell, the first moves under the new regime have largely shown an investment in conventional campaigning. Russian officials have rejected that accusation.
“I think it was a mutual decision to be frank with you”, Conway said.
John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said it would have been unsustainable for Manafort to stay on after Wednesday’s hires.
“All the people who have been saying, ‘Let’s get Trump to pivot, let’s get him to be more presidential.’ That is presidential”, she said. “And the Ukrainian stuff was becoming a real distraction”.
He did it in Charlotte Thursday night, delivering a very public – if equally vague – acknowledgment of any “personal pain” caused by his past words. Both had grown uncomfortable with Manafort, the person said.
A spokesman for Kushner declined to comment.
The final stretch of the protracted campaign traditionally starts after Labor Day, which falls on September 5 this year.
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“I’m not sure the public pays a lot of attention to inside campaign stories”, she said. “But that said, Trump has clearly been having significant problems in the polls and he needed to do something differently and perhaps this is the beginning of the attempt”.
