“This morning Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign”, Trump confirmed in a statement Friday. Manafort did work for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine before he joined the Trump campaign, and some pointed fingers at him as Trump seemed to adopt pro-Russian rhetoric. Campaign sources said that Trump had been unhappy with Manafort for a variety of reasons. Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in June, a time at which Manafort ascended to the top of the organization.
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Yet as his poll numbers tumbled, Trump decisively reversed course, installing a media provacateur – Bannon – as his campaign’s CEO. “I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain”.
Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, says the campaign’s outgoing chairman “was amazing” and he resigned because Trump didn’t want to be distracted by outside controversy.
Trump’s new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway suggested that the visit was part of a larger effort, like his speech on Thursday, to pivot to a more presidential phase.
The Times report said criminal investigators are separately looking into a network of “offshore shell companies that helped members of Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle finance their lavish lifestyles”.
He drew praise for steering the campaign through the final weeks of the primary process and the convention, where opposing forces sought ways to block a Trump nomination.
“I’m not sure the public pays a lot of attention to inside campaign stories”, she said.
Those payments, on top of other reports, raised concerns that Manafort may have violated USA laws requiring lobbyists to register as “foreign agents” with the Justice Department if they work with other governments. When Trump elevated Conway and Bannon, the campaign insisted that it was not a shake-up but a natural expansion in the final stretch of the election. At a Baptist church later, a woman screamed “We knew you would be here for us!” as he and Pence sat down with volunteers.
Manafort has also come under increased scrutiny over comments he has failed to tell Donald Trump in. One American soldier who was in Ukraine at the time revealed that protesters organized by Manafort threw rocks at North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops en route to the training exercise. In September 2004 a month before voting started, Yushchenko said he was poisoned in an assassination attempt he linked to Russian Federation.
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Earlier this week, Trump brought in a new campaign chief executive and campaign manager following a disastrous stretch in which the New Yorker committed a series of errors and fell behind Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in both national and battleground state preference polls.
