Just months after Paul Manafort was promoted to bring some structure to and scale up Donald Trump’s presidential bid, the Washington insider has resigned from the campaign.
Advertisement
Trump announced Friday on Twitter he accepted Manafort’s resignation, though he did not say why. “He helped us with the convention [and] he did a great job with the delegates”.
“I think my father didn’t want to be, you know, distracted by whatever things Paul was dealing with”, Eric Trump said.
Meanwhile, new documents released by Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators appear to link the lobbying work the men directed in the U.S.to handwritten entries in ledgers listing $12.7 million in cash payments alongside Manafort’s name. The damaging news included an Associated Press report Thursday describing a covert Washington lobbying operation run by Manafort’s firm.
Manafort and Gates never registered as foreign agents for their work as required under federal law.
This is second change at the top of Trump’s campaign in little more than two months. What Manafort was promising was a campaign turnaround. Manafort, recruited earlier this year to spearhead Trump’s Republican convention strategy, was a controversial figure for both his ties to a number of foreign dictators and his unique political strategies.
Trump’s visit to southern Louisiana put pressure on Clinton. The new disclosures about their work come as Trump faces criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But to no avail, as Trump entered a tailspin in virtually every national and swing state poll, Manafort began to be squeezed out of the campaign.
“I think this is a very important change for the campaign and it reaffirms unequivocally that Stephen K. Bannon and Kellyanne Conway are taking the campaign in a new direction”, Lewandowski said in an interview on CNN, where he was hired as a political commentator after being dumped by Trump.
But after getting pummeled in the media and punished in the polls for the three weeks since the Democratic National Convention, Trump finally has found his footing. Manafort denied he’d received any illegal payments.
“Manafort didn’t work for free in Ukraine, he served the Party of Regions for over 10 years and it is clear that his work was paid”, Leshchenko told a news conference.
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. Clearly irked by his former primary rival Ted Cruz’s decision to withhold an endorsement during a prime-time speech earlier in the week, the nominee at a news conference revived a conspiracy theory that tied the Texas senator’s father to President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Advertisement
Manafort has left open the possibility that payments were made to his US firm or colleagues.
