The Washington Post reports that in a July 2016 email exchange, Manafort wrote to a former employee of his political consulting firm about offering to brief Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
Advertisement
Deripaska is one of Russia’s wealthiest men, and an ally of President Vladimir Putin.
Manafort reportedly asked Kilimnik to pass the offer to Deripaska. Mr Deripaska’s spokeswoman refused to answer queries about the email.
Sen. Chuck Grassley is asking the Federal Bureau of Investigation if it warned Donald Trump that Paul Manafort, whom he brought in as campaign chairman in 2016, was being watched by the agency because of his dealings with pro-Kremlin figures.
But even if there was real-time phone surveillance and Trump happened to be talking to Manafort, that still would not support Trump’s claims from March that Obama ordered a wiretapping of then-presidential candidate Trump’s phone in Trump Tower. Could this be the reason why Donald Trump Jr. ditched his security detail days ago?
The e-mail was sent a little over a week before the Republican National Convention in July 2016 at which Trump clinched the party’s presidential nomination, media said.
It appears that former Trump campaign chairman and forgotten Looney Toons character Paul Manafort is fairly fucked.
CNN reported that there was a FISA court order for surveillance of Manafort, relating to the FBI’s investigation of him over potential ties to Ukrainian politics.
Manafort has previously denied financial wrongdoing regarding his Ukraine-related payments, his bank accounts in offshore tax shelters, and his various real estate transactions over the years. He has also denied any involvement in any efforts to undermine the USA election on behalf of Russian Federation.
Bombshell revelations this week about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort are what prompted the inquiry, made by the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley to FBI Director Christopher Wray.
Numerous emails do concern money that Mr Manafort believed he was owed by Eastern European clients, according to the Post.
Since capturing the communications of Manafort at a time when he was in communication with Trump necessarily means that communications with Trump would have been swept up in the surveillance, it is no stretch at all to say that the intelligence community – beginning with authorization from the Obama administration – conducted surveillance on Trump during and after the election. “I will say it’s possible”, Clapper said. She also dismissed the email exchanges, the Post said, as scheming by “consultants in the notorious “Beltway bandit” industry”.
His connection to Russian Federation and Deripaska began several years ago when he worked closely with him, according to the report by the Washington Post.
Making an offer to brief the Kremlin on the US presidential campaign while also discussing “black caviar” to refer to payments Manafort was seeking ticks all a lot of collusion boxes. Many have suggested Deripaska’s business with Manafort was an attempt to influence global politics for the Russian state.
Advertisement
The two however had a falling-out.
