“He helped us get through the primary process, he helped us get through the convention, he did a great job with the delegates”, Trump said.
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“Paul Manafort got him to the convention and [helped] bring those delegates to the magic number he had to have to be the nominee”, said Huckabee.
Manafort resigned as campaign chairman and de facto senior strategist for the Trump campaign on Friday morning.
Both claims have distracted from the Republican nominee’s bid for the White House that has seen Trump trail his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and effectively demote Manafort in an election team overhaul this week.
His position seemed increasingly uncertain after the shake-up of Trump’s campaign team this week, which saw former Breitbart boss Steve Bannon appointed as campaign chief executive and Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager.
Manafort is suspected of helping a pro-Russian party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law.
“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”, Mook said in a statement released Friday.
Manafort told Trump he was becoming a distraction and he wanted to end that.
The alleged payments, which Manafort denied, were noted in a ledger kept by former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych’s political party. Manafort has been beating back reports from multiple media outlets in recent days over his ethics, which have been egged on by a Clinton campaign eager to highlight Trump’s ties to the Kremlin. “I regret it”, he said, “particularly where it may have caused personal pain”.
For the second time in as many months, Donald Trump has a new campaign manager.
As for Manafort, there’s no reason to think this resignation comes due to the switchover.
The pro-Clinton organization American Bridge cited news reports that Manafort will continue to be an ally of Trump’s, and added that “the Trump campaign will have plenty of Russian Federation ties without him – starting with the Putin-admiring, NATO-hating candidate himself”.
“There is no other Donald Trump”, she said at a Florida event this month about the prospects that he could temper his tone.
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The Washington Post is reporting that Manafort will remain on friendly terms with the candidate and the campaign and will be tapped for advice from time to time.
