Yet the article focused on Trump and Manafort’s ties, without harkening back to another extensive Times report in April 2015 on, among other details, a $500,000 payment to Bill Clinton for a controversial Moscow speech.
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Manafort, who did work for the party led by the pro-Russian former Ukrainian president Viktor F. Yanukovych, also said that “I am a campaign professional” and “it is well known that I do work in the United States and have done work on overseas campaigns as well”.
Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, said he believes that the ledger correctly reflected the funneling of what he called “corrupt money”. “We have an analysis going on to confirm whether this is his signature or not and, if not, who this signature belongs to”, the spokesperson said.
He confirmed that while the preliminary investigation is underway, the bureau is conducting “a criminal investigation on whole black accounts but not against individuals yet”. Shortly after the piece went live, Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was sacked from the campaign, linked to it on Twitter without comment.
Landy says whether or not Manafort accepted cash payments is secondary to the fact that Trump would choose such a person to manage his campaign.
GOP nominee Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has become embroiled in an illegal money laundering system of the former Ukrainian ruling Party of Regions.
“No one should be surprised that Yanukovych paid Manafort for his services”.
The day before the paper ran the story about Manafort, it ran a story about the internal strife within the Trump campaign, eliciting a prompt and vehement response from the Republican candidate in a series of tweets. At the campaign’s urging, platform language calling for the U.S.to provide “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine was watered down to “appropriate assistance”. The former Ukrainian president fled to Russian Federation in February 2014.
Manafort’s well-documented role as an advisor to a Ukrainian administration regarded as pro-Russian has already raised eyebrows, particularly given comments by Trump lauding Putin’s leadership, dismissing the U.S.’s commitments to smaller North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members, and his call for Russia to hack opponent Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.
The country is allegedly behind the email hack of numerous Democratic campaign entities, including the Democratic National Committee.
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“Paul Manafort is among those names on the list of so-called ‘black accounts of the Party of Regions, ‘ which the detectives of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine are investigating”, the agency said in an official statement.
