Campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Gates would remain part of the campaign with a new role as liaison to the Republican National Committee, which has had a turbulent relationship with its nominee this year.
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Its statement stressed that NABU could not be certain that Manafort ever actually received the money – which the 67-year-old firmly denies. At the same time, the elevation of seasoned GOP operative Kellyanne Conway from senior adviser and pollster to campaign manager signaled a more intriguing possible move toward normalcy.
The Chief Executive officer of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team for the white house has resigned.
People with direct knowledge of Gates’ work said that, during the period when Gates and Manafort were consultants to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, Gates was also helping steer the advocacy work done by a pro-Yanukovych nonprofit that hired a pair of Washington lobbying firms.
The harsh reality for down-ballot Republicans in tight races is that the Trump campaign is dragging down their prospects, and despite the shakeup they’re being urged by some strategists to distance themselves from the nominee. “I regret it”, he said, “particularly where it may have caused personal pain”. “It was a crossfire”, said Foley, who first met Manafort when both were working on Tom Meskill’s 1970 campaign for CT governor.
Trump, who has never held elected office, has also been embroiled in a series of controversies in recent weeks and has lagged Clinton in opinion polls.
After the Times” report surfaced, Manafort issued a statement Monday vehemently denying any wrongdoing, saying he had worked on overseas campaigns but had “never received a single “off-the-books cash payment as falsely “reported” by The New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russian Federation”.
“The simplest answer is the truth: I am a campaign professional”, Manafort said in a written response to the Times article.
He maintained contracts with well-heeled Ukrainian clients, including several billionaire oligarchs, until he joined the campaign of the American billionaire Trump. But his efforts to rein in some of Trump’s most controversial tendencies were seen as a failure.
The Clinton campaign looked to use Manafort’s resignation to tie Trump and Vladimir Putin together. Trump’s son Eric, meanwhile, told Fox News that Manafort “was fantastic”, but his father didn’t want to be “distracted by whatever things Paul was dealing with”. The Republican’s campaign finally hit back on Friday with its first set of paid advertisements in four states, and with Bannon and Conway taking over the campaign, it made its final break with Manafort.
The 30-second ad focuses on immigration, saying Clinton would allow “terrorists and risky criminals” into the country, a charge her campaign dismisses.
“Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing”, Trump told backers in Charlotte, N.C.
The final stretch of the protracted campaign traditionally starts after Labor Day, which falls on September 5 this year. This may have been the reason Trump friended Putin and said that he was doing a good job for Russian Federation, even though its economy is slumping and he grabbed the Crimea illegally.
“At first I was a little bit surprised by what was going on”, he said. Last month, he invited Russian hackers to find “missing” emails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state, when she used a private email server to conduct government business, although he later described that call as sarcasm.
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A US federal judge ruled that Clinton did not need to give sworn testimony in a lawsuit about the email issue.
