But it seems it was an appointment that both Trump and Manafort came to regret. He stayed on with the convention, becoming its campaign chairman and replacing controversial former manager Corey Lewandowski, who Trump fired about two months ago.
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“We state that Mr. Manafort received $12,774,869 from November 20, 2007, until October 5, 2012, from a shadow account of the Party of Regions, which was filled in a non-transparent, corrupt way”, Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist who now heads a parliamentary subcommittee on fighting corruption, told a news conference in Kiev on Friday. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.theeagleonline.com.ng as the source.
“This morning, Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign”, the Republican nominee said in a statement.
What are Donald Trump’s links to Russian Federation?
Manafort, who’s denied getting cash payments, worked with Kremlin-backed Yanukovych for a decade, helping him win presidential elections in 2010 that tilted Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit until the 2014 revolution that ousted him from power.
Manafort has also been battling weeks of critical scrutiny, from Yahoo News and other outlets, related to his ties to Russian political interests in Ukraine.
Leshchenko held a Friday press conference in Kiev, where he presented new details about the $12.7 million in payments that were found in an 800-page “black book” from Yanukovych’s “Party of Regions”. The allegations about the payments were first made in The New York Times on Monday.
Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman for Breitbart News, is the new campaign CEO, while pollster and consultant Kellyanne Conway is now campaign manager. “Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success”, he said.
He left the Trump campaign yesterday after five months in the job. “I have done that, and I regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain”.
Lewandowski said he just thought the tweet was “funny” before he went back to applauding the Trump campaign’s new move.
A spokesman for Kushner declined to comment.
Trump’s son Eric said Friday that while Manafort had been instrumental in steering the campaign through the GOP convention, the former chairman’s business past had begun to detract from his father’s messages.
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“I’m not sure the public pays a lot of attention to inside campaign stories”, she said.
