With the announcement that Paul Manafort has resigned as Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and that his chief aide Rick Gates has decamped along with him, it’s becoming increasingly hard to view the operation run out of Trump Tower as an actual political campaign. The damaging news included an Associated Press report Thursday describing a covert Washington lobbying operation run by Manafort’s firm. The Republican presidential candidate named Stephen Bannon, head of Breitbart News, as the campaign’s chief executive, and longtime conservative pollster Kellyanne Conway was assigned the role of campaign manager.
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“This morning Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign”, Trump said in a statement issued to reporters. “He helped us with the convention [and] he did a great job with the delegates”.
Trump added that “Paul is a true professional and I wish him the greatest success”.
Manafort is stepping down in the wake of a campaign shake-up, as well as revelations about his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine.
Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign amid scrutiny of his Ukrainian work – but others involved in the once-secret influence campaign remain working for Trump in senior roles, including Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates.
“In the second shakeup to his campaign team in two months, Trump has given the upper hand to loyalists who favor his populist style”. Earlier this month, he said “the candidate is in control of his campaign, that’s number one, and I’m in control of doing the things he wants me to do in the campaign”.
Caputo said the increased scrutiny over Manafort’s ties to Russian Federation and Ukraine helped lead to his ouster.
In the preview, Eric Trump went on to praise the “amazing” Manafort for helping the campaign “get to the convention”. Manafort, who first joined the campaign in March, had presided over a period in which Trump had formally sealed the Republican presidential nomination after seeing off 16 rivals.
The emails show Gates personally directed two Washington lobbying firms, Mercury LLC and the Podesta Group Inc., between 2012 and 2014 to set up meetings between a top Ukrainian official and senators and congressmen on influential committees involving Ukrainian interests.
Clinton now leads on average 47.2 percent to Trump’s 41.2 percent, according to Real Clear Politics, and is ahead in virtually every swing state.
The Clinton campaign has pointed to Manafort’s work in Ukraine to add to its criticism of favourable comments that Trump has made about Russian President Vladimir Putin and to sow doubts in voters’ minds about whether the Russian government has an unseen hand in the USA election.
Allegations have emerged this week that Mr Manafort had received payments from the political party of the Kremlin-backed former leader of Ukraine. Manafort denied receiving any cash payments and called the idea “unfounded, silly and nonsensical”.
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The Clinton campaign does not believe that the Ukraine situation is just a distraction and believes it is an admission of the connections between Donald Trump and Russian Federation. The allegations were first made in The New York Times on Monday. Leshchenko said Manafort had worked in Ukraine for several years and that the entries in the ledgers are the only explanation of how he could have been paid.
