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While Donald Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort worked for Ukraine’s former government, he funnelled some $2.2 million in cash to two Washington lobbying firms, including the Clinton-connected Podesta Group, new revelations show.
In its report today, The Times of London describes a memo written by a Ukrainian prosecutor who investigated Manafort as determining that “he sabotaged USA interests in Ukraine and encouraged Russian nationalism in Crimea”. It comes at a time when Trump has faced criticism for his praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Manafort has also been accused of accepting payments from the Yanukovych regime without disclosing them to the United States government, which would be illegal.
People with direct knowledge of Gates’ work said that, during the period when Gates and Manafort were consultants to the Ukraine president’s political party, Gates was also helping steer the advocacy work done by a pro-Yanukovych nonprofit that hired a pair of Washington lobbying firms, Podesta Group Inc. and Mercury LLC.
A legal memo drafted for the firms stated that registration with the Justice Department, and under FARA requirements, was not needed.
Leonid Kozhara, a former foreign minister for Yanukovych’s government, was one of the Centre’s first leaders, according to The Daily Beast.
“Mercury was not required to register under FARA based on the unequivocal written and oral certifications stating that the Centre was a private entity and was not under the direction or funded by the Ukrainian government or foreign political party”.
Gross said he did not think there could be grounds for an investigation because, “We did everything we could have reasonably done under the circumstances” to ensure that the Centre was not being directed by a foreign politician or government. Moreover, registering under the law would have required Gates, Manafort or the lobbying firms to disclose the specifics of their lobbying work and their efforts to sway public opinion through media outreach.
Washington lawyer Ken Gross advised Mercury before they took on the client that they did not need to file under FARA. She said the nonprofit provided a signed statement affirming its independence from Ukraine’s government.
A Ukrainian prosecutor is investigating Manafort, who ran Trump’s presidential campaign for the past two months until a reshuffle this week, for “conspiring with a criminal organization” and “inciting ethnic hatred and separatism”.
Prosecutions under FARA are exceedingly rare, in part because the enforcement system favors voluntary compliance. “My assumption was that he was working for the Centre, as we were”.
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The Times of London reported on a memo that was said to reveal Paul Manafort’s involvement in the campaign to win support for the eventual annexation of the Crimean peninsula, which happened in 2014.
