The move comes days after a campaign shake-up that brought two new members to the top of the organization, including new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon.
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Clinton’s campaign has said Manafort’s associations are a troubling sign of ties between Trump’s campaign team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine.
People with direct knowledge of Gates’ work told the AP 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.
He first took control of Mr Trump’s campaign after the businessman’s campaign manager was sacked in June. The billionaire called Manafort “a true professional”.
Trump is now in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he is touring neighborhoods that have been ravaged by historic flooding.
Manafort had been brought in initially at Kushner’s urging, the source said.
The current CNN battleground map gives Hillary Clinton 273 electoral votes from states that are either solidly or leaning in her direction compared to 191 electoral votes for Donald Trump in states that are solidly or leaning in his direction.
Whether Manafort stepped down voluntarily (maybe he didn’t want to be associated with a likely defeat) or was pushed out (he was at the center of many ongoing controversies and wasn’t leading the operation to success) is, at least for now, unclear.
The good news for Trump is that the election isn’t being held today and a new national poll out from Pew Research shows some of Clinton’s post-convention glory may be fading a bit.
Clinton also led a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll that asked people to choose between Clinton, Trump, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Jill Stein of the Green Party.
The appointments marked the effective sidelining of Manafort and his strategy to temper Trump’s message and the candidate, in an attempt to woo middle-ground voters turned off by his abrasive, insulting manner.
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chair Paul Manafort has resigned. Reports claimed that Manafort had been trying, in vain, to get Trump to change his style, but that Trump was refusing.
It quickly became clear that Manafort, whose political experience dates to Gerald Ford’s 1976 presidential campaign, was much more than a delegate counter. While he did not specify which remarks he regretted, he added, “But one thing I can promise you is this: I will always tell the truth”. “You know, Paul was awesome”.
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“Well, look it’s obviously a hard thing for anybody when they change jobs and have a position that they’ve been so invested in for a long time and really put their heart and soul into something, to not be part of it, particularly when you’re this close”, Lewandowski told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on “At This Hour”.
