Accused of being a Putin man, of having worked with Yanukovych, alleged of having taken millions under the table and having organized the anti NATO protests in Ukraine, the spin doctor of Trump backed down.
Paul Manafort didn’t resist the accusations and threw in the towel. Donald Trump’s campaign director was rumored for his habit to offer his services to dictators, autocrats and kleptocrats. A man who can boast in its customer portfolio the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines tyrant Ferdinand Marcos, and former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (who wasn’t a dictator but head of a kleptocracy unmatched in the world). What forced Manafort to resign from office, however, were not the doubts about his links to Yanukovych, now a refugee in Russia, but the charges of having taken money under the table during his “Ukrainian period”, a topic in which American voters are particularly sensitive. So much so that the FBI has added his name to a wider investigation into possible links between American companies and the corrupt system of Yanukovych.
His resignation, however, did not erase the doubts about his choice by Trump as a consultant.
The closest adviser to Yanukovych
The scandal of the secret payments came right from Kiev. The Times of London obtained a dozen regime accounting notes for Manafort’s contract or expenses, totaling $7,6 million. But sources of the new Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau cited by Max Tucker, author of the scoop, have said to be in possession of ten more notes bringing the total amount of payments to Manafort to $12.5 million.
According to Ukrainian investigators, the money came from a clandestine cash reserve used by Yanukovych to pay judges, members of the electoral commission, politicians and journalists, up to a record sum of $2 billion.
The payment dates range from 2009 to 2012, when the spin-doctor helped Yanukovych’s in his presidential campaign, before becoming his advisor. Manafort denied both to have taken the money and to have never worked for the Ukrainian government. A claim contradicted by many testimonies, like that of the former head of Yanukovich’s presidential staff, Andrei Portonov, who says of “many meetings in Kiev and Washington. Mr Manafort was wise, persuasive and experienced“. And it is here that come out of the most burning issues.
According to sources quoted by the Times, Manafort was something more than just a consultant for the campaign of Yanukovich. Andrers Åslund, consultant of former president Leonid Kuchma, called it “the closest adviser is Yanukovich.” Manafort remained a close adviser of the former president to the end, attending security briefings in the “antirevolution situation room” during the final days of the Maidan. It means he somehow took part in Yanukovych’s response against the Maidan, or at least witnessed it, presumably close to the emissaries sent by the Kremlin to steer the Ukrainian politics.
Wiping the Orange Revolution
It is not enough. Because according to reports by the Times, a Ukrainian prosecutor who is investigating on the former Party of Regions, now outlawed as a criminal organization, alleges that in 2006 he orchestrated a series of anti-Nato, anti-Kiev protests in Crimea. He had been hired a year before by Rinat Akhmetov, the oligarch “Lord” of Donetsk and main sponsor of Yanukovych, to push his candidate freshly defeated in the presidential race by Viktor Yushchenko. In five years he managed to take him to the presidency, understanding how to accentuate the division of the Ukrainian electorate and by leveraging the cultural polarization of the country.
Manafort, in essence, is the man who wiped the Orange Revolution and brought back Ukraine in the hands of Putin. The man who advised Yanukovych to report non-existent dangers for Russian-speaking population, who animated the anti-Western movements in Crimea. The main architect of the kleptocratic system of Yanukovych. The man who advised the president in the days of the bloody repression of the Maidan.
It is not over yet, because even after Yanukovich’s escape to Russia, already in September 2014, Manafort was on the payroll of the former head of presidential administration, Serhy Liovochkin, to revive the dying Party of Regions. According to the New York Times he would be the man behind its name change strategy that led many of its former MPs in the Opposition Block.
Will his resignation dissolve the fears on Trump’s policy on Russia in the event that he will be elected?
@daniloeliatweet
Accused of being a Putin man, of having worked with Yanukovych, alleged of having taken millions under the table and having organized the anti NATO protests in Ukraine, the spin doctor of Trump backed down.
