Between 1977 and 1980, Manafort practiced law with the firm of
Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease in Washington, D.C. Between 1978 and 1980, Manafort served as the southern coordinator for
Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign and the deputy political director at the
Republican National Committee. After Reagan's election in November 1980, he was appointed associate director of the
White House Presidential Personnel Office. In 1981, he was nominated to the board of directors of the
Overseas Private Investment Corporation. and
Bob Dole in 1996.
Chairman of Trump's 2016 campaign In February 2016, Manafort approached Trump through a mutual friend,
Thomas J. Barrack Jr. He pointed out his experience advising presidential campaigns in the United States and around the world, described himself as an outsider not connected to the Washington establishment, and offered to work without salary. In March 2016, he joined
Trump's presidential campaign to take the lead in getting commitments from convention delegates. On June 20, 2016, Trump fired campaign manager
Corey Lewandowski and promoted Manafort to the position. Manafort gained control of the daily operations of the campaign as well as an expanded $20 million budget, hiring decisions, advertising, and media strategy. On June 9, 2016, Manafort,
Donald Trump Jr., and
Jared Kushner were participants in
a meeting with Russian attorney
Natalia Veselnitskaya and several others at
Trump Tower. A British music agent, saying he was acting on behalf of
Emin Agalarov and the Russian government, had told Trump Jr. that he could obtain damaging information on
Hillary Clinton if he met with a lawyer connected to the
Kremlin. At first, Trump Jr. said the meeting had been primarily about the Russian ban on international adoptions (in response to the
Magnitsky Act) and mentioned nothing about Mrs. Clinton; he later said the offer of information about Clinton had been a pretext to conceal Veselnitskaya's real agenda. In August 2016, Manafort's connections to former
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian
Party of Regions drew national attention in the US, where it was reported that Manafort may have received $12.7 million (~$ in ) in off-the-books funds from the Party of Regions. On August 17, 2016, Trump received his first security briefing. On the same day, August 17, Trump shook up his campaign organization in a way that appeared to minimize Manafort's role. It was reported that members of Trump's family, particularly Kushner, who had originally been a strong backer of Manafort, had become uneasy about his Russian connections and suspected that he had not been forthright about them. Manafort stated in an internal staff memorandum that he would "remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision." However, two days later, Trump announced his acceptance of Manafort's resignation from the campaign after
Steve Bannon and
Kellyanne Conway took on senior leadership roles within that campaign. Upon Manafort's resignation as campaign chairman,
Newt Gingrich stated, "nobody should underestimate how much Paul Manafort did to really help get this campaign to where it is right now." Gingrich later added that, for the Trump administration, "It makes perfect sense for them to distance themselves from somebody who apparently didn't tell them what he was doing." In January 2019, Manafort's lawyers submitted a filing to the court in response to the allegation that Manafort had lied to investigators. Through an error in redacting, the document accidentally revealed that while he was campaign chairman, Manafort met with
Konstantin Kilimnik, a likely Russian intelligence officer and an alleged operative of the "Mariupol Plan," which would separate eastern Ukraine by political means with Manafort's assistance. The filing stated that Manafort gave him polling data related to the 2016 campaign and discussed a Ukrainian peace plan with him. While Manafort served within the
2016 United States presidential election campaign, it is alleged that Manafort, via
Kyiv-based operative
Konstantin Kilimnik, offered to provide briefings on political developments to
Oleg Deripaska. Behaviors such as these were seen by writers at
The Atlantic as an attempt by Manafort "to please an oligarch tied to" Putin's government.
Lobbying career In 1980, Manafort was the founding partner of Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, alongside principals
Charles R. Black Jr. and
Roger Stone. After
Peter G. Kelly was recruited, the name of the firm was changed to
Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) in 1984.
Association with Jonas Savimbi . In 1985, Manafort's firm, BMSK, signed a $600,000 (~$ in ) contract with
Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the Angolan rebel group
UNITA, to refurbish Savimbi's image in Washington and secure financial support on the basis of his anti-communism stance. BMSK arranged for Savimbi to attend events at the
American Enterprise Institute (where
Jeane Kirkpatrick gave him a laudatory introduction),
The Heritage Foundation, and
Freedom House; in the wake of the campaign, Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars in covert American aid to Savimbi's group. Allegedly, Manafort's continuing lobbying efforts helped preserve the flow of money to Savimbi several years after the Soviet Union ceased its involvement in the Angolan conflict, forestalling peace talks. , the former President of the Philippines. . Manafort's firm, BMSK, accepted $950,000 yearly to lobby for
Ferdinand Marcos, the then-president of the Philippines. Additionally, he was involved in lobbying for
Mobutu Sese Seko, the authoritarian President of the
Republic of Zaïre (predecessor of today's
Democratic Republic of the Congo), securing a US$1 million (~$ in ) annual contract in 1989, while he also attempted to recruit the Somali strongman,
Siad Barre, as a client. His firm lobbied on behalf of the governments of the
Dominican Republic,
Equatorial Guinea,
Kenya, earning between $660,000 and $750,000 each year between 1991 and 1993, and
Nigeria, earning $1 million in 1991. These activities resulted in Manafort's firm being listed amongst the top five lobbying firms receiving money from human-rights-abusing regimes in the
Center for Public Integrity report "The Torturers' Lobby".
The New York Times reported that Manafort accepted payment from the
Kurdistan Region to facilitate Western recognition of the
2017 Kurdistan Region independence referendum.
Involvement in the Karachi affair Manafort wrote the campaign strategy for
Édouard Balladur in the 1995 French elections and was paid indirectly. The money, at least $200,000, was transferred to him through his friend,
Lebanese arms dealer Abdul Rahman al-Assir, from middlemen fees paid for arranging the sale of three French s to Pakistan, in a scandal known as the
Karachi affair. While producing a documentary as part of the deal, Manafort interviewed several Indian officials while pretending to be a
CNN reporter.
HUD scandal In the late 1980s, Manafort was criticized for using his connections at
HUD to ensure funding for a $43 million rehabilitation of dilapidated housing in
Seabrook, New Jersey. Manafort's firm received a $326,000 fee for its work in getting HUD approval of the grant, largely through personal influence with
Deborah Gore Dean, an executive assistant to former HUD Secretary
Samuel Pierce.
Transition to Ukraine Manafort's involvement in Ukraine can be traced to 2003, when
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska hired Dole, Manafort's prior campaign candidate, to lobby the
United States Department of State for a waiver of his visa ban, primarily so that he could solicit otherwise unavailable institutional purchasers for shares in his company,
RusAL. Then, in early 2004, Deripaska met with Manafort's partner,
Rick Davis, also a prior campaign adviser to Bob Dole, to discuss hiring Manafort and Davis to return the former Georgian Minister of State Security,
Igor Giorgadze, to prominence in Georgian politics. By December 2004, however, Deripaska shelved his plans in Georgia and dispatched Manafort to meet with Akhmetov in Ukraine to help Akhmetov and his holding firm, System Capital Management, weather the political crisis brought by the
Orange Revolution. even as the U.S. government (and U.S. Senator
John McCain) opposed Yanukovych because of his ties to Russia's leader
Vladimir Putin.
Borys Kolesnikov, Yanukovych's campaign manager, said the party hired Manafort after identifying organizational and other problems in the 2004 elections, in which it was advised by Russian strategists. In the 2010 election, Yanukovych managed to pull off a narrow win over Prime Minister
Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the 2004 demonstrations. Yanukovych owed his comeback in Ukraine's presidential election to a drastic makeover of his political persona, and—people in his party say—that makeover was engineered in part by his American consultant, Manafort. Manafort negotiated a $10 million (~$ in ) annual contract with Deripaska to promote Russian interests in politics, business, and media coverage in Europe and the United States, starting in 2005. A witness at Manafort's 2018 trial for fraud and tax evasion testified that Deripaska loaned Manafort $10 million in 2010, which, to her knowledge, was never repaid. In 2013, Yanukovych became the main target of the
Euromaidan protests. On March 17, 2014, the day after the
Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the
Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) by
President Barack Obama, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the United States. Manafort then returned to Ukraine in September 2014 to become an adviser to Yanukovych's former head of the
Presidential Administration of Ukraine Serhiy Lyovochkin. In an April 2016 interview with
ABC News, Manafort stated that the aim of his activities in Ukraine had been to lead the country "closer to Europe". Ukrainian government
National Anti-Corruption Bureau studying secret documents claimed in August 2016 to have found handwritten records that show $12.7 million in cash payments designated for Manafort, although they had yet to determine if he had received the money. Associated Press noted that under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department, which Manafort reportedly did not do. Financial records certified in December 2015 and filed by Manafort in
Cyprus showed him to be approximately $17 million (~$ in ) in debt to interests connected to interests favorable to Putin and Yanukovych in the months before joining the Trump presidential campaign in March. These included a $7.8 million debt to Oguster Management Limited, a company connected to Deripaska. An additional $9.9 million debt was owed to a Cyprus company that was tied through
shell companies to , a Ukrainian Member of Parliament of the Party of Regions. A July 2017 application by the FBI for a search warrant revealed that a company controlled by Manafort and his wife had received a $10 million (~$ in ) loan from Deripaska. According to leaked text messages between his daughters, Manafort was also one of the proponents of violent removal of the Euromaidan protesters, which resulted in police shooting dozens of people during
2014 Hrushevskoho Street riots. In one of the messages, his daughter writes that it was his "strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered." Manafort has rejected questions about whether Kilimnik, with whom he consulted regularly, might be in league with Russian intelligence. According to
Yuri Shvets, Kilimnik previously worked for the
GRU, and every bit of information about his work with Manafort went directly to Russian intelligence.
2017 activities Registering as a foreign agent Lobbying for foreign countries requires registration with the
Justice Department under the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Manafort did not do so at the time of his lobbying. In April 2017, a Manafort spokesman said Manafort was planning to file the required paperwork; however, according to
Associated Press reporters, as of June 2, 2017, Manafort had not yet registered. Among other things, he disclosed that he made more than $17 million between 2012 and 2014 working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. The sentencing memorandum submitted by the Office of Special Council on February 23, 2019, stated that the "filing was plainly deficient. Manafort entirely omitted [his] United States lobbying contracts... and a portion of the substantial compensation Manafort received from Ukraine."
China, Puerto Rico, and Ecuador Early in 2017, Manafort supported Chinese efforts at providing development and investment worldwide and in
Puerto Rico and Ecuador. Early in 2017, he discussed possible Chinese investment sources for Ecuador with
Lenín Moreno who later obtained loans worth several billion US dollars from the
China Development Bank. Manafort acted as the go between for the China Development Bank's investment fund to support bailout bonds for
Puerto Rico's sovereign debt financing and other infrastructure items.
Kurdish independence referendum In mid-2017, Manafort left the United States in order to help organize the
2017 Kurdistan Region independence referendum that was to be held on September 25, 2017, something that surprised both investigators and the media. He was hired by the
President of Kurdistan Region Masoud Barzani's son
Masrour Barzani who heads the
Kurdistan Region Security Council. To help Manafort's efforts in supporting Kurdish freedom and independence, his longtime associate Phillip M. Griffin traveled to
Erbil prior to the vote. Manafort returned to the United States just before both his indictment and the start of the
2017 Iraqi–Kurdish conflict in which the
Peshmerga-led Kurds lost the
Mosul Dam and their main revenue source at the
Baba GurGur Kirkuk oilfields to Iraqi forces. ==Homes, home loans and other loans==