On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported that Trump Campaign Chair Paul Manafort offered to give a “private briefing” on the state of the campaign to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.
A spokesperson for Deripaska has denied that any briefing took place. But if it did, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time Manafort exchanged notes with the Russian aluminum king. After all, Deripaska was the sugar daddy to many of Manafort’s activities in Eastern Europe. And more than a decade ago, Manafort offered to provide the oligarch with very special information.
Manafort told Deripaska in 2005 that he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine “at the highest levels of the U.S. government — the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department,” according to the documents. He also said he had hired a “leading international law firm with close ties to President Bush to support our client’s interests,” but he did not identify the firm.
According to the New York Times, we now know the name of that law firm.
The Justice Department, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation, recently asked the firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, for information and documents related to its work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, which crumbled after he fled to Russia under pressure.
And one of the things that law firm did for Manafort, was justify political prosecutions in Ukraine.
Five years ago, Paul Manafort arranged for a prominent New York-based law firm to draft a report that was used by allies of his client, Viktor Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, to justify the jailing of a political rival.
Long before Michael Flynn was leading the Republican convention—managed by Manafort—in chants of “Lock her up,” Manafort was helping despots lock up their opposition in Ukraine.
The request comes at a time when Mr. Manafort, his work for Mr. Yanukovych’s party and for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs as well as the handling of payments for that work have become focal points in the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and connections between Russia, Mr. Trump and his associates.
In addition to his other connections to Deripaska, Manafort also managed to mysteriously “lose” $17 million of the oligarch’s money.
Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.
Supposedly, Deripaska handed these trivial few million to Manafort to buy some television stations. But that deal didn’t go through, and oops, Manafort never gave back the money.
The notion of indebtedness on the part of Mr. Manafort also aligns with assertions made in a court complaint filed in Virginia in 2015 by the Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, who claimed Mr. Manafort and his partners owed him $19 million related to a failed investment in a Ukrainian cable television business.
So …
And that, unfortunately, leaves out much of the relationship between Manafort and Deripaska.