Fresh evidence suggests that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort may really have collected millions in illegal cash from Ukraine.
The documents included an invoice that appeared to show $750,000 funneled through an offshore account and disguised as payment for computers.
This invoice backs up accusations that Manafort pulled in more than $12 million in secret payments. Those accusations during summer 2016 raised Manafort’s profile to the point he had to leave his official role in the Trump campaign.
Paul Manafort was Donald Trump’s campaign chair. He ran the show for the entire primary season, right up to and through the Republican National Convention. Everything about Trump’s campaign, from the insane rallies to the insane policy, was put there by Paul Manafort. All that amounted to what Sean Spicer described as “a very limited role.”
But Paul Manafort played an even bigger role in another campaign: that of seating pro-Putin candidate Viktor Yanukovych as president of Ukraine. Manafort worked in Ukraine for five years, not just getting Yanukovych his position but building up the now outlawed Party of Regions, organizing protests against NATO, doing undisclosed foreign lobbying inside the United States, and laying groundwork for the invasion of Crimea.
Along the way, Manafort collected not just his known pay, but is under investigation for possible off the books payments that may have continued while Manafort was supposedly working for Trump.
It is not clear that Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine ended with his work with Mr. Trump’s campaign. A communications aide for Mr. Lyovochkin, who financed Mr. Manafort’s work, declined to say whether he was still on retainer or how much he had been paid.
The new problem for Manafort is just more documentation to support the idea that he ran off with millions in illegal payments.
What happens when you’ve spent years engaged in corrupt practices among a bunch of corrupt forces? You end up with a massive pile of connections and entanglements. For example, a ledger showing that Manafort collected $12.7 million in payments has been challenged as being fake.
Mr. Manafort, who denied the latest allegations, has asserted that the ledger is a forgery and that the member of Parliament, Serhiy A. Leshchenko, was involved in a scheme to blackmail him. Mr. Leshchenko insists that a letter appearing to show him threatening Mr. Manafort with the release of damaging information was itself a fake, and he denies any involvement in blackmail.
You’re the fake. No, you’re the fake!
But this latest receipt seems to tip the balance of fakery against Manafort.
On Monday, Mr. Leshchenko released an invoice that he said was recovered from a safe in Mr. Manafort’s former office in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, that seems to corroborate one of the 22 entries in the ledger from 2009. The invoice billed a shell company in Belize, Neocom Systems Limited, for $750,000 for the sale of 501 computers.
Neocom Systems has turned up as a shell company in other fraud cases.
Meanwhile, folks in the Ukraine have been trying to get Manafort back on their soil for some time.
Ukrainian prosecutors want to question Paul Manafort in connection with a corruption investigation and have made repeated requests for assistance from US authorities, CNN has learned.