Manafort Joins the Trump Campaign and Possible Connections to the GRU’s Hack-and-Leak Operation
This article covers how Paul Manafort was hired on to the 2016 Trump Campaign and his possible connections to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation.
It is the second article in the series “Black Caviar: Paul Manafort, Russia, and the 2016 Trump Campaign.”
While it is not necessary to read previous entries, it is recommended.
I published a series of articles covering Paul Manafort’s background as a lobbyist and political consultant, and his work in Ukraine prior to the 2016 election, here.
The first article covered Manafort’s activities in post-Maidan Revolution Ukraine and his dual family/fiscal crisis.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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Paul Manafort began seeking a role on the Trump Campaign as early as January 2016. According to his deputy Richard Gates, Manafort believed holding such a position would be “good for business,” and help them collect their debts in Ukraine.
Manafort used his longtime friendship and business relationship with Roger Stone and with the billionaire financier, real estate investor and Trump friend Thomas Barrack to send initial feelers to the campaign.
Manafort and Barrack had met 40 years earlier in Beirut while the former was doing business for a Saudi construction company and the two became fast friends.
Barrack, a Lebanese Christian who had grown up in California, had close ties to the Saudi royal family and leveraged the relationship to gain access to the Reagan White House.
Barrack had known Trump since the mid-1980s when, during an infamous spending spree that presaged Trump’s first debt crunch, he purchased 20% of the Alexander’s Department store chain, then owned by the wealthy Bass family of Texas, whom Barrack worked for at the time.
Barrack oversaw the sale of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan from the Bass’s to Trump for an $410 million in cash. The deal blew up in Trump’s face after interest payments on the money Trump borrowed to finance the purchase exceeded revenues and the Plaza was forced into bankruptcy.
The deal sealed Barrack’s reputation as a real estate heavyweight and, somewhat surprisingly, the two moguls became friends. In 1991 Barrack established his own outfit, Colony Capital, which later became Colony NorthStar.
Barrack later acquired $70 million worth of the debt held by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner of the $1.8 billion he owed for the 2010 purchase of the building located at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. In the aftermath of the financial crises, Kushner was faced with financial difficulties and Barrack agreed to reduce his obligations following a personal phone call from Trump.
After Trump’s election, Barrack was indicted for failing to register as a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates, obstruction of justice, and lying to investigators. He was acquitted after a trial in 2022.
Manafort met with Barrack at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills on January 30th, 2016 and requested that he use his influence with Trump to win him a position on the campaign.
It wouldn’t have been the first favor Barrack had bestowed upon the Manaforts, in 2004 he provided Manafort’s wife Kathleen a $1.8 million private loan secured by their real estate holdings.
Barrack agreed to help, having his own agenda with Trump as well.
In preparation for a post-oil world, Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), then Saudi Arabia’s powerful Deputy Crown Prince, was soon to announce the diversification of the countries vast assets through opening up shares of the state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Company to the public and then plowing the projected $2 trillion in proceeds into the country’s sovereign wealth fund.
Barrack, who hoped to participate in this once in a lifetime investment opportunity, was already preparing to leverage his relationship with his longtime friend and Ambassador for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to the US, Yousef Al Otaiba, to these ends.
Otaiba was a close ally of Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of the Gulf State of Abu Dhabi, who was close with MBS and counseled him that closer ties to the US were possible through improved relations with Israel.
Barrack calculated that in addition to his relationships with Trump and Otaiba, having strong relations with a high level member of the Trump campaign couldn’t help but improve his position, so he went to bat for Manafort. Following their meeting at the Montage, Barrack emailed Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump suggesting that Manafort could help.
By February 25th, 2016, Barrack had spoken twice with Trump and argued that Manafort could help him secure the nomination at the convention against any last ditch efforts by the Republican establishment.
Manafort sent Barrack two sets of memos that Rick Gates helped him prepare articulating arguments in support of him joining the campaign. Barrack added a personal cover letter that described Manafort as “the most experienced and lethal of managers,” and “a killer.”
“I have managed Presidential campaigns around the world,” Manafort wrote to Trump. “I have had no client relationships dealing with Washington since around 2005. I have avoided the establishment in Washington since 2005.”
He continued, “I will not bring Washington baggage.”
Manafort highlighted the fact that he owned a condo in Trump Tower and initially pitched himself as occupying the role of convention manager.
Lastly, in what would ultimately prove to be his most persuasive argument, Manafort wrote, “I am not looking for a paid job.”
In the second set of memos sent on February 29th, 2016, Manafort warned of establishment Republican plots seeking to derail Trump’s candidacy during the convention and outlined his recommended actions to counteract these efforts.
That very same day Barrack, who had been privately supporting the Trump campaign for months, issued a public endorsement of Trump’s bid for the presidency. He was the first major Wall Street player to do so.
Barrack then sent the memos to Ivanka who printed them out and presented them to her father, complete with a handwritten note at the bottom of them that read, “Daddy, Tom says we should get Paul.”
Following Trump’s commanding wins on Super Tuesday, March 1st, 2016, which brought him ever closer to seizing the nomination, Barrack continued to promote Manafort to Trump, Jared and Ivanka. Throughout this period both Manafort and Barrack were in close and continuous contact with Roger Stone.
“You are the only one who can do this,” Stone wrote to Barrack.
“Donald sees you as a peer — the rest of us are just vassals. [H]e has no research or plan. [H]is handlers reinforce his worst instincts … I think lvanka and Jared and Don [Jr] and Eric have had their fill of Corey. We will know Tues if we are headed to a brokered convention- if so he needs Manafort or he will get robbed.”
Read my series “From Nixon to Trump: Roger Stone’s Politics of Deception and Division,” here.
Stone pressed his case with Trump personally, holding ten phone calls with him between March 1st and 16th.
Throughout the same period, Manafort spoke with Stone over the phone eleven times.
By the evening of March 16th, Stone and Barrack’s efforts paid off and Manafort was hired by the Trump campaign.
“You are the Best!!!” Manafort wrote in an email to Barrack. “[W]e are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.”
Paul Manafort, Konstantin Kilimnik, and the GRU’s Hack-and-Leak Operation
Six days before Manafort joined the Trump Campaign, on March 10th, 2016, GRU Unit 26165 began targeting the Clinton campaign. The Senate Intelligence report states that Konstantin Kilimnik “may be connected to the GRU hack-and-leak operation.”
The section describing the “fragmentary evidence” of his involvement is almost fully redacted.
The report further describes Manafort’s involvement in the hack and leak as “largely unknown.”
It points toward “two pieces of information” that suggest Manafort could have been involved. The following section describing the said information is nearly fully redacted, with the exception of a partial sentence mentioning Jeffrey Yohai, Manafort’s currently incarcerated ex-son-in-law.
Curiously, Manafort and Yohai were engaged in a series of highly suspect real estate and financial transactions at key moments during the 2016 election involving several financial institutions with tantalizing links to Eurasian organized crime.
One of the financial institutions utilized by Manafort and Yohai was Spruce Capital. The co-founder and principal of Spruce Capital, Joshua Crane, had worked with the Trump Organization before developing the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Waikiki Beach Walk.
Spruce Capital was financially backed by a Brooklyn-based fertilizer billionaire named Alexander Rovt.
Born under the name Sándor Róth in Ukraine, Rovt identifies as Carpathian and moved to New York City in the mid-1980s.
In 1988, Rovt joined IBE Trade (International Barter Exchange), which had been founded by a Korean war veteran, major Republican party donor and former intelligence operative named Sheldon Silverston.
IBE Trade sold goods to pariah states with little hard currency, examples including Uganda after its civil war in the 80s and Romania under Ceausescu, in exchange for commodities.
Silverston used Rovt’s contacts to gain access to the Soviet Union during the period it was opening up under Gorbachev, where they bartered for vast quantities of fertilizer.
Rovt and a partner Imre Pakh eventually bought out Silverston and by the late-90s IBE Trade controlled upwards of 85% of the fertilizer in Russia and Ukraine.
Imre Pakh is known to have ties to Russian organized crime.
In 1999, IBE Trade purchased a fertilizer factory in Bulgaria.
In order to provide the plant with a steady gas supply, Rovt partnered with Igor Makarov, the very same natural gas tycoon from Turkmenistan who established ITERA, the Gazprom-linked intermediary and predecessor to Eural Trans Gas (ETG) and RosUkrEnergo (RUE), all of which sold Turkmen gas to Ukraine and have been associated with corrupt Gazprom officials, Vladimir Putin, Semyon Mogilevich and Eurasian organized crime.
In return, Makarov received a 25% ownership stake in the plant. Rovt eventually got into a dispute with some of his other partners in the plant and one accused him and Pakh, without providing any evidence, of having old ties to the KGB.
Rovt sold his overseas assets to Dmytro Firtash, the Ukrainian billionaire and suspected front for Semyon Mogilevich, who was listed as part owner of ETG and RUE.
On the day of the election, Rovt donated $10,000 to the Trump campaign. However, all but $2,700 was returned as the rest was above the legal limit.
What, if anything, this had to do with the GRU’s hack and leak campaign is a mystery.
Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, there is not enough publicly available information to write about these matters with any authority. This is an important avenue for future investigators. These transactions may have been a means to conceal the movement of money, potentially even bribes, at key moments of the campaign.
The next article will cover Paul Manafort’s interaction with Eastern oligarchs while he was Chairman of the Trump Campaign, and his providing of polling data to Russian intelligence.