The Black Ledger and Manafort’s Last Days on the Campaign
This article covers how events in Ukraine led to Paul Manafort’s resignation from the Trump Campaign in August of 2016. It is the fifth article in the series “Black Caviar: Paul Manafort, the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, and the Trump Campaign.” While it is not necessary to read earlier entries, it is highly 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.
The second article covers how Manafort was hired onto the Trump Campaign and his possible connections to the GRU’s hack-and-leak operation.
The third article covered Manafort’s communications with pro-Kremlin oligrachs and Konstantin Kilimnik’s provision of polling data to Russian intelligence.
The fourth article describes the meeting between Manafort and Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Room where they discussed a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian peace plan.
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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While Paul Manafort was in the thick of his intrigues, events were transpiring in Ukraine that would ultimately doom his position on the Trump campaign. A Ukrainian parliamentarian and investigative journalist named Serhiy Leshchenko was preparing to reveal to the world a portion of a hand-written “Black Ledger” which listed secret, illegal payments made by the Yanukovych regime that would eventually implicate Manafort.
In February of 2016, Leshchenko received an envelope delivered to his parliamentary mailbox containing 22 pages supposedly from the ledger, though none of the payments listed in them were to Manafort. Unable at that time to verify the authenticity of the documents, Leshchenko refrained from publishing them.
Three months later, Leshchenko learned via Ukrainian media that Viktor Trepak, the former deputy head of Ukraine’s security services, was in possession of the full ledger. At that point, Leshchenko released the portion of the Black Ledger he had received months earlier.
According to Leshchenko, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) eventually confirmed to New York Times reporter Andrew Kramer and an unnamed British journalist who was unable to publish because of UK libel laws that Manafort was listed on the ledger.
On August 14th, less than two weeks after Manafort’s meeting with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club, The New York Times published the sensational story revealing that Manafort had received $12.7 million in illicit, potentially illegal payments, from the Yanukovych regime.
None of this came as a surprise to Manafort.
Hours before the publication of the piece in the Times, Manafort attended a meeting in Trump Tower with Steve Bannon, Roger Ailes of Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie and Trump himself. According to Bob Woodward, Manafort had troubles within the Trump campaign that were unrelated to the impending Ukraine story.
Trump’s poll numbers were 12–16 points underwater and as campaign chairman Manafort was shouldering much of the blame. A story in the Times published on August 13th featured 20 unnamed Republican sources and painted a dismal picture of chaos and dysfunction in the Trump camp.
Rebekah Mercer, daughter of the billionaire hedge fund manager and top Trump donor Robert Mercer, had described Manafort as a “disaster” to Bannon and urged him to usurp his position on the campaign. Trump, infuriated by what he perceived as leaks to the Times, angrily attacked Manafort during the meeting.
Bannon was brought on as the CEO of the campaign that day, with the understanding that Manafort wouldn’t be fired, but rather would be able to “stick around as a figurehead.”
Following the contentious meeting, Manafort invited Bannon up to his condo in Trump Tower and showed him a draft copy of the Ukrainian Black Ledger story about to go live on The New York Times website. Manafort explained to Bannon, who believed the article was “a kill shot,” that he had known the article was in the works for two months.
This would have placed the time that Manafort learned of the article roughly around the same time he was elevated to the position of campaign chairman on June 20th, 2016.
Manafort denied to Bannon that he had been the recipient of the cash, claiming that the money was distributed to people who worked for him in Ukraine. After the story was published, Trump, reportedly having received no advanced warning, was furious.
Manafort later told the FBI that he had previously discussed his work in Ukraine with Trump so that he wouldn’t be blindsided if news related to Ukraine or Oleg Deripaska were to come out, but that Trump at the time was uninterested.
Accounts of Manafort’s final days on the Trump Campaign are primarily based upon the testimony of Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon. As mentioned, Manafort was convicted of violating his plea agreement by lying to the Special Counsel’s office.
The Senate Intelligence Committee made a criminal referral to DOJ regarding their suspicions that Bannon had lied to Congressional investigators.
Bannon is also believed to have been a key source for Bob Woodward’s book Fear, which also describes this moment in the campaign.
While Manafort’s and Bannon’s unreliable testimony doesn’t mean that the current account is wrong, it does raise questions. While it is certainly possible that Manafort was de facto replaced by Bannon mere hours before the Black Ledger story broke, when nobody on the campaign aside from Manafort and later Bannon knew about the impending story, it is a remarkable coincidence.
On August 18th, Konstantin Kilimnik emailed James Marson of The Wall Street Journal saying that he was in “almost daily contacts with Manafort these days on this ‘Ukraine crisis.’”
Kilimnik further indicated that he was in contact with Rick Gates.
“What others do not see,” Kilimnik explained to Marson, “is that Manafort is building a parallel system of HQ, pretty similar to what he has done in Ukraine for [the Party of Regions], which plays a crucial role in key moments. Whether he has time to finish it is a key story.”
Kilimnik was not alone in this belief. Rick Gates told later investigators that Manafort, much as he had done with the Party of Region in Ukraine, established a “parallel system” of loyal contacts on the Trump campaign that included Digital Media Director Brad Parscale, pollster Tony Fabrizio, and Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff Rick Dearborn, among others. Gates believed that Manafort maintained these contacts after he officially left the Trump campaign.
On the same day Kilimnik emailed Marson, Politico published an article by Kenneth P. Vogel about Kilimnik that described him as “a Russian Army-trained linguist who has told a previous employer of a background with Russian intelligence.”
It was the first time any hint of Kilimnik’s connection with Russian intelligence was mentioned in the Western press. While the story largely vanished into the media maelstrom surrounding the campaign, the article led to an investigation into Kilimnik being launched in Ukraine.
The next day, CNN reported that the FBI and Justice Department had been looking into Manafort as part of a sprawling investigation into the corruption of the deposed Viktor Yanukovych regime.
Finally succumbing to negative press, Manafort resigned from the campaign that day.
While Manafort may no longer have held an official position on the Trump Campaign, he was not out of the picture. His subordinate Rick Gates stayed on with the campaign under Steve Bannon. Between his resignation and election day, Manafort also continued to speak with Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and Steve Bannon, among others.
“We need to avoid [M]anafort like he has a disease,” Bannon wrote in an email to RNC head Reince Priebus. “Dems will say that the Russians are helping us win.”
On October 21st, amid WikiLeaks’ staggered releases of John Podesta’s emails, Manafort emailed Kushner a strategy memo that argued that the campaign should portray Clinton as “the failed and corrupt champion of the establishment.”
He further argued that “WikiLeaks provides the Trump campaign the ability to make the case in a very credible way — by using the words of Clinton, its campaign officials, and DNC members.”
On November 5th, three days before election day, Manafort emailed Trump, Kushner, and Priebus a message, which he forwarded separately to Fox News Anchor Sean Hannity, with the subject line “Securing Victory.”
In the email, Manafort predicted a Trump victory in the election. Manafort advised that the Trump team devise a strategy to prepare the public and media for such a shocking and unexpected outcome or they would face severe backlash.
Following a Trump victory, Manafort argued that the Clinton campaign would “”move immediately to discredit the DT victory and claim voter fraud and cyber-fraud, including the claim that the Russians have hacked into the voting machines and tampered with the results.”
The next article will cover the Manafort’s mysterious real estate and financial transactions that took place during critical moments of the 2016 campaign.