tried to convince [Trump] administration officials to broker a resolution to a long-running guerrilla war between Russia and Ukraine.”315
Sometime after his hire by Trump but before mid-June 2016, Manafort—along with Rick Gates—had begun electronically transferring internal campaign polling data to Kilimnik, data that had been, according to the New York Times, “developed by a private polling firm” whose work product was nonpublic.
In the first ten months of his presidential campaign, not only does Trump decry pollsters, but indeed he has no polling operation of his own. By Election Day, Trump will have five polling firms on staff, all of which were engaged after Trump hired Manafort in late March 2016.316
On August 19, Paul Manafort resigns as Trump’s campaign manager, though the move is a cosmetic one only.
Once Manafort becomes a target of the special counsel office’s investigation, Trump and his aides move to obscure the importance of Trump’s former campaign manager to the president’s 2016 campaign. In 2017, Trump’s White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, falsely describes Manafort as a man “who played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”317 An unnamed former Trump campaign worker falsely tells Politico, “We didn’t really have that much interaction with Paul. He wasn’t part of the core campaign team.”318 The same anonymous campaign worker will also falsely say that Manafort “didn’t have a relationship” with Trump before March 2016.319 In fact, as Politico will note in May 2017, “Manafort’s lobbying firm worked for Trump in the 1980s and 1990s fighting the expansion of Indian casinos that could compete with his Atlantic City gambling business, and trying to change the flight path of planes that Trump said disturbed guests at his newly purchased Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.”320 Trump is Manafort’s first-ever client as a political consultant with Black, Manafort & Stone, the consultancy Manafort founded in 1980 with Roger Stone and Charles R. Black Jr.321
Politico reports that after his March 2016 hire by Trump, Manafort “quickly exerted his influence over the entire campaign, which was headquartered at Manhattan’s Trump Tower.” Manafort had owned an apartment there since 2006, the first full year in which Felix Sater worked under an exclusive deal with the Trump Organization to help Trump build a tower in Moscow.322 Bloomberg and Washington Monthly have noted that 2006 was also the year Sater and his Bayrock Group assisted Trump in signing one of the biggest deals of his career, Trump SoHo, several of whose funders “hailed from the former Soviet Union” and had “reported ties to the Kremlin;” many had also “faced allegations of corrupt and criminal behavior, ranging from money laundering to smuggling to involvement in a prostitution ring.”323
As to the extent of Manafort’s engagement with Trump following his late March 2016 hire, in early April 2016 Manafort’s daughter texts her sister that “Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together.”324 She adds that her father and Trump are “perfect allies.”325 While Manafort will not officially gain “complete control” over Trump’s campaign until June 2016, by mid-April 2016 he has so sidelined Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as the authority behind Trump’s operation that NBC News reports that Manafort is Trump’s “de facto campaign manager” and Lewandowski no more than a “body man and scheduler.”326
In January 2018, Trump will tell friends privately that he believes he can escape legal liability in the special counsel’s Russia investigation because “he’s decided that a key witness in the Russia probe, Paul Manafort, isn’t going to ‘flip’ and sell him out.”
The NBC News report in which these private conversations are disclosed contains another, equally shocking revelation: that “Trump is even talking to friends about the possibility of asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions to consider prosecuting Mueller and his team.”327 The report doesn’t indicate what charges Trump wants the Department of Justice to bring against the man investigating him and his aides, allies, and associates, but it confirms, with a Trump adviser as a source, that Trump’s aim in such a prosecution would be to make it impossible for Mueller to “run the federal grand jury” in the Russia investigation because he would be busy defending himself against criminal allegations.328
In midsummer 2016, per Bloomberg, Dustin Stockton, a writer for Breitbart, sponsors a “10-week [media] blitz aimed at convincing black voters in key states to support the Republican real estate mogul [Trump], or simply sit out the election.”
Stockton spends October 2016 as Breitbart’s primary interlocutor