Former President Donald Trump is expected to enlist former campaign chief Paul Manafort as a campaign adviser, according to The Washington Post. Manafort may be involved in planning around the upcoming Republican National Convention in July and could potentially play a role in fundraising for the campaign, sources told the outlet, adding that no formal decision has been made.
Manafort was Trump’s campaign chief in 2016 before he was charged and later convicted of tax and bank fraud felonies in special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the election. Manafort was sentenced to prison after he admitted to lying to investigators about his contact with a Russian associate during the 2016 campaign, among other crimes. He was pardoned by Trump in his final days in office.
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report released in 2020 called Manafort’s receptivity to Russian outreach “grave counterintelligence threat” that opened the campaign to “malign Russian influence.” The report concluded that Manafort’s longtime partner, Konstanin Kilimnik, was a Russian intelligence officer who may have been directly involved in the Russian plot to break into Democratic Party accounts and leak the files to WikiLeaks.
Five Democratic senators on the committee, including then-Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said the report “unambiguously shows that members of the Trump Campaign cooperated with Russian efforts to get Trump elected.”
“This is what collusion looks like,” the Democrats said, referring to Manafort sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik.
