For those who missed it, the real source of Manafort’s trouble: You don’t steal from Mr. Trump!
Just as Steve had thought, the story ran the next day, August 15, page one, above the fold.
“I’ve got a crook running my campaign,” Trump said when he read it.
Paul’s propensity to operate in dark corners had perhaps showed itself early in his tenure on the campaign. On the day Corey was fired, amid the craziness, Paul went to Jeff DeWit, the campaign’s chief operating officer, and asked for a $5 million check to be cut for a media buy that sounded vague at best. DeWit said he would issue the check only after he received a memo from Allen Weisselberg with Donald Trump’s “D” signed on it. That was the last DeWit heard about the check or the buy.
Then there was the strange and murky case of Left Hand Enterprises LLC. In May 2016, after Manafort joined the campaign, and before they fired Corey, the campaign operated on two separate budgets. Corey oversaw the funds in one, and Manafort managed the other. Soon after the campaign hired Manafort, his budget quickly cut successive checks totaling over $700,000 to a newly formed Delaware company that was supposed to provide direct mail to Nebraska and Indiana. Whether or not the mailing found its way to those states, or to any other location, is still up for debate. What is known is that Left Hand LLC had a mailing address at a farm in Virginia that just happened to be the voting residence of Manafort’s former business partner.
The complete story of the Left Hand incident has never been fully resolved. But the amount of $700,000 for a mailing that no one knows for sure ever happened is something that a guy with the initials DJT will not soon forget.
Trump told Bannon to fire Manafort right away. Steve argued that firing his campaign chairman would cause a shit storm of bad press. Instead he argued that Trump should take away his authority and give him a new title, which is what happened. When the campaign announced the new team, Bannon had the title of campaign CEO, Kellyanne Conway was the campaign manager, and Manafort remained the campaign chairman.
The kill shot for Paul came on Thursday the eighteenth, when Trump was about to go onstage at a rally in Charlotte, North Carolina. A friend showed him a printout of an AP story written by Jeff Horwitz and Chad Day. Based on emails that the AP had obtained, the story described Manafort running “a covert Washington lobbying operation on behalf of Ukraine’s ruling political party, attempting to sway American public opinion in favor of the country’s pro-Russian government.” It also said that Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, had “never disclosed their work as foreign agents as required under federal law.”
“Tell Jared to fire him,” Trump said.
Lewandowski, Corey R.. Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency (pp. 145-147). Center Street. Kindle Edition.
I immediately knew this guy was going to be trouble for Trump.
I argued with people on line. They insisted Trump had to use Manafort and get rid of Lewendowski because Manafort would win Trump the nomination.
It was a bargain with the devil.
Q anon has stated pretty clearly that Paul Manafort was a plant in the campaign. We’ll see.