Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican strategist and chairman of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign, has resigned from an unpaid role advising party officials on the nominating convention. .
Manafort’s move comes after The New York Times reported that he was in Milwaukee last week for a planning session for the convention, and the Washington Post said he had been involved in work with foreign officials and companies. This was done in response to a paper report.
“As a longtime and avid supporter of President Trump, and with nearly 50 years of experience in organizing presidential conventions, I volunteered to provide advice and suggestions to the Trump campaign regarding the upcoming convention,” Manafort said in a statement. ” he told the Times. he said in a statement provided by the Trump campaign.
“But it’s clear that the media wants to use me as a distraction to try to harm President Trump and his campaign by recycling old news,” he said.
“And I will not let the media do that. Therefore, I will be on the sidelines and support President Trump in every way to defeat President Biden,” he said in a statement.
Trump campaign officials declined to comment.
Manafort, who helped thwart Trump’s effort to block his nomination at the 2016 convention, was charged with seven counts of financial crimes unrelated to the 2016 campaign, including tax evasion, bank fraud and money laundering. He was sentenced to more than a year in prison. — before Trump was pardoned before leaving office.
His role in advising tournament organizers had been under consideration for several weeks. Manafort has extensive convention experience, and the Trump campaign was looking for a veteran staffer to help in July.
Mr. Manafort, 75, served as an adviser to Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and ran the Republican convention that year. He was brought into Trump’s campaign in the spring of 2016 as Trump faced efforts to strip him of the delegates he needed to be a candidate at his party’s convention.
Manafort’s work with Trump’s campaign that year was relatively short-lived. In August 2016, he was expelled in part due to headlines about his activities with a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Mr. Manafort then became embroiled in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
Manafort is one of the few Trump advisers to have been sentenced to prison on charges unrelated to the campaign. Trump praised Manafort for not cooperating with government investigations and pardoned him at the end of his term. The Washington Post reported this week that Manafort is once again working for foreign interests and politicians, including with a Chinese entertainment streaming service. He denied working for the service, but told the paper he had introduced potential partners in the United States.
Manafort was never expected to take on the role of managing the tournament. However, he was expected to be involved in advising on the composition of the platform committee, although not on the content of the platform itself, according to people briefed on the matter.
The platform debate will be especially important for the party this year. In 2020, the Republican Party did not adopt a new platform amid a series of changes to its convention due to the coronavirus pandemic, simply reverting to its 2016 platform.
And in a controversy that received little attention at the time, language was inserted into the platform watering down language supporting Ukraine with military aid against Russia’s invasion. The language change was one of the issues Mueller sought information on during the investigation.
