Trump says he knew nothing about Manafort’s dealings with Russian

President Trump on Thursday denied any knowledge that his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort shared polling data with a Russian who has ties to the Kremlin’s intelligence community.

“I didn’t know anything about that,” Trump told reporters outside the White House as he embarked on a trip to the southern border in Texas.

The revelation came this week in court documents filed by Manafort’s defense lawyers that accidentally included details that were intended to be redacted.

The filings show special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, accused Manafort of sending campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a former business associate of Manafort with connections in the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency.

Manafort’s defense team was responding to Mueller’s accusations that he lied to the special counsel’s investigators about his contacts with Russians during the campaign after pleading guilty last year.

Kilimnik worked with Manafort’s consulting firm when he was representing pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.

The court documents also accidentally revealed that Manafort met with Kilimnik to discuss a peace plan with Ukraine.

Russia, which illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, wanted a peace plan so the US would remove the sanctions it imposed because of the invasion.

Manafort, who ran the Trump campaign from March to August 2016, was convicted last August of eight counts of financial fraud in federal court in Virginia.

In September, he agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with Mueller to avoid another trial in Washington federal court.

Source: Read Full Article