Paul Manafort: The Kremlin’s Man Inside Trump’s 2016 Campaign

Chapter 14 of our series on how Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election to help Trump win

Last week, we explored how fixers and intermediaries exploited Donald Trump’s thirst for a Russian real estate expansion to further entangle him in Moscow’s web. This week, we turn to Paul Manafort, the campaign manager who brought the Kremlin directly into the heart of Trump’s presidential campaign.

Manafort’s entry into the 2016 Trump campaign seemed like a routine hire: a seasoned Republican operative, with decades of experience in Washington, brought in to impose order on a chaotic campaign. Yet what followed revealed something far more troubling — a nexus of foreign influence, hidden debts, and secret data exchanges that ultimately exposed how deeply Russia was entangled in Trump’s campaign operations.

Manafort had spent his career moving through the corridors of Republican power. He advised presidential campaigns for decades and had cultivated an image as a pragmatic strategist, a man who could win by understanding both voters and the power brokers who backed them.

Behind that polished facade, however, Manafort launched his career as a central figure in Washington’s notorious “torturers’ lobby.” In the 1980s, he orchestrated lucrative influence campaigns for some of the world’s most brutal dictators — Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and Jonas Savimbi in Angola. Together, they sold access to the Republican power elite, laundering the reputations of regimes steeped in corruption, torture, and murder — all in exchange for millions in fees.

Domestically, Trump was one of their first clients in 1980. In 1979, Roger Stone met Donald Trump through lawyer Roy Cohn, who also introduced Trump to Paul Manafort around the same time. The following year, Stone, Manafort, and Charles Black founded Black, Manafort & Stone, one of Washington’s first major political lobbying firms. One of their first clients was Trump, who hired them to handle federal matters related to his growing casino and real estate ventures, including dredging permits for the Trump Princess yacht, FAA height waivers for his skyscrapers, and Treasury regulations affecting casino cash transactions. Stone managed the account while Manafort offered strategic advice, establishing a relationship of mutual benefit that would resurface decades later in national politics.

By the turn of the century, Manafort’s focus shifted overseas to Russia. Alongside his partner Rick Davis, he began working for oligarchs, autocrats, and shadowy intermediaries whose political goals aligned with Russia’s objectives. Through their firm, Davis Manafort Partners, the pair built an extensive network across Eastern Europe and in countries once under Soviet control — nations Moscow was actively trying to draw back into its sphere of influence. Much of their work was financed by Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch and part of Putin’s inner circle, whose vast business empire frequently served the Kremlin’s foreign and domestic agenda. In Russia, oligarchs are not truly independent; their fortunes exist at the pleasure of the state, and their survival depends on advancing the Kremlin’s objectives.

Manafort had spent decades selling access and influence in Washington, and now he was selling political strategy to Kremlin-linked authoritarian leaders seeking legitimacy, money, and access to the West. His work in Ukraine began around 2003, when Deripaska and British financier Nat Rothschild brought him in to advise clients of interest to the Kremlin. Around this time, Manafort began relying on his new associate, Konstantin Kilimnik. Their partnership would soon become one of the most consequential relationships in modern political history, linking Manafort’s Western consulting machine to the Kremlin’s networks of influence.

One of their first assignments involved aiding a pro-Russian former KGB general and former Georgian Minister of State Security, Igor Giorgadze, in an effort to return from exile in Moscow and regain political influence in Georgia after the country’s pro-Western Rose Revolution. Giorgadze had been accused of orchestrating a 1995 assassination attempt on Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze, and his return would have reinstalled a loyal Kremlin operative inside Georgia’s government. Manafort’s firm helped draft a strategy to rehabilitate Giorgadze’s image and smooth his return, while Rothschild’s business ventures in Georgian vineyards were leveraged as pressure points against Tbilisi. The plan ultimately failed when Georgia’s new leadership refused to yield to Moscow’s demands.

In 2005, Manafort and Kilimnik surfaced in Kyrgyzstan after the Tulip Revolution, where, according to subsequent investigative reporting, they worked to strengthen Russia’s position — most notably by promoting the closure of the U.S. military presence at Manas air base. It was the second time Manafort appeared in a post- “color revolution” country, and in both cases his mission aligned with Moscow’s goal of rolling back U.S. influence.

From that point forward, Manafort’s work consistently advanced Russian interests across Europe. In Montenegro, he advised on Deripaska’s political and business operations during the 2006 independence referendum, helping the oligarch secure control of the country’s aluminum industry and maintain Moscow’s leverage even as the small Balkan state drifted toward the West. Russia’s interest in Montenegro was strategic, and the Kremlin viewed the country as a vital foothold on the Adriatic and a potential barrier to NATO expansion. A decade later, that same obsession would culminate in a failed coup plot orchestrated by Russian intelligence operatives, who attempted to overthrow the pro-Western government and assassinate the prime minister to prevent Montenegro from joining NATO.

But it was in Ukraine that Manafort made his deepest mark — arriving in late 2003 to prepare Viktor Yanukovych’s campaign for the 2004 presidential election, when the Kremlin was determined to secure a loyal government in Kyiv.

In the 2004 presidential race that followed, Yanukovych’s rival, pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned with TCDD dioxin in an attack that became a global scandal. Declassified U.S. intelligence later concluded that Russian intelligence orchestrated the poisoning. Manafort had arrived a year before the attack and would go on to reengineer Yanukovych’s image, setting the stage for Yanukovych’s eventual return to power.

Manafort was brought into Yanukovych’s orbit through a joint arrangement between Deripaska and Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch and key financier of the pro-Kremlin Party of Regions. His mission was to rehabilitate the party’s image after the Orange Revolution — a popular uprising that had exposed Yanukovych’s electoral fraud and deepened Ukraine’s divide between Western-leaning and Moscow-aligned factions. Manafort’s assignment went well beyond conventional campaign strategy: he reshaped Yanukovych’s messaging to appeal to Western sensibilities, teaching him to speak the language of democracy and reform while quietly advancing policies that would bend Ukraine toward Russia.

Through a mix of American-style political advertising, microtargeting, and narrative reframing, Manafort helped engineer Yanukovych’s comeback and eventual election to the presidency in 2010. American prosecutors later revealed that Manafort was paid tens of millions of dollars through offshore accounts and shell companies for this work — payments largely funded by oligarchs whose business empires depended on Russia’s economic and political favor.

By the time Manafort began rebuilding Yanukovych’s image, Kilimnik had joined him full-time. A Russian intelligence operative educated at the Defense Ministry’s Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a school known for training officers of Russian military intelligence, and a staffer at the International Republican Institute in Moscow, he was dismissed in 2005 after reportedly leaking internal information while freelancing for Manafort — a move that confirmed what many colleagues already suspected about his ties to Russian intelligence. Among Moscow insiders, he was known as “Kostya, the guy from the GRU,” a nickname that reflected his military intelligence career.

Yanukovych’s Party of Regions functioned as Moscow’s most reliable political instrument in Kyiv, advocating for closer economic integration with Russia and resisting NATO expansion. Manafort’s advice — polishing Yanukovych’s authoritarian instincts into populist packaging — helped the Kremlin reassert influence in a country it regarded as part of its historic sphere. Manafort’s Ukrainian political work included efforts to undermine former prime minister and opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, whose imprisonment during Yanukovych’s presidency became an international scandal condemned by both the European Union and the United States. In effect, Manafort exported American campaign technology to reinforce an authoritarian regime aligned with the Kremlin, advancing Russia’s geopolitical aims under the guise of democratic consulting.

In 2005, Manafort pitched Deripaska a strategy memo outlining how he could advance Russia’s interests by influencing politics and media in former Soviet republics and the United States, promising to “greatly benefit the Putin government.” Within a year, Deripaska agreed to pay Manafort roughly $10 million annually for this work, routed through offshore entities. Their partnership extended beyond political consulting: they collaborated on investment ventures in Ukraine, Montenegro, and Cyprus, where Manafort helped Deripaska pursue privatization deals and energy infrastructure projects that dovetailed with Russian geopolitical objectives. Deripaska’s business empire, rooted in raw materials, state contracts, and Kremlin patronage, provided a financial lifeline for Manafort, who accumulated millions in debt to Deripaska-linked companies by 2016.

This consulting relationship effectively placed Manafort at the intersection of Ukrainian domestic politics and Russian strategic interests. Working through Western operatives, including former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter Alan Friedman and Eckart Sager, a one-time CNN producer, Manafort’s team built a transnational PR machine that placed favorable stories in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and European publications sympathetic to Moscow’s viewpoint. Documents later obtained by The Guardian revealed that between 2011 and 2013, Manafort approved a clandestine “black ops” campaign directed by Friedman through FBC Media, designed to smear Tymoshenko and rehabilitate Yanukovych’s image in the West. The operation included ghost-written op-eds, a fake think tank — the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics — social media manipulation, and anonymous briefings, including to outlets like Breitbart, attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting Tymoshenko’s release.

These covert information operations blurred the line between journalism, lobbying, and propaganda. Friedman and Sager coordinated closely with Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, and longtime intel agent Kilimnik to manage messaging, payments, and media placements. Around the same period, Friedman helped construct the so-called Hapsburg Group, an informal coalition of former European leaders secretly paid through offshore accounts controlled by Manafort to lobby U.S. policymakers on behalf of Yanukovych and his Kremlin-aligned government.

According to filings by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and reporting by The New York Times, Friedman served as the conduit between Manafort and prominent figures such as former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and former European Commission President Romano Prodi, arranging op-eds, meetings, and trips to Washington while concealing Ukraine’s sponsorship. In 2018, when Manafort attempted to contact Friedman via WhatsApp to coordinate testimony, prosecutors cited the outreach as witness tampering — prompting a judge to revoke Manafort’s bail. These intertwined “dark media” and lobbying operations exposed the full reach of Manafort’s network: a fusion of Western public relations craft, Kremlin-aligned financing, and covert political influence that would later echo in Russia’s broader information warfare operations.

The relationship between Manafort and Deripaska, one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, reveals how money, influence, and political access further penetrated the Trump campaign. Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate with close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin, played a key role during the 2016 election.

Manafort’s arrival in Trump’s campaign came during a period of turmoil. The candidate’s unpredictable behavior and organizational chaos had alienated experienced operatives. Trump’s advisors wanted someone who could navigate the complexities of convention politics and delegate counts. Manafort, who had once managed the same types of battles for Reagan and Gerald Ford, seemed an ideal fit. By June 2016, he was not only Trump’s convention manager but his campaign chairman, presiding over messaging, budgeting, and strategy. The problem was that Manafort’s expertise came with baggage — a trail of offshore accounts, foreign clients, and opaque financial arrangements.

As Manafort assumed control of Trump’s campaign, his entanglements with Deripaska should have raised dozens of red flags. By 2016, Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska had deteriorated into a multimillion-dollar liability that placed Manafort in a precarious and compromised position.

Court filings, Cypriot financial records, and reporting show that Manafort’s firm, Davis Manafort International, had entered into joint ventures with Deripaska beginning around 2007, including the “Pericles Emerging Markets” fund, which was supposed to invest in telecommunications and infrastructure projects in Eastern Europe. When the ventures collapsed amid the 2008 global financial crisis, Deripaska accused Manafort of mismanaging tens of millions of dollars and of “disappearing” with his investment.

By 2014, Manafort allegedly owed as much as $17 million to Deripaska and to companies linked to him — a debt that remained unresolved when Manafort became chairman of Trump’s campaign two years later. Those close to Manafort later claimed that he was desperate to “get whole” with Deripaska, a man widely seen as both volatile and deeply connected to Putin’s inner circle.

Deripaska had a reputation for ruthless business tactics and was barred from entering the United States because of alleged organized crime ties. Against that backdrop, Manafort’s decision to reach out to Deripaska through his associate Konstantin Kilimnik — offering private briefings on the Trump campaign — reads less like diplomacy and more like self-preservation. Whether driven by fear, opportunism, or financial desperation — or all three — Manafort’s efforts to re-establish favor with a Kremlin-aligned oligarch while managing a U.S. presidential campaign created a situation that intelligence officials later described as a “grave counterintelligence risk.”

Manafort’s continued relationship with Kilimnik was equally troubling. Kilimnik had longstanding ties to Russian intelligence services, an assessment formally confirmed by the Treasury Department, which in 2021 labeled him a “known Russian intelligence agent.” Yet, Manafort maintained a close professional and personal relationship with him for over a decade. When Manafort joined Trump’s campaign in 2016, Kilimnik stayed in regular contact through encrypted communications and in-person meetings, effectively linking the campaign’s inner workings to a figure deeply enmeshed in Russia’s political apparatus.

During the 2016 campaign, this relationship evolved into a channel for the transmission of sensitive information from the campaign to the Kremlin. Manafort instructed his deputy, Rick Gates, to share internal Trump campaign polling data and strategy information with Kilimnik. At a meeting at the Grand Havana Room in New York on August 2, 2016, Manafort provided Kilimnik with the Trump campaign’s internal polling of battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. These were not random metrics. They were precisely the states later targeted by Russian social media interference operations. A Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report later described Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik as a “grave counterintelligence threat,” underscoring the risk that confidential campaign data was likely used to calibrate Kremlin-backed influence efforts.

There were other moments when Manafort’s presence appeared to align the Trump campaign with Moscow’s objectives. During the Republican National Convention, delegates proposed a platform plank calling for the United States to provide lethal defensive weapons to Ukraine to help resist Russian aggression. The proposal was abruptly softened, and explicit support for arming Ukraine disappeared from the final language. Multiple witnesses later said that Manafort’s team, through his deputies, had signaled their desire to avoid offending Russia. The adjustment symbolized a larger shift in tone — a major party was softening its stance toward a foreign adversary even as that adversary was interfering in the election.

By August 2016, the weight of Manafort’s foreign entanglements could no longer be contained. The New York Times uncovered evidence that he had received tens of millions in undisclosed payments from Ukrainian sources, hidden through offshore accounts and shell companies. A “black ledger” found by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau detailed secret cash disbursements to Manafort from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. As the revelations mounted, Trump’s campaign faced growing scrutiny over whether its chairman was compromised by his financial relationships. On August 19, 2016, Manafort resigned, ending his formal role but not the questions surrounding his conduct.

Manafort’s financial and political channels also intersected with organized crime networks. U.S. diplomatic cables described how gas magnate Dmytro Firtash — a business associate of Manafort and ally of Yanukovych, whose indictment was filed by U.S. prosecutors in Chicago — acknowledged needing Russian organized crime boss Semion Mogilevich’s permission to enter certain businesses. Firtash operated as a Kremlin proxy and trusted lieutenant to Mogilevich, serving as a conduit between Russian intelligence, organized crime, and Ukraine. Mogilevich, a top Russian mafia boss who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for over a decade, epitomized the fusion of Kremlin-linked finance, organized crime, and political power. He lived openly in Moscow under the protection of Russian security services, while Firtash and Manafort worked in tandem to channel Kremlin influence through Ukraine’s Party of Regions — a network where corruption, politics, and espionage converged.

The subsequent investigations — first by the FBI, then by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and finally by the Senate Intelligence Committee — peeled back layers of deceit and self-dealing. Prosecutors charged Manafort with tax evasion, bank fraud, and failing to register as a foreign agent. Court filings revealed that even after his indictment, Manafort continued to communicate with Kilimnik, discussing “peace plans” for Ukraine that would effectively re-legitimize Russian control over Crimea — plans that aligned neatly with Moscow’s aims.

For his part, Kilimnik passed the campaign polling data he received from Manafort to Russian intelligence services. American intelligence officials noted that Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaigns, led by Yevgeni Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, focused heavily on the same states Manafort’s data had covered. The overlap suggested coordination at the level of target selection and narrative framing.

What makes the Manafort episode so consequential is not simply the possibility of collusion but the ease with which the Kremlin was able to infiltrate the highest echelon of the Trump campaign. The American campaign system, built on private data analytics and minimal disclosure requirements, offers few safeguards against foreign infiltration. Manafort’s position gave him access to sensitive strategy, internal polling, and donor networks — all without a formal security clearance or vetting process. The Trump campaign’s disregard for standard protocols created an opening that foreign interests could exploit through the very currency that Manafort understood best: information.

The aftermath of Manafort’s fall exposed the frailty of accountability. He was convicted of financial crimes unrelated to direct election interference and later received a “full and complete” pardon from Trump. The core counterintelligence questions — the sum total of what exactly he shared, with whom, and to what effect — remain unanswered. Yet even the public record leaves little doubt that a senior Trump campaign official passed proprietary data to a man linked to Russian intelligence in the middle of a Russian election interference campaign. That should have been a political earthquake. Instead, it became one more episode absorbed into the chaos of the Trump years.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded its five-volume investigation in 2020, its language was sober but damning: Manafort’s relationship with Russian-connected individuals “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.” It was the bipartisan consensus of an investigation that had sifted through millions of pages of evidence and testimony. Yet the political response was muted. By then, the lines between scandal and governance had blurred; outrage had become ambient noise.

Still, history will likely view Manafort as one of the central figures who allowed foreign interests unprecedented proximity to a U.S. campaign. His case illustrates the vulnerabilities of the modern political system, where consultants with global clients can move effortlessly into domestic elections, and where campaign data — the lifeblood of persuasion — can slip across borders under the guise of business as usual. The polarization that later engulfed the United States mirrored what Manafort had already engineered in Ukraine, turning civic divisions into strategic weapons to serve Russia’s strategies. It is a cautionary tale not only about 2016 but about the future: the next campaign, the next strategist, the next malign foreign actor whose influence hides in plain sight.

Manafort joined the Trump campaign, promising to professionalize it. Instead, he professionalized its corruption. Behind the rallies and slogans, he brought with him the logic of oligarchic politics — a worldview in which power is transactional, borders are porous, and truth is negotiable. In that sense, his presence was perfectly suited to the candidate he served. The tragedy for American democracy is that, for a brief and consequential moment, those values guided a campaign that would soon guide the nation.