The day Paul Manafort stepped down, he received $13 million from Donald Trump’s associates

| 3:16 pm EDT April 12, 2017
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One day after his bank records were found to have aligned with Ukrainian records asserting that he was paid tens of millions of dollars by a Kremlin intermediary (link), Paul Manafort announced today that he’ll be retroactively registering as a foreign agent (link). But now another shoe has dropped. According to the New York Times, the day Manafort stepped down from the Donald Trump campaign, he created a shell company which Trump’s allies filled with $13 million in “loans.”

The stunning new revelation suggests that Donald Trump may have had his financial associates pay the radioactive Paul Manafort to go away, after allegations of the Kremlin payments surfaced during the height of the 2016 campaign. Manafort had been running the Trump campaign while taking no salary, so his departure from the campaign would not have placed any sudden financial strain on him. Yet nonetheless, Manafort instantly borrowed millions from Trump associate Alexander Rovt, who has a long financial association with Trump hotels.

At the time Manafort resigned from the Donald Trump campaign, he had been its chairman for several months, and had also briefly served as campaign manager. The cynical interpretation would be that Trump had his associates funnel the money to Manafort in exchange for stepping down quietly and keeping any campaign secrets to himself. This part is not proven. However, a number of other Trump campaign advisers having secretly met with Russian government officials during the election, and at least two of them having acted so suspiciously that the FBI was able to obtain FISA surveillance warrants on them. So there was quite a lot of dirt for a departing campaign chairman to have kept quiet about.

It’s not yet clear if the loans to Manafort (source: NY Times) have been paid back, or if they will be paid back — or if they were merely “loans” in the sense that Deutsche Bank keeps mysteriously funneling money into Donald Trump’s hands even though he tends not to pay his loans back. Deutsche, in turn, was recently busted by the State of New York for laundering Russian money into clients in New York City. Contribute to Palmer Report