Ahead of arrests, Paul Manafort’s Kremlin oligarch’s private plane reportedly arrives in United States

| 7:07 pm EDT October 29, 2017
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One or more individuals in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal are getting arrested on Monday, and a number of experts believe Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort may be among those arrested. Manafort is facing legal trouble for, among other things, the tens of millions of dollars he took from a Kremlin oligarch without registering as a foreign agent. Now, notably, a private plane registered to that same Kremlin oligarch has reportedly arrived in the United States.

Several disclaimers are necessary here. Although a flight tracking service does list Kremlin oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s plane as having been at Teterboro airport in New Jersey since Thursday (link), that doesn’t mean Deripaska arrived on it. He could have loaned the plane to a friend. The tracking information could be in error. But it’s nonetheless led to a popular theory online that Deripaska may have sent the plane to New Jersey in order to help Paul Manafort flee the country ahead of his possible arrest.

Again, this is just a theory being floated by a number of users on Twitter, based on what is clearly incomplete information. Paul Manafort does have a home in nearby New York. However, Manafort has no way of knowing for sure if he’s among those who will be arrested tomorrow. Moreover, the plane reportedly arrived on Thursday, and news of the impending arrests didn’t leak until Friday. Perhaps most notably, nothing about Deripaska’s actions up to this point suggests that he would be willing to help a fugitive flee from justice.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s Russia scandal has now grown so surreal that just as Paul Manafort is facing the possibility of imminent arrest, a private plane belonging to his Kremlin oligarch benefactor has arrived at an airport fairly near to him in the United States. This is all starting to read like a bad spy novel.