Manafort resigns from Team Trump as scandal expands
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No surprise.
SCOOP: A close friend of Manafort tells me he has resigned
— Robert Costa (@costareports) August 19, 2016
BREAKING: Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort resigns in wake of campaign shakeup and revelations about Ukraine work.
— The Associated Press (@AP) August 19, 2016
MSNBC reports that Manafort resigned of his own accord, having seen “the writing on the wall.” The resignation was surely a combination of Trump’s decision to bring Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway on board his campaign, along with the quite public revelations about Manafort acting as a lobbying go-between (i.e. a foreign agent) on behalf of a pro-Putin Ukranian leader.
Another factor may be the news that Manafort is tied to organized violent protests in the Ukraine:
On Wednesday, we learned that Ukrainian authorities have accused Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of organizing protests against a NATO military exercise in Ukraine on behalf of the pro-Russian Party of Regions.
Now we’re learning about some of the details of that protest and they are not pretty.
Fusion.net talked with Lt. Colonel Tom Doman, who was one of the U.S. soldiers who was in Ukraine to help plan the NATO exercise, dubbed Sea Breeze 2006. When he and 112 of his fellow soldiers were en route to a NATO compound, anti-NATO protesters descended upon their vehicles.
“We had rocks thrown at us,” Doman tells Fusion. “Rocks hit Marines. Buses were rocked back and forth. We were just trying to get to our base.”
This revelation adds some color to a memo that leaked earlier this week that revealed a senior Ukrainian prosecutor is alleging that Manafort in 2006 orchestrated these anti-NATO protests, which eventually forced NATO to cancel military exercises in Ukraine and helped raised the profile of Party of Regions chief Viktor Yanukovych.
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