President Trump’s ex-campaign manager offered to privately brief a shady Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin on the Trump campaign two weeks before the New York billionaire won the GOP nomination, according to a report Wednesday.
The Washington Post, citing sources, said Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum kingpin Manafort had done business with in the past.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, some of which was read to the paper along with other documents from the same period.
Manafort resigned under pressure the following month after his overseas business dealings became a campaign issue.
The email was among thousands of documents Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators has compiled in its probe of Russian meddling in the US election and possible ties to the Trump campaign.
There was nothing in the documents that suggested that Deripaska saw Manafort’s offer or that any briefings ever took place.
A spokeswoman for Deripaska slammed the email exchanges as a plan by “consultants in the notorious ‘beltway bandit’ industry” to make a quick buck.
But investigators believe that the emails show Manafort’s willingness to cash in from his ties to Trump and grant Russian interests access to top figures in Trump’s campaign.
In one April exchange days after Trump named Manafort as a campaign strategist, he boasted about his great press and growing reputation and asked, “How do we use to get whole?” the paper reported.
A Manafort spokesman said that the email exchanges reflected an innocent effort to collect past debts, and that no briefings took place.
Deripaska reportedly owed Manafort’s firm money from earlier work.
The billionaire is one of Russia’s wealthiest men, and an ally of President Vladimir Putin.
A US diplomatic cable from 2006 that was published by WikiLeaks said Deripaska was “among the 2-3 oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.”
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the Russian billionaire has been trying to get visas to travel to the US but has been rebuffed because concerns he might have ties to the Russian mob, charges he denies.