EXCLUSIVE: Paul Manafort has been back channeling campaign tips through top Trump aides since last year, Republicans tell 24sight News
Sources say Manafort worked through senior campaign advisor Chris LaCivita and veteran pollster Tony Fabrizio behind the scenes, but Trump camp denies direct involvement
Paul Manafort, the former campaign manager for Donald Trump, has been secretly advising the 2024 re-election effort through his top campaign aides since last summer, according to the more than half-dozen Republicans who told 24sight News about the arrangement.
Manafort has quietly been passing strategic advice back to Trump through co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and longtime Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio, the Republican sources said. Manafort has been analyzing polling results and advised on the organization of state Republican parties and selecting delegates to the Republican nominating convention — one of his specialties — according to two Republicans familiar with the dealings.
But LaCivita and other Trump campaign officials vehemently denied Manafort’s involvement.
LaCivita called questions about huddling with Manafort for Trump’s benefit “manufactured horseshit,” in a text message to 24sight News. Trump campaign spokesman Brian Hughes endorsed LaCivita’s reply, adding some context to the pushback.
“There was clearly a moment of consideration about using Manafort specifically for the convention,” Hughes said Wednesday. “But Manafort very publicly withdrew himself.”
Asked if Manafort had discussions with Fabrizio about helping steer the campaign, Hughes said he was unaware of everything that people talk about outside the campaign.
Three Republicans familiar with the dealings said that LaCivita met with Manafort in suburban Washington last fall. LaCivita denied details of the meeting to 24sight News, but declined to answer additional questions.
“LaCivita made a huge mistake with Manafort. Why do a public restaurant?” one Republican aware of their encounter last fall told 24sight News.
Republicans familiar with Manafort’s dealings said he has played an instrumental role behind the scenes, in one clear instance helping craft the Trump campaign’s messaging — which has been markedly sharper this time than it was eight years ago when the political neophyte first ran for office.
Manafort, who has had a longstanding relationship with Fabrizio, would analyze Fabrizio’s polls and then send a message back through Fabrizio on what Trump should tell supporters. Manafort “looks at polling every other day, and says ‘It’s the interest rate on home loans,’” one Republican familiar with their arrangement told 24sight News, citing a specific example from the campaign trail.
Last December, shortly before the New Hampshire Republican primary, Trump hit Biden on high mortgage rates during a rally in the Granite State. And Trump re-upped that line of attack a few days ago in a post to his social media site.
Republicans familiar with Manafort’s efforts have said Manafort has not spoken with Trump himself throughout this race and they rejected media reports that the presumptive GOP nominee had warmed up to Manafort returning. It’s also unclear if LaCivita or Fabrizio presented any information or advice gleaned from Manafort this time around to Trump as having come from his former confidant.
Fabrizio did not reply to requests for comment. Manafort, who previously denied helping Trump this election cycle, did not respond to 24sight News text messages or phone calls on Wednesday.
Manafort, who resigned from Trump’s 2016 campaign after political strategies he crafted to “greatly benefit the Putin Government” were revealed by The Associated Press, was later convicted of financial crimes including banking and tax fraud and sentenced to 47 months in prison.
Leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were taken aback by Manafort’s promotion of Russian interests, fingering him as part of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s coordinated effort to influence the Trump campaign and sway the 2016 election. They spent years investigating how Manafort, working with Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik and pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine, did Putin’s bidding.
“The Committee found that Manafort's presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on the Trump Campaign,” Senate lawmakers wrote in their five-volume report on Russia’s election interference. “Taken as a whole, Manafort's high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik and associates of Oleg Deripaska, represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
The FBI is offering a $250,000 reward for Kilimnik’s capture and has placed him on the Most Wanted list. But Trump’s allies have broadly disputed Kilimnik’s ties to Russian intelligence.
A few months after negotiating an early release from prison in May 2020, by pleading that he was in danger of contracting Covid-19, Manafort set up the shell company which would become his ticket to rejoining Trumpworld. 24sight News broke the news about Manafort’s stealth comeback bid, via Winter Solstice Holdings LLC, in March.
‘Part of the same problem’
Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Van Hollen sighed deeply when asked about Manafort’s comeback effort.
“I have broader concerns about Trump's ties to Russia and the fact that Trump so often sides with Putin against the United States and our interests,” the Maryland Democrat told 24sight News, calling the campaign’s cozying back up to Manafort “all part of the same problem.”
Trump and his allies have forcefully pushed back against details of their ties to Russia and support for Putin, for close to a decade now, repeatedly panning them as either a “hoax” or “witch hunt” perpetuated by the “deep state.”
In 2019, then-Attorney General Bill Barr famously misrepresented the findings from then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to support Trump in 2016. Barr broke with Trump after the 2020 election, rebutting Trump’s false claims that he had won the election, but recently came back into the fold and endorsed the former president’s third White House bid.
Close to a dozen top Senate Democrats overseeing international, legal and national security operations sounded exasperated but unsurprised by Manafort’s efforts, when approached by 24sight News.
“It’s a source of great concern. But not a surprise, knowing Trump's method of operation,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Chris Coons, a senior member of the Foreign Relations and Judiciary panels, burst out laughing when asked about Manafort rejoining Trump’s brain trust, “They're welcoming back a number of folks whose previous records have not covered them in glory.”
Pressed about the possible national security threats Manafort brings to the table, Coons said Trump’s got enough baggage of his own.
“There's plenty to be concerned about, just about Donald Trump himself. What he says. What his record is,” said Coons, a Delaware Democrat and longstanding ally of President Joe Biden.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ben Cardin echoed the broader concern with Trump himself, noting that Congress could try and “Trump-proof” certain procedural guardrails before the November election. But the retiring Maryland Democrat said if the former president gets back into the White House, the world should brace for more chaos.
Senate Judiciary Committee member Mazie Hirono said she was almost at a loss for words regarding the former president’s judgment.
But then she found some.
“There's very little that former President Trump does that is not totally astounding, bizarre, and I have no words, often,” the Hawaii Democrat said. “But here’s a guy for whom the rule of law does not apply in history.”
Old friends
Fabrizio and Manafort have a longstanding relationship, dating back more than a decade.
The veteran New York Republican pollster’s firm “earned more than a quarter million dollars from Manafort for polling and surveys in Manafort’s Ukraine operation in 2012 and 2013,” according to a CNN report from 2019, which cited foreign agent registration filings.
And Fabrizio has deep ties to LaCivita and Trump’s closest confidants pre-dating his work as the former president’s top pollster, which was noted in a 2016 Politico report.
As he’s worked to rebuild his standing in GOP politics, Manafort has been trading on those relationships to assert that he is back in with Trump, Republicans said.
“Fabrizio has been pushing Paul (Manafort) internally,” one Republican familiar with the current efforts told 24sight News. “Fabrizio has a real relationship with Trump.”
Through the Republican primaries last summer, Manafort repeatedly told friends from his old stomping grounds in Northern Virginia that he was back in with Trump, according to Republicans familiar with the conversations. At the time, many sources wrote it off as bluster from the 2016 collaborator.
But Manafort was methodically chipping away at the campaign fortress around Trump — and it looks like it worked.
Manafort met with RNC officials organizing the party’s nominating convention in Milwaukee this July, according to the New York Times. Two Republicans familiar with the convention efforts confirmed Manafort’s appearance in Milwaukee to 24sight News. One said it was possible that Manafort flew there on his own and misrepresented his ties to the campaign.
After the Washington Post reported on his consulting work for a mobile streaming platform endorsed by the Chinese government, Manafort said he was abandoning plans to prep the GOP festivities.
“I was offering my advice and suggestions to the Trump campaign on the upcoming convention in a volunteer capacity,” Manafort told the Times via a statement from the Trump campaign. “However, it is clear that the media wants to use me as a distraction to try and harm President Trump and his campaign by recycling old news.”