The New York Times issued a correction Wednesday to a report that said former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort asked for campaign polling to be passed on to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
The newspaper issued a correction note and clarified that Manafort asked then-deputy Trump campaign manager Rick Gates to give the polling data to Ukrainian oligarchs Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, and not Deripaska, who has close ties to the Kremlin.
“A previous version of this article misidentified the people to whom Paul Manafort wanted a Russian associate to send polling data,” the Times said in its correction Wednesday. “Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, not Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.”
The report came after the defense team for Manafort acknowledged in a new filing that their client shared 2016 presidential campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian-Ukrainian political consultant to Russian intelligence, who at one point worked for Manafort’s consulting firm.
In failing to properly redact their document, Manafort’s defense team said he was unable to properly answer questions “with regard to the government’s allegation that Mr. Manafort lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign.”
Kilimnik was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in June 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice and tampering with a witness on behalf of Manafort.
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