White House press secretary Sean Spicer Wednesday sought to diminish criticism of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, saying a $10 million contract he is accused of accepting from a Russian oligarch with strong ties to Vladimir Putin was offered a decade ago.
Manafort was hired by the Trump campaign last March to help wrangle delegates ahead of the GOP convention and was later promoted to chairman of the operation. He quit in mid-August after multiple allegations surfaced regarding his ties to Russia. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Manafort pitched a plan to Putin ally Oleg Deripaska in 2005 that detailed how he could benefit the Russian president using politics and media coverage inside the United States.
“Nothing in this morning’s report references any actions by the president, White House or any Trump administration official. I think that has got to be clear from the get-go,” Spicer said Wednesday. “The report is entirely focused on actions Paul took a decade ago… and the report that came to light this morning is about a former client he had last decade.”
Spicer said all of the information about Manafort’s foreign clients is available in “public data,” claiming it is widely known that he represented clients in “the Caribbean, Asia, Africa and Europe.”
“His representation of foreign clients is public and similar to the work of Tony Podesta, a Clinton campaign fundraiser whose brother chaired Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” Spicer said.
The Trump spokesman noted that former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta “sat on the board of a Russian energy company” and Clinton herself “crafted policy that was said to ‘strengthen Russia.'”
“So an individual who worked for the president for less than five months over a two-year campaign, who worked for a Russian entity over a decade ago, is the subject of rampant media speculation all day long even though the Clintons had even more extensive ties,” Spicer charged.
Numerous outlets have reported on Manafort’s ties to the Kremlin since FBI Director James Comey confirmed on Monday that his agency has been investigating possible Trump-Russia connections since last summer.
Spicer was quick to note that lawmakers on both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees “have seen zero evidence of any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.”
“And that is not going to be changed by the former business dealings of a campaign staffer from a decade ago,” he said.
Spicer, who began advising the Trump campaign late last summer, could not confirm if Trump knew about Manafort’s ties to Deripaska at the time he hired the veteran GOP operative. Nor would he say whether the president would still have given Manafort the position had he been aware of his foreign consulting.
“I don’t know. Paul was hired to help with delegates. To look back right and to say if we knew now what we know then would we have done something different? I don’t know,” a visibly frustrated Spicer told reporters.
He continued, “I’m not here to vouch for what he did… I don’t know what the circumstances were at the time, so for me to start to infer what he did or did not do was anything improper, is not appropriate at this time.”
