President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has filed as a foreign agent for work he did for a political party in Ukraine tied to Russia.
The Washington Post reported that Manafort retroactively filed forms to the Justice Department on Tuesday, indicating that his firm received $17.1 million over two years from Ukraine’s Party of Region. That party’s leadership of Ukraine ended when its leader fled to Russia in 2014 after protests against his anti-Western rhetoric.
Manafort is the second Trump associate to acknowledge his foreign interests, after failing to do so previously.
Mike Flynn, the former White House national security adviser, filed a disclosure in March saying that he worked as a foreign agent last year representing the interests of the Turkish government.
Such disclosures are required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act for anyone advocating in the U.S. on behalf of a foreign government or political party.
Manafort and Flynn are both subjects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, and potential collusion with the Trump campaign.
Manafort’s spokesperson told the Washington Post that the former campaign chairman began the process of preparing his filing in September “before the outcome of the election and well before any formal investigation of election interference began.”
He resigned from the Trump campaign in August — before the election — because of pressure related to his work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian party.
