Paul Manafort, who quit this summer as U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign manager after the National Anti-Corruption Bureau disclosed $12.7 million in payments from ex-President Viktor Yanukovych, had a hand trying to make ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s trial and imprisonment look legitimate.
Manafort, while working for Yanukovych, commented on a report by U.S. law firm Skadden Arps in 2012, before it was released publicly, undermining the former administration’s attempts to portray the investigation as “independent.” Specifically, a memo found in the house of ex-Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka tied Manafort to the effort to persuade the West that Tymoshenko, Yanukovych’s rival, was not a political prisoner and deserved her conviction for abuse of power in 2011. She was imprisoned until Yanukovych fled power on Feb. 22, 2014.
Manafort and Skadden did not reply to requests for comment.
The Ukrainian government under Yanukovych hired Skadden Arps to conduct an investigation into whether the prosecution of Tymoshenko met Western standards of fairness. The report, released in December 2012, cleared the Ukrainian government of wrongdoing in violating Tymoshenko’s right to a fair trial.
Attorney Gregory Craig – Barack Obama’s first White House counsel – led the investigation on an official retainer of Hr 95,000 ($3,735), according to Serhiy Vlasenko, Tymoshenko’s lawyer and a Batkivshchyna Party member of parliament.
The Ukrainian government has since opened a criminal case into former Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych over his hiring of Skadden, with prosecutors alleging that Lavrynovych laundered $1 million out of the Ukrainian state budget in order to pay the law firm’s legal fees.
A document cache found in the mansion of Pshonka is logged as evidence in the Lavrynovych investigation.
The Kyiv Post reviewed one memo from the cache. The document says that Craig was to send a draft of the report to Manafort for him to provide commentary. Another document, provided to the Kyiv Post and published by The New York Times in 2014, is a memo from Craig to Manafort asking him to help the Skadden team acquire documents from the Prosecutor General’s Office.
Craig did not reply to a request for comment. An attorney for Lavrynovych also did not reply to a request for comment.
The results of the investigation were met with incredulity by many in the West, including U.S Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland.
Dnipro to Potomac
Manafort made numerous visits to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine in the runup to the 2006 parliamentary elections, along with colleagues Catherine Barnes and Phillip Griffin, according to a series of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks.
The cables show Manafort going on the offensive to warn U.S. officials about his concerns that the upcoming elections would be unfair. According to the cables, Manafort also implied that U.S. officials used the 2004 Orange Revolution to steal that election from Yanukovych.
“Manafort warned that…there could be negative consequences in the eyes of people who saw the ‘West made certain demands on the one hand when one group was in power but reacted differently, or stayed silent, when another group was in power,’” one cable, dated March 10, 2006, reads.
Assisting Manafort was Konstantin Kilimnik, a former Russian intelligence officer who worked at the International Republican Institute’s Moscow office, Politico reported. Kilimnik did not reply questions on whether he had worked for Russian intelligence.
Kilimnik left IRI in the mid-2000s and joined Manafort’s team in Kyiv. According to Politico, Kilimnik began to spend more time in Kyiv, hanging out at the city’s elite Hyatt Regency Hotel and moving into a mansion with its own pool.
Following the elections, which saw Yanukovych become prime minister for the second time, Manafort arranged a trip for his client to Washington. For Yanukovych, the trip was an opportunity to rebrand himself as a candidate palatable to the West. Manafort arranged the excursion, bringing oligarch Serhiy Lyovochkin along with him.
Serhiy Kudelia, a Radio Liberty correspondent in D.C. at the time, said that Manafort and Lyovochkin were sitting “shoulder to shoulder” at one meeting attended by Yanukovych and journalists. Kudelia said that the visit left an impression in Washington that Yanukovych was someone with whom the West could do business.
“As long as you could persuade him to get things done, things may work out,” Kudelia said, describing the impression made at the time. n
