Paul Manafort met secretly several times with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London — including in the spring of 2016 when he joined the Trump presidential campaign, a report said Tuesday.
Manafort, 69, held talks with Assange, whose group leaked thousands of emails stolen by Russian hackers from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in 2013, 2015 and March 2016, the Guardian reported, citing sources.
The Trump campaign announced at the end of March that they were bringing in Manafort to help corral delegates in the lead-up to that July’s Republican National Convention.
The newspaper said it’s unclear what Manafort and Assange discussed, but suggested the March 2016 meeting would be of great concern to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election and any collusion on the part of Trump campaign advisers.
Meanwhile, CNN reported on Tuesday that the special counsel has been investigating a meeting between Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno in the capital Quito in 2017 and questioned whether Assange or WikiLeaks were discussed.
Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, denies any involvement in the email hack, and his lawyers declined to comment to the Guardian.
WikiLeaks denied the report’s claims and was willing to bet the newspaper was wrong.
“Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange,” it said in a tweet.
Mueller on Monday announced in court filings that he was ending Manafort’s deal to cooperate with the investigation because the long-time political operative lied to the feds.
Manafort was found guilty in August of financial fraud but pleaded guilty and entered into a cooperation agreement with Mueller before the start of a second federal trial in September.
His first visit to the WikiLeaks whistleblower happened about a year after Assange sought asylum at the embassy from extradition to Sweden, where he was facing sex crime charges.
According to documents from Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency, seen by the Guardian, “Paul Manaford” [sic] is listed as one of the embassy’s guests. It also mentions “Russians.”
At that time in 2013, Manafort was working for a Kremlin-connected politician in Ukraine.
He returned to the embassy in 2015.
In March 2016, Manafort showed up alone and dressed in casual clothes for a visit that lasted about 40 minutes. He was not logged in, the newspaper reported.