Top Trump aide lobbied for Pakistani spy front

Source: Yahoo News | April 18, 2016 | Michael Isikoff

For more than five years, Donald Trump’s new top campaign aide, Paul Manafort, lobbied for a Washington-based group that Justice Department prosecutors have charged operated as a front for Pakistan’s intelligence service, according to court and lobbying records reviewed by Yahoo News.

Manafort’s work in the 1990s as a registered lobbyist for the Kashmiri American Council was only one part of a wide-ranging portfolio that, over several decades, included a gallery of controversial foreign clients ranging from Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire’s brutal dictator Mobutu Sese Seko to an Angolan rebel leader accused by human rights groups of torture. His role as an adviser to Ukraine’s then prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, prompted concerns within the Bush White House that he was undermining U.S. foreign policy. It was considered so politically toxic in 2008 that presidential candidate John McCain nixed plans for Manafort to manage the Republican National Convention — a move that caused a rupture between Manafort and his then business partner, Rick Davis, who at the time was McCain’s campaign manager.

Manafort’s work for the Kashmiri group has so far not gotten any media attention.

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