Paul Manafort, the former campaign leader of President Donald Trump, was arrested by the US intelligence service FBI. Manafort, who might be involved in Russian interference in the US presidential elections, is accused of being laundered.
The 68-year-old lawyer reported to the FBI this morning. “This is shocking,” says correspondent Erik Mouthaan. “This is not just somebody. It’s the man who has set up the Trump campaign, the party convention, about someone involved in the election of the vice president.”
He led Trump’s election campaign until the end of August last year. He got up, well over two months before the election day, after being heard because of the possible receipt of bribes from the camp of Ukrainian President Yanukovych. The accusation states that he is suspected of interfering with money laundering.
In recent months, the White House has made an effort to push Manafort’s role into the background, says Mouthaan. “They wanted to take a distance from him and said he had played an insignificant role. The nonsense of course. He was the boss of the Trump campaign.”
At the same time, says Mouthaan, the circles around the US president are busy erecting a smoke curtain: “They suddenly reassure Hillary Clinton accusations and come up with all kinds of stories about uranium.”
At the end of July, Mueller’s special prosecutor had already been invaded at the Manafort apartment in Alexandria (Virginia). That happened “in an extremely aggressive way,” says Mouthaan. “They came in early in the morning, apparently because they were afraid that he would destroy evidence.”