Paul Manafort, the Republican consultant and felon who President-elect Donald Trump pardoned in 2020, put together a team of Trump 2024 advisers to try and drum up business advising far-right parties in Europe and South America, according to a report.
The New York Times, citing documents and interviews, said Manafort entered talks to work for a billionaire backer of Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Rassemblement National, and reached out to potential interests in Ukraine, where his pro-Putin antics put him in the crosshairs of U.S. investigators.
A memo pitching the services of Manafort’s team—including Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and his 2024 pollster Tony Fabrizio—was circulated in Kyiv recently, the Times reported, to anxious reception.
Manafort told the Times that he has been contacted “by numerous parties in Ukraine,” though said he “never submitted a proposal on any matter to anyone in Ukraine.”
LaCivita said he and Fabrizio “are not currently under contract” with Manafort’s team, adding “successful political consultants on both the right and left routinely do political consulting overseas.”
Manafort’s long consulting career has included lobbying on behalf of controversial foreign parties, among them former dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos, former dictator of Zaire Mobutu Sese Seko, and the pro-Russian government of former Prime Minister of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych.
For his work in the latter case, he was sentenced to 47 months in prison for bank and tax fraud in 2019. Oligarchs who supported Yanukovych showered Manafort with tens of millions of dollars and, after Yanukovych’s government collapsed in 2014, he kept ties with them and other Kremlin-friendly agents.
His indictment came in 2017 as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. Another 43 months were tacked on when it was found out that he lied to authorities in violation of a plea agreement.
The Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee determined in 2020 that Manafort’s connections to people with Russian intelligence ties while he was Trump’s campaign manager “represented a grave counterintelligence threat.”
But Manafort’s prospects on the global consulting circuit have been revived by Trump’s election victory in November, his associates and competitors told the Times.
A pitch memo sent to French billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin, who plans to invest $150 million in the next decade in far-right parties in his country—including Le Pen’s—offered to “develop a state-of-the-art and multidimensional campaign plan” that would target voters and use opposition research to discredit opponents.
Stérin’s associate Arnaud Rérolle told the Times that he held a call with Manafort, whose team agreed to provide the memo. They opted not to sign a contract with his team, however.
Manafort may turn to Peru, where the Times said he spoke with a representative of Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga last month. Aliaga leads the conservative Popular Renewal and is a likely presidential candidate in 2026.
