Paul Manafort's colleagues on the Trump campaign have defended him after reports that tied him closer to the Kremlin. | Getty Trump campaign circles the wagons around Manafort

Donald Trump's campaign defended its embattled chairman, Paul Manafort, on Tuesday, pushing back against reports that the former consultant had received secret cash payments from a deposed Ukrainian leader with close ties to the Kremlin — while being careful to distance Manafort from any possible wrongdoing by the candidate himself.

Manafort’s connections to Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russia former president of Ukraine, won’t hurt Trump's campaign, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said Tuesday, because “he’s not running for president.”


“I think Paul Manafort has dismissed that as completely false and inaccurate and I accept him at his word,” Pence said in an interview with the Fox affiliate in Columbus, Ohio. “The truth is Mr. Manafort is involved in our campaign, but he’s not running for president. Donald Trump is running for president and so is Hillary Clinton.”

A New York Times report published on Sunday detailed secret ledgers discovered in Ukraine showing more than $12 million earmarked for Manafort, who was a consultant for the Yanukovych's pro-Russian party before joining the Manhattan billionaire’s campaign. Manafort denied that he ever received the cash payments outlined in the ledger and attacked the story as part of the newspaper’s “political agenda.”

The Times report raised new questions about Trump's foreign policy rhetoric toward Moscow, which often departs sharply from Republican orthodoxy and from that of previous GOP presidential nominees. Trump has lavished praise on Russian President Vladimir Putin and said that he might be willing to officially recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea; his critics have also alleged that the Trump campaign softened a portion of the GOP platform that originally called for arming the Ukrainian government with lethal weaponry.

Trump has also been critical of NATO — for decades the bulwark of the Western alliance — and said during the Republican National Convention that if he were president, the United States might not come to the aid of Eastern European NATO members if they were invaded by Russia. Only if those nations had met all their financial obligations to NATO, Trump said, would the U.S. fulfill its commitment to defend them.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who heads Trump's transition team, dismissed the Times article as likely biased, though he did not offer a full-throated defense of Manafort.

“All I know about this are allegations that were made in a front-page New York Times story that I think was yesterday. And having been the subject of a number of front-page New York Times story, I look at it with, at least, a healthy skepticism,” Christie said at a news conference Tuesday. “I don’t think this reflects on Donald at all. And whatever Paul may or may not have been involved in previously is something he’ll explain. But I think I read in the story yesterday that his lawyer has denied all of the allegations that were made in the Times story yesterday. So, appears to me we have a jump ball on that one.”

Instead of worrying about Manafort’s ties to Ukraine’s former leader, Pence said, he was more concerned with leaked emails showing a Clinton Global Initiative donor sent advice to high-level State Department officials while Clinton was secretary of state. George Soros, a billionaire who has also donated to Clinton’s campaign, emailed the State Department in 2011 over political unrest in Albania, evidence of a “pay-to-play arrangement,” according to Pence.

“What’s hard for me to understand is how, a week ago, documented information came out to demonstrate that wealthy foreign donors who made major contributions to the Clinton Foundation, who were apparently then gained access to the State Department has gotten such little attention,” he said. “I think it would be very important that the public have the ability to know and understand the extent to which this ultimately was a pay-to-play arrangement.”