WASHINGTON: The Republican frontrunner's top campaign aide Paul Manafort was reportedly a registered lobbyist for the Kashmiri American Council, which the US justice department prosecutors charged with operating as a front for Pakistan's intelligence service ISI.Manafort's portfolio included a gallery of controversial foreign clients ranging from Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and Zaire's brutal dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, but the ISI connection is considered the most toxic given the agency's ties to terrorism, including recent disclosures that it might have funded the suicide bombing that claimed the lives of seven CIA agents at Camp Chapman in Afghanistan in 2009."Court records show that Manafort's Kashmiri lobbying contract came on the FBI's radar screen during a lengthy counterterrorism investigation that culminated in 2011 with the arrest of the Kashmiri council's director, Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, on charges that he ran the group on behalf of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI, as part of a scheme to secretly influence US policy toward the disputed territory of Kashmir," Yahoo News reported on Monday , even as the Trump campaign seemed to be going off the rails in a brutal and internecine Republican battle for the presidential nomination.Manafort's lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly , was reportedly paid $700,000 by the Kashmiri American Council between 1990 and 1995.This was among more than $4 million that federal prosecutors alleged came from the ISI, much of it routed through Fai.The Kashmiri American Council was a scam that amounted to a "false flag operation that Fai was operating on behalf of the ISI," Gordon Kromberg, the assistant US attorney who prosecuted the case, said in March 2012 at Fai's sentencing hearing in federal court.While posing as a US-based nonprofit funded by American donors sympathetic to the plight of Kashmiris, it was actually bankrolled by the ISI in order to deflect public attention "away from the involvement of Pakistan in sponsoring terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere," he added.Fai, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and tax fraud charges, was then sentenced to two years in federal prison and has recently been released. He has resumed lobbying in a low-key manner.