Connecticut Republicans distance themselves from Manafort

Then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, center, takes a selfie with former Norwalk mayor and current Ridgefield resident Richard Moccia during a Connecticut GOP breakfast Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in Cleveland. To the left is state Republican J.R. Romano, a Derby native. Manafort is from New Britain and cut his teeth as a political operative in Connecticut. To the right, checking his phone is former Thomas Herrmann, the former Easton first selectman. less Then Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, center, takes a selfie with former Norwalk mayor and current Ridgefield resident Richard Moccia during a Connecticut GOP breakfast Tuesday, July 19, 2016, in ... more Photo: Neil Vigdor / Hearst Connecticut Media Photo: Neil Vigdor / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 30 Caption Close Connecticut Republicans distance themselves from Manafort 1 / 30 Back to Gallery

For the Connecticut Republicans, a party starving for national relevance, Paul Manafort was one of their own.

On the same day that Donald Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination last year, his then-campaign chairman obligingly posed for selfies with convention delegates from his home state in Cleveland after speaking at a breakfast for the group. The New Britain native was the man of the hour.

But that was then. Now that Manafort has been indicted for alleged money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent — stoking the fires of potential collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia — state GOP members have gone from name-dropping Manafort to just dropping the political fixer.

“He has no ties to us,” said J.R. Romano, the state GOP chairman. “The guy, his family is originally from Connecticut. That’s pretty much it.”

Manafort is under house arrest, the top target caught up in the dragnet of Special Counsel Robert Mueller so far. He’s maintained his innocence through his lawyer, who in court filings Thursday argued that the multimillionaire and holder of three U.S. passports is not a flight risk.

“Given the substantial media coverage surrounding Mr. Manafort and this investigation, it is fair to say that he is one of the most recognizable people on the planet today,” Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, wrote Thursday in a federal court filing in Washington, D.C. “Query where such an individual could even hide?”

Plenty of awkward reminders from Manafort’s audience with Connecticut Republicans at last year’s convention still exist. That’s given Democrats in the state a visual device to spin their narrative that the state GOP is the party of Trump.

“You know what they say about the company you keep,” the Connecticut Democrats tweeted with a photo of Manafort and state Rep. John Frey, R-Ridgefield, on the convention floor in Cleveland.

Frey, a Republican National Committee member, served as the convention’s sergeant-at-arms and was tasked with keeping order in the Quicken Loans Arena. He downplayed the Manafort connection, saying they discussed security.

“I had like two conversations with him at the convention,” Frey said. “I had never met him before.”

Betsy McCaughey, a Greenwich resident and former New York lieutenant governor, presented Manafort with a copy of her book bashing Obamacare at last year’s convention.

“I think this indictment is much ado about nothing,” McCaughey said Thursday. “There’s nothing in this indictment that connects him to any wrongdoing on behalf of the Trump campaign.”

McCaughey tried to thread the needle between Manafort and Trump, whom she referred to as an outsider.

“The fact is everybody knows Washington is rotten,” she said. “Most of these campaign operatives on both sides of the aisle, they’re rotten.”

Long before Manafort’s was a household name, his family’s name was ubiquitous in Connecticut. His late father was New Britain’s mayor and public buildings commissioner for Gov. Thomas Meskill in the early 1970s.

Manafort’s cousins run one of the largest and most profitable construction firms in the state, Manafort Brothers Inc., which has been awarded at least $366 million in contracts from the state Department of Transportation during the last decade.

Landing Manafort for a delegation breakfast on the second morning of the July 2016 convention was viewed as a coup for the Connecticut contingent. His appearance came the morning after Melania Trump was accused of plagiarizing parts of a Michelle Obama speech in her convention debut.

In one photo from that morning, Manafort was flanked by Romano and Kevin Moynihan, who went to Georgetown University with Manafort and is running for first selectman of New Canaan.

“I don’t know this guy,” Romano said. “At the end of the day, there’s this litmus test that the media seems to want to put on us. It’s not like he’s running to be governor like (Bridgeport Mayor) Joe Ganim is. We have an ex-felon running on the Democrats’ side of the aisle and we have Democrats posing for pictures with him every day.”

Moynihan has characterized Manafort as a casual acquaintance.

A request for comment was left Thursday for Ganim, who served seven years in prison for corruption before winning back the mayor’s office in the state’s largest city. Ganim is exploring the governor’s race.

Former Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia asked Manafort to take a selfie at the delegation’s hotel, the Courtyard Cleveland University Circle. A request for comment was left Thursday for Moccia.

Manafort served as Trump’s campaign chairman from March of last year until August, with Trump enlisting him to corral GOP delegates for a contested convention that never materialized. With Trump trailing Clinton in the polls and scrutiny mounting over Manafort’s business interests in Russia, he was bounced from the campaign.

“I don’t know why you want to talk about Manafort,” Romano said. “He has nothing to do with Connecticut.”

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