Soon after Manafort joins Trump’s presidential campaign on March 28, 2016, Deripaska dispatches former GRU officer Victor Boyarkin to pressure Manafort to square his debts with the oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin will tell Time in 2018, “and he was offering [in 2016] ways to pay it back. I came down on him hard.”59 Indeed, just two weeks after Manafort’s hire (a hire that occurs once Manafort tells Trump friend Thomas Barrack that he “really needs to get to” Trump), Manafort emails “his old lieutenant” Kilimnik asking him how he can “use” his “media coverage” as Trump’s
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