Leader of pro-Trump Super Pac had mortgage on Paul Manafort property

Ben Jacobs in Washington
Updated

  • Prosecutors are trying to seize ex-Trump campaign chief’s Long Island house

  • Tom Barrack secured a loan on property in 2004

Paul Manafort’s house in the Hamptons is one of four properties prosecutors under the auspices of special counsel Robert Mueller are trying to have forfeited.
Paul Manafort’s house in the Hamptons is one of four properties prosecutors under the auspices of special counsel Robert Mueller are trying to have forfeited. Photograph: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters

The leader of a pro-Trump Super Pac once held a mortgage on one of the properties owned by Paul Manafort which federal prosecutors are trying to seize.

Tom Barrack, a close friend of Donald Trump’s who leads the Rebuilding America Now Super Pac, made a secured loan tied to Manafort’s house in the Hamptons in July 2004.

The loan – to Manafort’s wife Kathleen, who was listed as the owner of the house – consolidated $1.76m in previous loans and also included a loan of $382,002.98 with the property as collateral, according to records in the Suffolk County clerk’s office.

The county clerk records a satisfaction of mortgage or full repayment of the loan on 8 March 2006.

A spokesman for Manafort declined to comment on the loan while a spokesman for Barrack simply told the Guardian “the loan was repaid in accordance with the terms” and declined to comment further.

The property, located at 174 Jobs Lane, Water Mill, New York, is one of four owned by Manafort listed in the indictment that federal government seeks to have forfeited as “derived from proceeds traceable to the offense(s) of conviction”.

Barrack, a billionaire real estate investor, has long been friends with Manafort and was reportedly responsible for connecting the political operative with the Trump campaign. According to the New York Times, the two met over coffee in February 2016 at a Beverly Hills hotel where Manafort successfully urged Barrack to advocate on his behalf with Trump. Shortly thereafter, Manafort joined the Trump campaign to manage the delegate process and within weeks, was effectively running it.

In addition to his ties with Manafort, Barrack also hired Rick Gates, described in the indictment as Manafort’s “right hand man”, after Gates was forced to leave a pro-Trump Super Pac earlier this year. Gates, who joined the Trump campaign with Manafort after working for the political operative overseas for a decade, was indicted with Manafort on Monday.

The loan came shortly before Manafort started his work in Ukraine in 2005 in an effort to improve the image of Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russian Party of Regions. Both Manafort and Gates advised Yanukovych and helped him win Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election. However, the Ukrainian president left power in 2014 after a violent crackdown on pro-EU protesters led to his government being overthrown. Yanukovych fled to Russia shortly thereafter and, in the aftermath of his departure, Russian-backed forces invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine.