Donald Trump campaign hit by links to Pakistan’s ISI

Chidanand Rajghatta | TNN | Apr 19, 2016, 09.12 AM IST
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.