Text messages allegedly hacked from Paul Manafort's daughter's phone are believed to point to the possible influence he had over the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych at the time of the mass killings by Ukrainian police in Kiev in 2014.

Ukrainian lawyer Eugenia Zakrevska, who is representing some of the Kiev victims, called on prosecutors on Thursday to investigate whether the text message were authentic. Manafort resigned as Trump's campaign chairman back in August following allegations he received more than $12 million in illegal cash from the ex-Ukrainian president to influence U.S. policy.

In one text exchange from March 2015, Andrea Manafort seems to suggest to her sister Jessica that their father may have had a hand in the killings that killed dozens of protesters. The text messages were among 300,000 published by a hacker website last month claiming to have been taken from Andrea's phone, according to Politico.

'Don't fool yourself... That money we have is blood money,' she wrote. 'You know he has killed people in Ukraine? Knowingly Remember when there were all those deaths taking place. A while back. About a year ago. Revolts and what not. Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that, to send those people out and get them slaughtered.'

"I'm just not sure how you would go about writing a James Bond film now," Wade (Bond writer) said. "Each time, you've got to say something about Bond's place in the world, which is Britain's place in the world. But things are moving so quickly now, that becomes tricky. With people like Trump, the Bond villain has become a reality. So when they do another one, it will be interesting to see how they deal with the fact that the world has become a fantasy."

Richard Painter
The facts now in this investigation are much worse than the facts in the early stages of Watergate, which was a simple break-in ordered by midlevel campaign officials — not by the president. Here we have facts that are much worse: We have a foreign power that has orchestrated a break-in. It’s a much worse situation than the outset of Watergate.

Tara Golshan
What have you made of the White House’s response to this? You were the ethics lawyer under the Bush administration — are they following the guidance you would have given in this situation?

Richard Painter
I don’t see much of a response. They are blowing it off. It’s very clear President Trump needs to immediately find out who in his campaign had any communications with the Russians about anything. Find out what those communications were to the best of his ability and find out who in the administration knew what the Russians were doing. He needs to support a thorough inquiry, not a cover-up — that is the mistake Nixon made with Watergate.

Their public comments have been atrocious so far. They keep accusing CNN of fake news; then the spokesperson for the Kremlin accuses CNN of fake news. What we are seeing is the White House putting themselves on the same page as the Kremlin, when they [the Russians] have been spying on the United States and attacked our democratic system in 2016. That is a terrible posture they are in.

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith defended CNN on Friday after the news organization was barred from spokesman Sean Spicer’s question-and-answer session at the White House.

"For the record, 'fake news' refers to stories that are created, often by entities pretending to be news organizations, solely to draw clicks and views and are based on nothing of substance," Smith said during his program.

"In short, fake news is made up nonsense delivered for financial gain. CNN’s reporting was not fake news. Its journalists followed the same standards to which other news organizations, including Fox News, adhere," he added.

A new report suggests that Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, was the victim of a blackmail attempt by a Ukrainian parliament member who was aware of both Trump’s and Manafort’s connections to President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Manafort has ties to Russia that include his having worked for the pro-Russian former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and an FBI investigation of Trump’s connections to Russia may also examine Manafort. According to Politico, Manafort’s daughter received a text from Serhiy Leshchenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament, that threatened to expose Manafort’s financial ties to Yanukyovych and an alleged meeting of Trump with Yanukyovych crony Serhiy Tulub.

MOSCOW — A dossier on Donald Trump's psychological makeup is being prepared for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Among its preliminary conclusions is that the new American leader is a risk-taker who can be naïve, according to a senior Kremlin adviser.

Trump "doesn't understand fully who is Mr. Putin — he is a tough guy," former Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Fedorov told NBC News.