manafort, paul
see also manfort davis firm
see 2 (crashes?)
manfort tag
NO MERRI
MANAFORT lobbied for marcos
bak 619
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ALTERNET+ NO LNX
Inside the Trump Crime Syndicate
Gregg Barak May 07, 2024
Before Donald Trump criminalized the White House, Republican Party and perhaps the Supreme Court, he was the CEO of the Trump Organization — a fraudster, racketeer and patriarchal Boss of a family owned and operated criminal enterprise. He spent five decades in New York and beyond avoiding charges and prosecutions for sexual harassment, tax evasion, money laundering and nonpayment of employees.
If this wasn’t enough, Trump also busied himself by allegedly defrauding tenants, customers, contractors, investors, bankers, attorneys, students and charities, not to mention making use of undocumented workers.
In retrospect, Trump’s lifetime of lies and lawlessness appear to have prepared him for the fateful moment in which he now finds himself — in a court of law, answering for the first 34 of 88 felony counts that stem from alleged crimes he committed immediately before, during and after his presidency. Trials involving Trump’s alleged 2020 election interference and illegal retention of national secrets loom.
As the fraudster-in-chief and Benedict Arnold of our time, Trump continues to maintain his innocence and blames everybody but himself while attempting to make a mockery of the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.
In light of Trump’s defiance, and the potential for more illegal Trumpian interference during the 2024 election, in which he is almost certain to be the Republican Party’s nominee, now is a good time to go beyond Trump and explore the criminal culpability of Trump Crime Syndicate lieutenants and Trump’s kitchen cabinet of MAGA knaves and rogues.
These are the people who have aided and abetted Trump, and continue to assist him in his single-minded quest to become the most powerful man in America.
They are worth your attention precisely because of the danger to democracy that they represent.
Criminalizing the power of the pardon with the intent to defraud
At the federal level, a gaggle of powerful Republican actors were deeply involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. These include — and are not limited to — Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
At the state level, dozens of Republican fake electors and Trump stakeholders have been criminally indicted in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada.
All of these criminal indictments for election interference like Trump’s indictments are “basically telling the same story of corruption and venality” except for their “different charges” according to Kenneth F. McCallion, a former Special Attorney and Assistant U.S. Attorney with the DOJ who also worked for the New York attorney’s general office as a prosecutor on Trump-related racketeering cases.
But before proceeding further with this examination of presidential crime, politics and accountably, it is important to highlight Trump’s unprecedented usage of the pardon power, which facilitated the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021, as well as Republican electioneering of 2024.
Prior to Trump, the presidential power of the pardon had always been about showing mercy and compassion. It was most certainly not a tool for rewarding criminal loyalty and weaponizing criminal conduct.
Excluding Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime “fixer” and former “partner in crime,” the Boss pardoned several of his other loyal associates, especially those within the Trump Crime Syndicate.
For example, in relation to Russian election interference in 2016, Trump pardoned his former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
Revealed for the man he is in the 1992 Center for Public Integrity report The Torturers’ Lobby, Manafort in 2019 was found guilty in the Eastern District of Virginia of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one count of failing to disclose an offshore bank account.
Manafort also pleaded guilty to conspiracy against the United States and to witness tampering in the federal District of Columbia. Most of these crimes were connected to his lobbying work in Ukraine.
Then, just days before his longtime friend and campaign adviser Roger Stone’s 48-month incarceration was scheduled to begin for seven felony convictions, including impeding a congressional inquiry, Trump commuted Stone’s sentence.
And when Trump was literally leaving the Oval Office and almost out the door, he granted clemency to his former chief political strategist Steve Bannon who had defrauded Trump donors out of more than $1 million to allegedly help build the border wall between the United States and Mexico.
Trump also pardoned retired Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the only one-time White House official to be convicted as part of the Trump-Russian investigation carried out by special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
In the cases of both Stone and Flynn, Trump’s “forgiveness” cameafter Bill Barr, Trump’s third of five attorneys general, failed to shut down these investigations on the spurious grounds that these two perpetrators, Stone and Flynn, had been the victims of witch hunts and overzealous prosecutors.
ALSO READ: Trump vs. history: Former presidents typically implode on their comeback tours
We have also known for nearly two years since former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before a House select committee that the pardon power does not prohibit preemptive pardons. Nine members of Trump’s kitchen cabinet requested them in the wake of Jan. 6, demonstrating their full knowledge and intent of criminal wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, Manafort, Stone, Bannon, and Flynn are back supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign as they did in 2016 and 2020. And, Trump and Putin are closer than ever. The Russian president has even publicly endorsed him this time round . It didn’t hurt that Trump seemed to have Putin’s back most, if not, all the time since he took office. Trump opposing NATO as well as Ukraine helped as well. Trump’s pardoning his own men involved in the 2016 interference seemed to condone it. His illiberal authoritarian and anti-democratic credo was another plus.
Trump’s minions began their election interference in 2015 and never stopped
Let’s begin with the criminal prosecutions related to the 2016 Russian election interference investigated by Mueller.
Mueller’s investigation led to the indictments of 34 individuals and three Russian companies. Five Trump associates and campaign officials were convicted of felonies including those mentioned above. Mueller’s final report, while finding insufficient evidence of a Trump-Russian conspiracy, did conclude that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, and expected to benefit from Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Key players in the 2016 Russian collusion affair
Paul Manafort (discussed above) according to the U.S. intelligence community was also believed to have passed internal Trump campaign and polling strategy information to Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik.
Rick Gates, a longtime business associate of Manafort and also a former Trump campaign official, was also charged in two separate federal courts and he too plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy against the United States, lying to federal prosecutors, financial crimes, and lobbying without a license.
Michael Flynn was also pardoned by Trump and worked on the 2020 as well as the 2024 presidential campaigns. Since 2022 Flynn has had a ReAwaken roadshow with the Army of God for Trump. He was the first to plead guilty in 2017 after admitting that he made false statements and omissions in FBI interviews only days after Trump was sworn in to office. The former Army general “impeded and otherwise had a material impact on the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the existence of any links or coordination between individuals associated with the campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election.”
Roger Stone (discussed above) was the subject of the video, The Roger Stone tapes, that reveals Stone working from the Willard hotel in D.C. with Giuliani and others, and quickly checking out while the riots were taking place.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney and “fixer” for more than a decade,pleaded guilty in a New York federal court to one count of making a false statement to Congress as well as to other crimes committed in his taxi related business in the Southern District of New York. He spent almost three years in prison serving time concurrently for both convictions.
Cohen and David Pecker are two of the key, among, many witnesses from Trump’s inner circle testifying against their former Boss in the New York presidential election interference case.
By contrast, defendant Trump has no witnesses on his behalf. He also has no family or friends except son Eric who showed up in court on April 30 for the first time. Otherwise surrounded by only his attorneys who are devoid of any facts and some twisted law, maybe, if they are lucky.
And through testimony on Friday the defense had scored no points during cross-examination that so far could create reasonable doubt.
2020 Election Interference as part of Trump’s Kitchen Cabinet
Turning next to a review of three of the 2020 Trump election interference cases. I do so without concern with the consequences for or accountability of the fake electors because none of these individuals were either affiliated with the Trump Crime Syndicate or members of the former president’s kitchen cabinet.
Although a number of them were or are elected state officials and high-ranking members of the Republican presidential campaigns of 2020 as well as 2024.
Jeffrey Clark, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia
John Eastman, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia and Arizona
Rudy Giuliani, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
Jenna Ellis, convicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
Sidney Powell, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
Kenneth Chesebro, DOJ unindicted co-conspirator, convicted in Georgia
Peter Navarro, convicted and in prison
Steve Bannon, convicted and out on appeal
Mark Meadows, DOJ witness, indicted in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
Boris Epshteyn, unindicted co-conspirator in Georgia, indicted in Arizona
An unidentified political consultant is also a DOJ unindicted co-conspirator
Nixon’s Watergate was ‘much ado about nothing’ compared to Trump’s failed coup and insurrection
To put Trump’s minions in perspective, a brief examination of President Richard Nixon’s henchmen is required.
In response to the criminal cover-up of the crimes involved in the attempted burglary of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1972. Nixon was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" on March 1, 1974, by a federal grand jury in the District of Columbia. This was a wide conspiracy case that sent some of Washington's biggest names at the time to prison.
Compared to Trump’s failed coup, Nixon’s Watergate break-in and cover-up was no big deal; it certainly was not an existential threat to democracy and the rule of law. There was no violence toward the Capitol or danger to members of Congress and the vice president.
Forty federal officials were indicted or jailed in the case. These included Nixon's highest-ranking officials such as the former Attorney General and chairman of his 1972 presidential campaign John Mitchell. Along with the disgraced Mitchell there was John Dean, White House legal counsel, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Halderman (White-House senior staff), Charles Colson, special counsel to the President, and James McCord, Security Director of CREEP. They were found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice and perjury in the January cover-up trial of 1975. All of these men carried out orders that, directly or indirectly, originated with Nixon himself.
What stands out as a huge difference between the Watergate crimes responsible for forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency of the US and the Jan 6 insurrection was that Nixon became an unindicted co-conspirator while still in office. And he received his comeuppance after only a little over two years since the crimes occurred. At the time, Nixon had been president for the better part of six years.
Trump after eight years of election interference and four years as president has yet to receive his criminal comeuppance. Even if he is convicted later this month on 34 felony counts in Manhattan, his appeals could delay his well-deserved imprisonment from occurring for at least another year or two.
By contrast, three years after Jan.6, and the violent assault on the Capitol building there have been 749 convicted and sentenced offenders. At least 467 rioters have been incarcerated in either jail or prison for an array of offenses including assaulting law enforcement officers, felonious obstructing, impeding, or interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder.
More than a dozen members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boy were convicted of the serious charges of seditious conspiracy. Additionally, 53 persons have been indicted as fake electors, many of whom have been high ranking Republican officials in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona.
Compared to racketeering, Trump and company’s very complex and organized election interference that included more than 2000 rioters besieging the Capitol on Jan. 6, and hundreds more working away in seven swing states including Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.
Paradoxically, it may seem strange given the reaction of the Republicans and the Department of Justice to Nixon and Watergate, that Trump and his election interference crimes have been given a free pass by the Supreme Court.
With respect to Trump’s inner circles, a few have already pleaded guilty and many more will be held to account regardless of whether Trump is, although this is certainly a reflection on a man who boasted of surrounding himself with the “best and brightest” the nation has to offer.
Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its 2024 sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/lets-recall-what-exactly-paul-manafort-and-rudy-giuliani-were-doing-in-ukraine
3/22
no lnx dox
alhough Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.
One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)
Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.
Americans Making Money Abroad. What’s the Problem?
Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.
In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”
Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv.One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy.The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”
Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”
Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.
“We Are Going to Have So Much Fun, and Change the World in the Process”
In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year,Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.
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With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.
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“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.
According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)
A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.
One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”
According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.
Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.
The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”
Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.
After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.
Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.
“Do Us a Favor”
With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.
By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.
Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.
Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.
Credit:(Transcript courtesy of rev.com)
Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.
Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:
These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.
“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.
In December 2019, as animpeachmentinquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.
Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”
In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Where They Are Now...
Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:
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Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump
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Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI
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Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch
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Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal
Key Documents
US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report
Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account
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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/us/trump-investigations-new-york.html?module=inline
The investigation into the Trump inaugural committee partly grew out of a recording that F.B.I. agents seized when they raided Mr. Cohen’s home and office. On the recording, Mr. Cohen is heard discussing potential irregularities with one of the main contractors for the inauguration. The Southern District is investigating, among other things, whether the committee made false filings with the Federal Election Commission and received illegal donations from foreign nationals, a subpoena from the investigation shows.
In addition, the Southern District took on two investigations stemming from the cases against Mr. Manafort, who was prosecuted by Mr. Mueller’s office and was recently sentenced to more than seven years in prison for a litany of crimes.
In one of the investigations, the prosecutors are weighing charges against the officer of a bank that Mr. Manafort has acknowledged defrauding, according to people briefed on the matter.
In the other, Mr. Mueller’s team referred investigations involving three firms that worked with Mr. Manafort — the lobbying firms Mercury Public Affairs and Podesta Group, and the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom — to the Southern District for potential prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Since then, Skadden reached a settlement with the Justice Department. But prosecutors in Washington are weighing charges against Skadden’s lead lawyer on the firm’s work in consultation with Mr. Manafort in 2012 on behalf of the Ukrainian government, while the Southern District has retained control of the investigations of Mercury and the Podesta Group, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Southern District’s reputation for nonpartisanship — and history of autonomy from the Justice Department in Washington, giving it the nickname “Sovereign District” — may make it less vulnerable to attacks from the president and his allies. The president’s lead lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, led the office from 1983 to 1989 and later became New York’s mayor.
The Southern District’s role in Trump-related cases comes at a time of transition for the office, which is led by Geoffrey S. Berman, who was appointed in January 2018 by the Trump administration.
Mr. Berman notified Justice Department officials early last year of a possible appearance of a conflict of interest in the Cohen investigation, and officials concluded that he should be recused, for reasons that have not been disclosed.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/vice-president-pence-faces-heightened-scrutiny-over-his-relationship-paul-manafort
...Amongst the bad news for Trump last week was the indictment of Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Manafort was found guilty last week on eight counts of financial crimes in his fraud trial.
It was Paul Manafort who chose Mike Pence as Donald Trump's vice president, with the president reportedly preferring Chris Christie for the role.
The link between Manafort and Pence is leading to additional scrutiny for the vice president, as people ask just what Pence knew about Manafort and his connections.
Many are also curious about Pence's involvements with former adviser Mike Flynn, questioning if he lied to protect the general in January of 2017 when he declared that Flynn had not discussed, "anything having to do with the United States' decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia" with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn, in his guilty plea, admitted to discussing sanctions with Kislyak, and that he was following the instructions of "a senior member" of the campaign.
Representative Elijah Cummings had also warned Pence about possible conflicts of interests surrounding Flynn in light of his visit to Russia and his ties to Turkey.
It is possible that, when Mueller concludes his investigation, that both Trump and Pence, amongst others, would be unable to fulfill the office of the Presidency.
It is worth noting that the last Republican president to face impeachment, Richard Nixon, also lost his vice president as the administration became mired in controversy. Vice President Spiro Agnew pled no contest to a charge of tax evasion and resigned on the 10th of October 1973, several months prior to Nixon's own resignation.
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derispaya sp
6/18
10m$ more loan found to manafort
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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/connections-trump-putin-russia-ties-chart-flynn-page-manafort-sessions-214868
oligarchs
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The criminal information document released by special counsel Robert Mueller ahead of Trump campaign aide Rick Gates’ guilty plea on Friday contains prominent references to “a member of Congress” who met in 2013 with future Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and another lobbyist.
HuffPost has identified that member as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), a loudly pro-Russia lawmaker who has drawn the attention of Mueller and congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Mueller has not yet interviewed Rohrabacher, the congressman’s spokesman told HuffPost on Friday in a message that also confirmed the 2013 meeting with Manafort. But Mueller’s team wanted to interview Rohrabacher as of late last year, according to news reports, and the criminal information released in advance of Gates’ plea suggests they were asking about Rohrabacher recently. The congressman has already been interviewed by the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
Gates has told a court that he lied to federal investigators on Feb. 1, 2018, about his knowledge of the meeting between Rohrabacher, Manafort and lobbyist Vin Weber when he falsely claimed he did not know Ukraine was discussed. Ukraine is one of the top foreign policy concerns of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Manafort spent years working for Ukrainian politicians close to Moscow. And Rohrabacher was one of only a few U.S. lawmakers to oppose American assistance to a new government in Ukraine established in 2014 after protests against Putin’s allies in that country.
Rohrabacher has become notorious for being what The New York Times calls “an apologist” for Putin. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said during a 2016 meeting of the GOP’s top brass, according to a secret recording shared with The Washington Post. (McCarthy later said he was joking.) Russian intelligence officials gave Rohrabacher a code namebecause they viewed him as a valuable source, The New York Times revealed last year.
Rohrabacher maintains that he is simply motivated by a sincere desire for better relations between Washington and Moscow. In a 2014 Twitter exchange, the congressman wrote, “Have known Manafort 35 years. As in all matters, I make up mind based on truth & right, not donations or even friendship.”
Officials speaking with The New York Times last year said they did not believe Rohrabacher was actively working with the Russians.
As both chair of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee covering Europe and a former anti-Soviet hawk, the congressman argues that the two countries with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals need to get along and that Americans should have more sympathy for Russia’s priorities and its fears of Western encirclement.
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/manafort-sues-doj-reel-mueller-confirms-he-can-prosecute-trump-financial-crimes
Wednesday, President Trump’s ex-campaign manager, Paul Manafort, sued the Justice Department’s special counsel, urging a federal court to narrow Robert Mueller’s investigation to Russian collusion with Trump’s campaign, not private business deals. Manafort’s lawsuit described Mueller’s probe as a “creeping incursion” that can investigate “anything,” and likened Mueller to a “wolf.” Yet what emerges from this panicky plea is an acknowledgment that Mueller can investigate and prosecute the thing Trump fears the most—the question of whether Trump broke the law in order to build his fortune.
“Paul Manafort and Donald Trump share a common problem and it is entirely to do with Russian money,” said investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump’s finances for decades and is author of the forthcoming book, It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America. “Trump has been receiving money from the Russians in squirrely deals, like grossly overpaying or funneling money through intermediaries, for more than 30 years.”
“Manafort, as an unregistered foreign agent, is vulnerable not so much because he might get a few years in prison, but because under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, he can be stripped of every dollar that prosecutor Mueller can show came from a foreign government,” Johnston continued. “Manafort, like Trump, is desperate to make sure that the record of financial transactions does not get before a judge and a jury.”
The optics of the lawsuit describe Mueller as a runaway prosecutor, echoing calls from Republican loyalists in Congress and right-wing media to discredit Mueller and urge Trump to fire him.
“Indeed, the Appointment Order in effect purports to grant Mr. Mueller carte blanche to investigate and pursue criminal charges in connection with anything he stumbles across while investigating, no matter how remote from the specific matter identified as the subject of the Appointment Order,” the lawsuit says. “The investigation has focused on Mr. Manafort’s offshore business dealings that date back to as early as 2005—about a decade before the Trump presidential campaign launched—and have been known to the United States government for many years.”
As the lawsuit goes on to describe how the special counsel left 2016 behind and investigated Manafort’s overseas consulting for Russian political allies, it also reveals Mueller was investigating Manafort’s taxes, his overseas accounts and his financial deals.
“This stuff goes directly to Donald Trump’s finances, which he has always been determined to keep as secretive as possible, because it will expose who he really is and his behavior,” Johnston said.
Moreover, the lawsuit appears to be a desperate attempt to throw a final barrier between Mueller and Trump, by seeking a federal judge to restrict the scope of the special counsel investigation. (The suit ignores the fact that another federal judge, presiding over a grand jury, is overseeing and authorizing everything Mueller is doing.)
“What Manafort is clearly trying to do here is shut off one of the avenues from Mueller to get into Trump’s money, particularly as connected with Russians,” Johnston said. “This will not succeed, or should not succeed, because in the United States you don’t get to pick your prosecutor. That’s really what Trump wants to do. He wants to have a show prosecution, an investigation where he’s in control. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
“That’s how it works in places like Russia.”
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-mueller-may-indict-paul-manafort-all-over-again-report
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why pick pence?! manafort brought him in
john nichols, day of subpoena
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-30-2017/
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-manafort-may-hold-key-who-was-he-really-working
... We've known the outlines of this before, but the details of Mueller's requests show that he's stepping up the pressure on the White House and will be focusing on individual staff members to testify about what they saw and heard during this entire period. Notably, Mueller's staff has requested information from former White House press secretary Sean Spicer about his public comments pertaining to Comey's firing.
That request has in turn led to the revelation that Spicer has kept copious notes going all the way back to the Republican convention, the Trump campaign, the transition and into the administration. Those will undoubtedly be of great interest to the special counsel and possibly the congressional committees. When asked about these notebooks, Spicer told his old friend Mike Allen of Axios to stop texting and calling him or he'd "call the proper authorities." As the Mueller investigation starts to close in on the White House, things are getting tense in Trump world.
But for all that intrigue, it wasn't the biggest Russia investigation story of the week. Since he was the man who ran what was known as "The Torturer's Lobby" in Washington for many years, it's only fitting that Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is slowly roasting over a very hot spit. This week CNN confirmed that Manafort had been under a FISA surveillance warrant by American intelligence services from 2014 through 2016 under suspicion of ... something. The warrant wasn't in effect during the period Manafort worked for Trump's campaign, but the government reportedly began to track his communications once again from the fall of 2016 through at least the spring of this year.
Manafort has been involved with a lot of shady characters over the years (and I do mean a lot), so it's difficult to know specifically why he was a surveillance target. But the Washington Post reports that among the documents Manafort turned over to the congressional committees are emails he sent to an employee named Konstantin Kilimnik,who allegedly has ties to Russian intelligence. In those emails, Manafort appears to be offering to set up meetings between Trump and a notorious Russian oligarch namedOleg Deripaska, who has previously been denied entry into the U.S. because of ties to organized crime.
These emails seem to be written in a sort of code to obscure Deripaska's identity, but nobody has had much trouble figuring it out. At one point Manafort wonders if arranging this meeting will make him "whole." Manafort's spokesman said that he was just trying to collect some money owed to him, but since Deripaska had filed suit against Manafort in 2014 for $17 million, it might make more sense to conclude that Manafort was offering to trade contact with Trump for a relief of his debt, rather than the other way around.
This raises the the question once again as to why in the world Manafort was supposedly working for a billionaire candidate for free. It's not as if Manafort was a longtime Trump friend or a true believer in Trump's ideology, whatever that is. He's a hired gun and hired guns don't work for nothing. He is not the type of guy who doesn't get paid.
Natasha Bertrand at Business Insider put together a narrative of Manafort's tenure with the Trump campaign that's very useful in drawing the bigger picture. The bottom line is that it is starting to look very much as if Manafort was working for someone other than Donald Trump.
What we don't know is what other people on the campaign knew, including Trump himself. To this day he can't bring himself to say anything negative about Vladimir Putin. His irrational attempts to shut down the investigation do not suggest the behavior of a man with nothing to hide.
Manafort left his job as campaign chair in August 2016, but continued to be involved. He made one key decision before his official departure: He made sure that Trump chose Mike Pence as his running mate. When Pence took over the presidential transition team after Chris Christie was let go, according to the Daily Beast, Manafort came back in the tent, helping to choose cabinet members and speaking with Trump and Pence on a regular basis. He even advised the incoming administration on how to handle the Russia investigation.
So Manafort, who had resigned after a wave of reports detailing his shady relationships with Russia-aligned Ukranian politicians, was up to his neck in the Trump transition. During the same period when Jared Kushner was meeting with Russian bankers and talking to the Russian ambassador about back channels at the Russian embassy, and Mike Flynn was on the horn promising to lift the Russia sanctions. Nobody remembered to put any of these meetings on their applications for security clearance.
It's not clear whether Trump has stayed in contact with Manafort since he became president. I'm sure his lawyers go to bed every night praying that he didn't.
digby
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ref slate 2x?
...
His work necessarily entails secrecy. Although his client list has included chunks of the Fortune 500, he has also built a booming business working with dictators. AsRoger Stone has boasted about their now-disbanded firm: “Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find. … Dictators are in the eye of the beholder.” Manafort had a special gift for changing how dictators are beheld by American eyes. He would recast them as noble heroes—venerated by Washington think tanks, deluged with money from Congress.
Playing tennis with Yanukovych at Mezhyhirya might have been the culmination of Manafort’s long career. He spent nearly seven years commuting to Kiev. Over that stretch, he remade Ukrainian politics and helped shift the country into Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. It was an impressive achievement, at least according to the ethical calculus that governs Manafort’s world. But then along came Donald Trump—another oligarch in desperate need of his services.
* * *
The genesis of Donald Trump’s relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. ThatRoy Cohn: Joe McCarthy’s heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the ’70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit. (Cohn accused the Feds of using “Gestapo-like tactics.”) But Cohn and Trump became genuine pals, lunching at the Four Seasons and clubbing together at Studio 54. It was Roy Cohn who introduced Stone and Manafort to Trump.
During those disco years, Stone and Manafort were tethered together. They were both kids from Connecticut, attending colleges in Washington, though they couldn’t have been more different. Stone loved attention and garnered it with theatrical flair. He was a bad boy, soi-disant. As a student at George Washington University, Stone moonlighted for the Nixon campaign and gravitated to Jeb Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Dirty tricks came naturally to Stone. He assumed a pseudonym and made contributions on behalf of the Young Socialist Alliance to one of Nixon’s potential challengers. He hired spies to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. Stone wasn’t shy about his handiwork. In fact, he wasn’t shy about anything. He loved to sit for interviews and vamp. Stone is a bodybuilding fanatic who posedshirtless in theNew Yorker. The photo captured his implanted hair, but not the tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.
Manafort had a very different mentor. He studied under the future secretary of state, James A. Baker III, who wielded his knife with the discipline of a Marine and the polish of a Princetonian. It was a good fit for Manafort, who shared his mentor’s pragmatic conservatism and his thirst for politics. (His father spent six years as the mayor ofNew Britain, Connecticut, a Republican who flourished in Democratic terrain.) Baker, an avid collector of young talent, had managed Gerald Ford’s re-election campaign. That’s where he spotted Manafort and anointed him aide de camp. When Baker needed his own manager for his 1978 campaign to become attorney general of Texas, he tapped Manafort. The experience of whispering in Baker’s ear left a lasting impression. “Paul modeled himself after Baker,” one of his friends told me.
...
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ref digby
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/9/20/1700186/-Trump-campaign-chair-offered-private-briefings-on-state-of-Trump-campaign-to-Russian-billionaire
ref main
ess than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.
“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.
The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team as they probe whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.
There is no evidence in the documents showing that Deripaska received Manafort’s offer or that any briefings took place. And a spokeswoman for Deripaska dismissed the email exchanges as scheming by “consultants in the notorious ‘beltway bandit’ industry.”....
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mojo russia:
Paul Manafort
A lobbyist out of central casting, Manafort has repped some of the world’s shadiest autocrats and dictators, once flying to Angola in the ’80s amid the country’s bloody civil war to pitch warlord Jonas Savimbi. (In hacked text messages made public in February, Manafort’s daughter Andrea allegedly said her father had “no moral or legal compass” and described her family’s wealth as “blood money.”) Brought on to the Trump campaign at the urging of his former business partner Roger Stone, Manafort helped to guide it through the Republican convention. Manafort was ousted in August, as details emerged about his work for deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a Putin ally, which allegedly involved $12.7 million in secret cash payments earmarked for Manafort. Scrutiny of Manafort, who is reportedly under investigation by the FBI and the Treasury Department, has expanded to include his business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum magnate and Putin ally who was denied a visa to the United States because of alleged ties to organized crime.
Roger Stone
The 64-year-old, who proudly sports a tattoo of Richard Nixon across his back, has made a career of political subterfuge. He cut his teeth at 19 as a Nixon dirty trickster, once hiring a GOP operative to infiltrate George McGovern’s campaign. He later co-founded the lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Atwater in the early 1980s. He has advised Trump for decades, lobbying on behalf of Trump’s casino interests and serving as campaign manager of the real estate mogul’s short-lived presidential campaign in 2000. During the 2016 campaign, Stone seemed to possess uncanny knowledge of what WikiLeaks had in store for Hillary Clinton. On October 1, he tweeted, “Wednesday @HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.” Less than a week later, WikiLeaks began publishing the emails of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Stone claimed he was in touch with WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, and that he exchanged direct messages with Guccifer 2.0—the handle for the alleged Russian hacker(s) who posted the stolen DNC emails. Reportedly under investigation by the FBI, Stone has strenuously denied any collusion with Russians and has volunteered to testify before Congress. But anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt—his mantra, after all, is: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”
Michael Cohen
In the dossier produced by the ex-British spy Steele, Trump’s pugnacious personal lawyer surfaced as an alleged liaison to Russian officials—a charge he strongly denies. He has long-standing business and family ties to Ukraine. In January, he hand-delivered a peace plan for Ukraine and Russia to then-national security adviser Flynn, according to the New York Times. The effort also involved Trump’s business associate Sater and Andrii V. Artemenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker.
J.D. Gordon
The former Navy officer and Pentagon spokesman, who advised the Trump campaign on national security policy, has reportedly acknowledged advocating a controversial platform change at the Republican National Convention: removing language calling for the provision of “lethal defensive weapons” to Ukraine to protect the country from Russian aggression. Gordon was also one of several Trump campaign aides who met with Ambassador Kislyak during the Republican convention.
Rick Gates
As Manafort’s right-hand man, Gates helped him lobby on behalf of Putin-allied Ukrainian President Yanukovychand was involved in at least two multimillion-dollar deals with Russian oligarchs—one with Deripaska and another with Ukrainian natural-gas titan Dmitry Firtash. Like Manafort, Gates did not disclose his work as a foreign agent to the Justice Department last year, a possible violation of the law. Following the election he helped form a nonprofit promoting Trump’s agenda, but he departed after the Associated Press reported Manafort’s business dealings with Deripaska.
Michael Caputo (paladino with roger stone) [spitzer?]
The veteran PR consultant ran communications for Trump’s 2016 primary campaign in New York. But before that, he spent years working in Russia, first for the US Agency for International Development and then for his own Moscow PR firm. In 2000, he was hired by Gazprom Media to burnish Putin’s image in the United States. At one point, fearing Russian organized-crime figures were hunting him, Caputo (and his parrot, August West) took refuge on a boat inFlorida.
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August, as tension mounted over Russia’s role in the U.S. presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sat down to dinner with a business associate from Ukraine who once served in the Russian army.
Konstantin Kilimnik, who learned English at a military school that some experts consider a training ground for Russian spies, had helped run the Ukraine office for Manafort’s international political consulting practice for 10 years.
At the Grand Havana Room, one of New York City’s most exclusive cigar bars, the longtime acquaintances “talked about bills unpaid by our clients, about [the] overall situation in Ukraine . . . and about the current news,” including the presidential campaign, according to a statement provided by Kilimnik, offering his most detailed account of his interactions with the former Trump adviser.
Kilimnik, who provided a written statement to The Washington Post through Manafort’s attorney, said the previously unreported dinner was one of two meetings he had with Manafort on visits to the United States during Manafort’s five months working for Trump. The first encounter was in early May 2016, about two weeks before the Trump adviser was elevated to campaign chairman.
The August dinner came about two weeks before Manafort resigned under pressure amid reports that he had received improper payments for his political work in Ukraine, allegations that he has denied.
Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said that Kilimnik was a “longtime business associate” who would have naturally been in touch with Manafort. Manafort told Politico, which first reported his relationship with Kilimnik, that his conversations included discussions about the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and the release of its emails.
“It would be neither surprising nor suspicious that two political consultants would chat about the political news of the day, including the DNC hack, which was in the news,” Maloni said.
He added, “We’re confident that serious officials will come to the conclusion that Paul’s campaign conduct and interaction with Konstantin during that time was perfectly permissible and not in furtherance of some conspiracy.”
Before joining Trump’s campaign, Manafort had built a practice in Ukraine as an adviser to the Russia-friendly Party of Regions and helped elect former president Viktor Yanukovych, who was ousted in 2014 and fled to Russia. Manafort kept his Kiev office open until mid-2015.
Federal investigators have shown an interest in Manafort on several fronts beyond his work on behalf of Trump.
Subpoenas in New York have sought information about Manafort’s real estate loans, according to NBC News. Justice Department officials also are exploring whether Manafort should have more fully disclosed his work for foreign political parties, as required by federal law.
Former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III has been appointed special counsel to oversee the Russia inquiry, and people familiar with his work said his office has now taken over investigations of Manafort’s conduct unrelated directly to the Russia probe.
A spokesman for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to discuss the subpoena there. A spokesman for Mueller also declined to comment.
Manafort’s relationship with Kilimnik shows the challenge facing investigators as they seek to determine whether contacts between Russian allies and Trump associates during the height of Russian interference in the campaign amounted to collusion or reflected routine interactions between people with relationships unrelated to the campaign.
Kilimnik said he grew up in southeastern Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. He said he moved to Moscow in 1987, when he was 17, and enrolled in the Military Institute of the Ministry for Defense, an elite academy for training military translators.
Kilimnik said he was trained in English and Swedish and spent the early 1990s serving as a military translator, including in 1993 on a trade mission of a Russian arms company.
He said the GRU, the military intelligence service that U.S. officials have linked to the 2016 cyberattacks, did not recruit from his language academy.
“No one ever spoke to me ever about doing any intelligence work — neither Russians or Ukrainians or any other foreign country,” he said.
Some experts disputed Kilimnik’s description of the Moscow academy.
Stephen Blank, a Russia expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank, and a longtime former instructor at the U.S. Army War College, called the institute a “breeding ground” for intelligence officers.
Mark Galeotti, a Russia security specialist at the Institute of International Relations, a Prague-based foreign policy think tank, said the school is one of the “favored recruiting grounds” of the GRU.
In 1995, amid uncertainty in the post-Soviet economy, Kilimnik said he needed money and took a job as a translator for the International Republican Institute, a pro-democracy group affiliated with the U.S. Republican Party.
People who worked with Kilimnik said he was proficient in several languages and a savvy reader of people.
“I relied on him,” said Sam Patten, who was Kilimnik’s boss at the Moscow office of IRI from 2001 to 2004.
At the time, Kilimnik openly discussed his work in the Russian army, said Phil Griffin, a political consultant who hired him at the IRI. “He was completely upfront about his past work with Russian military intelligence,” Griffin said. “It was no big deal.”
Julia Sibley, a spokeswoman for the IRI, confirmed that Kilimnik worked for the organization a decade ago but declined to provide additional information.
In 2005, Griffin, who had left Moscow to work for Manafort in Ukraine, invited Kilimnik to join him there, according to both men.
Kilimnik said he has worked largely in Ukraine ever since, although he declined to say whether he has become a Ukrainian citizen.
Kilimnik’s role for Manafort grew over time. Beyond his work as a translator, Kilimnik would “help Manafort understand the political context and why people were doing what they were doing,” Patten said.
People familiar with Kilimnik’s work in Ukraine for Manafort say his assignments included meeting with powerful Ukrainian politicians and serving as a liaison to Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin and did business with Manafort.
A spokeswoman for Deripaska did not respond to a request for comment.
In August, Volodymyr Ariev, a member of the Ukrainian parliament who represents a party that opposed Manafort’s clients, requested that Ukraine’s top prosecutor investigate whether Kilimnik had worked with Russian intelligence services.
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond to questions from The Post. The prosecutor’s office told Politico in March that Kilimnik was “not being processed now as a witness, suspect or accused.”
Others viewed Kilimnik as more aligned with Washington than Moscow.
...
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dn
Associated Press is also reporting that financial records show another Trump associate, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, received at least $1.2 million in payments for doing political consulting work for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. It’s the first evidence that Manafort actually received some of the $12.7 million in cash payments detailed on handwritten ledgers unearthed in Ukraine.
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Manafort, the former chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, has hired a crisis communications firm.
The move comes as Manafort faces scrutiny over possible ties to Russia centered on his past consulting work for officials in Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych's pro-Russia government.
Manafort’s new spokesman is Jason Maloni, a former senior vice president and chair of the litigation practice at Levick who formed his own firm, called JadeRoq, late last year.
“Paul retained me recently because he was getting a lot of media inquiries. Having some support in this area allows folks like you to get your answers faster and allows him to focus on other matters,” Maloni said in an email.
FBI Director James Comey on Monday confirmed publicly that law enforcement is investigating possible ties between Trump campaign officials and Russia. Manafort is widely believed to be among the targets of that investigation.
Manafort on Monday said he “had no involvement” in Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, including its email hacking of prominent Democratic groups and figures, and never spoke to Russian officials who claimed involvement.
“The suggestion that I ever worked in concert with anyone to release hacked emails or sought to undermine the interests of the United States is false,” he said in a statement.
"Despite the constant scrutiny and innuendo, there are no facts or evidence supporting these allegations, nor will there be," Manafort said, calling the issue a "blatant attempt to discredit me and the legitimacy of the election of Donald Trump."
Manafort has previously denied reports that he is under FBI investigation for his connections to Russia.
He has also said the Trump campaign had no involvement with the government of Vladimir Putin and denied playing a role in softening platform language about Russia's annexation of Crimea and broader military actions in eastern Ukraine during last summer’s Republican National Convention.
The White House, meanwhile, sought to distance Trump from Manafort on Tuesday.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer described Manafort as someone who “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.”
The New York Times on Monday night reported that documents had surfaced apparently showing that the Party of Regions — Yanukovych’s political party — funneled $750,000 to Manafort through an offshore account, listing it as a payment for 501 computers.
The documents, released to the Times by a member of Ukraine’s parliament, have not been independently verified by other media outlets. Serhiy Leshchenko, that politician, said the 2009 invoice is an attempt to hide the payment for work Manafort did for the pro-Russia political party.
In a public statement, Maloni said the allegations are “baseless” and should be “summarily dismissed.”
Maloni spent 11 years at Levick before leaving last September but has owned his own firm before — called Black Arrow Media Strategies — in addition to working at other firms including DCS Group and Powell Tate
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https://www.democracynow.org/2017/3/21/headlines/fmr_trump_campaign_chair_paul_manafort_facing_new_accusations_in_ukraine
New York Times reported Monday that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort is facing a new round of accusations in Ukraine, after evidence emerged that he sought to hide payments he’d received while doing political consulting work for former President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort was ousted as Trump’s campaign chair in August after handwritten ledgers unearthed in Ukraine showed $12.7 million of cash payments from a pro-Russian party that were slated to go to Manafort—although it is not known whether he ever received the money.
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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53327/paul-manafort-ukraine/
Dostoevsky novel in which we have plunged ourselves seems to be getting more tangled and inescapable by the day. As the Beeb reports, there's this dude in Austria who may be visiting one of America's finest courthouses fairly soon.
Mr Firtash was first detained in 2014 in Vienna, but was released after posting a record Austrian bail of €125m (£102m). During the lower court hearing, Mr Firtash's team raised the issue of political motive. At the time, Mr Yanukovych had just indicated he would not sign a deal bringing Ukraine closer to the EU, despite US pressure. The judge said there may have been a US desire to remove his ally, Mr Firtash, from the scene. "The aim was clearly to prevent [Firtash] from undermining the political interests of the US," he wrote. Austrian police insisted the arrest was not related to political events and the US justice department appealed.
Do tell.
With the administration of Donald Trump coming to power, the Firtash case now falls into the realm of possible links between the new president's team and Russia. This has already claimed one scalp - national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was fired after misleading Vice-President Mike Pence about his talks with the Russian ambassador during the presidential transition. Mr Firtash gained much of his wealth through arrangements with Russian energy giant Gazprom.
His business flourished after Mr Yanukovych came to power. A key paid adviser in the president's campaign was Paul Manafort, who later became Mr Trump's election campaign adviser. Mr Manafort and Mr Firtash were linked in a real estate project to redevelop the Drake Hotel site in Manhattan. Mr Yanukovych's opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, argued this was a money-laundering project to siphon huge amounts of cash out of Ukraine. Mr Firtash denies this, telling Bloomberg that although he was initially interested in the project, he changed his mind. He said he "always had clean money" and called Ms Tymoshenko a liar. Last August, the New York Times reported finding ledgers pledging $12.7m (£9.8m) in undisclosed cash payments from the former Russian-backed Ukrainian government to Mr Manafort between 2007 and 2012.
The only through-line in the campaign and the administration of El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lagois its entanglement with the Russian kleptocrats, in and out of government. It's the only truly consistent element in his rise to power. It's the only thing that's been there, day in and day out, from the moment he came down the golden escalator.
Then, as we move further into the dark and stormy night, there's this business with the Russian ambassador to the U.N. From the *AP*:
Further study usually includes toxicology and other screenings, which can take weeks. The case was referred to the medical examiner's office by the hospital, spokeswoman Julie Bolcer said. Vitaly Churkin, who died a day before his 65th birthday, had been Russia's envoy at the United Nations since 2006. He was the longest-serving ambassador on the Security Council, the U.N.'s most powerful body. The medical examiner is responsible for investigating deaths that occur by criminal violence, accident, suicide, suddenly or when the person seemed healthy, or if someone died in any unusual or suspicious manner. Most of the deaths investigated by the office are not suspicious.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/paul_manafort_isn_t_a_gop_retread_he_s_made_a_career_of_reinventing_tyrants.html
The Quiet American
Paul Manafort made a career out of stealthily reinventing the world’s nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom. Getting Donald Trump elected will be a cinch.
By Franklin Foer
Donald Trump’s political strategist Paul Manafort, left, with former presidential candidate Ben Carson at a campaign reception on April 21 in Hollywood, Florida.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s palace, is impressive by the standards of Palm Beach—less so when judged against the abodes of the world’s autocrats. It doesn’t, for instance, quite compare with Mezhyhirya, the gilded estate of deposed Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych. Trump may have 33 bathrooms and three bomb shelters, but his mansion lacks a herd of ostrich, a galleon parked in a pond, and a set of golden golf clubs. Yet the two properties are linked, not just in ostentatious spirit, but by the presence of one man. Trump and Yanukovych have shared the same political brain, an operative named Paul Manafort.
Ukrainians use the term “political technologist” as a favored synonym for electoral consultant. Trump turned to Manafort for what seemed at first a technical task: Manafort knows how to bullwhip and wheedle delegates at a contested convention. He’s done it before, assisting Gerald Ford in stifling Ronald Reagan’s insurgency at the GOP’s summer classic of 1976. In the conventions that followed, the Republican Party often handed Manafort control of the program and instructed him to stage-manage the show. He produced the morning-in-America convention of 1984 and the Bob Dole nostalgia-thon of 1996.
Given Manafort’s experience and skill set, it never made sense that he would be limited to such a narrow albeit crucial task as delegate accumulation. Indeed, it didn’t take long before he attempted to seize control of the Trump operation—managing the budget, buying advertising, steering Trump toward a teleprompter and away from flaming his opponents, appearing on air as a primary surrogate.
Some saw the hiring of Manafort as desperate, as Trump reaching for a relic from the distant past in the belated hope of compensating for a haphazard campaign infrastructure. In fact, securing Manafort was a coup. He is among the most significant political operatives of the past 40 years, and one of the most effective. He has revolutionized lobbying several times over, though he self-consciously refrains from broadcasting his influence. Unlike his old business partners, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, you would never describe Manafort as flamboyant. He stays in luxury hotels, but orders room service and churns out memos. When he does venture from his suite for dinner with a group, he’ll sit at the end of the table and say next to nothing, giving the impression that he reserves his expensive opinions for private conversations with his clients. “Manafort is a person who doesn’t necessarily show himself. There’s nothing egotistical about him,” says the economist Anders Aslund, who advised the Ukrainian government. The late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory described him as having a “smooth, noncommittal manner, ” though she also noted his “aggrieved brown eyes.” Despite his decades of amassing influence in Washington and other global capitals, he’s never been the subject of a full magazine profile. He distributes quotes to the press at the time and place of his choosing, which prior to his arrival on the Trump campaign, was almost never. (Indeed, he did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)
His work necessarily entails secrecy. Although his client list has included chunks of the Fortune 500, he has also built a booming business working with dictators. As Roger Stone has boasted about their now-disbanded firm: “Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find. … Dictators are in the eye of the beholder.” Manafort had a special gift for changing how dictators are beheld by American eyes. He would recast them as noble heroes—venerated by Washington think tanks, deluged with money from Congress.
Playing tennis with Yanukovych at Mezhyhirya might have been the culmination of Manafort’s long career. He spent nearly seven years commuting to Kiev. Over that stretch, he remade Ukrainian politics and helped shift the country into Vladimir Putin’s sphere of influence. It was an impressive achievement, at least according to the ethical calculus that governs Manafort’s world. But then along came Donald Trump—another oligarch in desperate need of his services.
* * *
The genesis of Donald Trump’s relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. That Roy Cohn: Joe McCarthy’s heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the ’70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit. (Cohn accused the Feds of using “Gestapo-like tactics.”) But Cohn and Trump became genuine pals, lunching at the Four Seasons and clubbing together at Studio 54. It was Roy Cohn who introduced Stone and Manafort to Trump.
During those disco years, Stone and Manafort were tethered together. They were both kids from Connecticut, attending colleges in Washington, though they couldn’t have been more different. Stone loved attention and garnered it with theatrical flair. He was a bad boy, soi-disant. As a student at George Washington University, Stone moonlighted for the Nixon campaign and gravitated to Jeb Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President. Dirty tricks came naturally to Stone. He assumed a pseudonym and made contributions on behalf of the Young Socialist Alliance to one of Nixon’s potential challengers. He hired spies to infiltrate the McGovern campaign. Stone wasn’t shy about his handiwork. In fact, he wasn’t shy about anything. He loved to sit for interviews and vamp. Stone is a bodybuilding fanatic who posed shirtless in the New Yorker. The photo captured his implanted hair, but not the tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back.
Manafort had a very different mentor. He studied under the future secretary of state, James A. Baker III, who wielded his knife with the discipline of a Marine and the polish of a Princetonian. It was a good fit for Manafort, who shared his mentor’s pragmatic conservatism and his thirst for politics. (His father spent six years as the mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, a Republican who flourished in Democratic terrain.) Baker, an avid collector of young talent, had managed Gerald Ford’s re-election campaign. That’s where he spotted Manafort and anointed him aide de camp. When Baker needed his own manager for his 1978 campaign to become attorney general of Texas, he tapped Manafort. The experience of whispering in Baker’s ear left a lasting impression. “Paul modeled himself after Baker,” one of his friends told me.
Despite his Yankee stock, Manafort ran Reagan’s Southern operation, the racially tinged appeal that infamously began in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the hamlet where civil rights activists were murdered in 1964. The success of the 1980 campaign gave Stone and Manafort cachet. More important, they helped run Reagan’s transition to power. They stocked the administration, distributing jobs across the agencies and accumulating owed favors that would provide the basis for their new lobbying business. They opened their doors in 1981.
Manafort and Stone pioneered a new style of firm, what K Street would come to call a double-breasted operation. One wing of the shop managed campaigns, electing a generation of Republicans, from Phil Gramm to Arlen Spector. The other wing lobbied the officials they helped to victory on behalf of its corporate clients. Over the course of their early years, they amassed a raft of blue-chip benefactors, including Salomon Brothers and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
Another early client was Donald J. Trump. What Trump wanted was help fending off potential rivals to his Atlantic City casino business. He especially feared the rise of Indian gaming. As the 2016 campaign has graphically illustrated, Trump doesn’t treat rivals gently. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1993, he began with his rote protestations of friendship. “Nobody likes Indians as much as Donald Trump.” He then proceeded to worry that the tribes would prove unable to fend off gangsters. “There is no way Indians are going to protect themselves from the mob ... It will be the biggest scandal ever, the biggest since Al Capone … An Indian chief is going to tell Joey Killer to please get off his reservation? It’s unbelievable to me.”
Trump poured money into a shell group called the New York Institute for Law and Society. The group existed solely to publish ads smearing his potential Indian competition. Under dark photos of needles and other junkie paraphernalia, the group asserted, “The St. Regis Mohawk Indian record of criminal activity is well documented.” (It wasn’t.) “Are these the new neighbors we want?” We know that Trump and Stone were behind the New York Institute because Gov. George Pataki investigated its doings. He slapped Trump and Stone with a $250,000 fine and required them to publicly apologize for running the ads.
Manafort didn’t own the Trump account at the firm. But one of his former partners told me that he would dispense advice and pitch in, winning Trump’s trust. When Manafort took an apartment in Trump Towers in 2006, he would kibitz with his old client when they’d run into one another on the elevator. “Trump knew this guy was top drawer,” says one Republican operative.
* * *
Manafort and Stone built a glamour firm. The Black in its name belonged to Charles Black, who as a 25-year-old launched the Senate career of Jesse Helms. Later, they lured Lee Atwater, the evil genius who would devise the Willie Horton gambit for George H.W. Bush. The firm had swagger. In the early ’80s, the partners spoke openly to the Washington Post of their annual $450,000 salaries. According to the consultant Ed Rollins, Black would later boast that the firm had schemed to gain cartel-like control of the 1988 Republican presidential primary. They managed all of the major campaigns. Atwater took Bush; Black ran Dole; Stone handled Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to a reporter from Time, “Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?”
Manafort actively avoided the spotlight, though he had a knack for garnering unwanted attention. He took on clients and causes that even most of his colleagues on K Street considered outside the usual bounds. Black, Manafort, and Stone hired alumni of the Department of Housing and Urban Development then used those connections to win $43 million in “moderate rehabilitation funds” for a renovation project in Upper Deerfield, New Jersey. Local officials had no interest in the grants, as they considered the shamble of cinder blocks long past the point of repair. The money flowed from HUD regardless, and developers paid Manafort’s firm a $326,000 fee for its handiwork. He later bought a 20 percent share in the project. Two years later, rents doubled without any sign of improvement. Conditions remained, in Mary McGrory’s words, “strictly Third World.” It was such an outrageous scam that congressmen flocked to make a spectacle of it. Manafort calmly took his flaying. “You might call it influence-peddling. I call it lobbying,” he explained in one hearing. “That’s a definitional debate.”
Strangely, the HUD scandal proved a marketing boon for the firm. An aide to Mobutu Sese Seko told the journalist Art Levine, “That only shows how important they are!” Indeed, Manafort enticed the African dictator to hire the firm. Many of the world’s dictators eventually became his clients. “Name a dictator and Black, Manafort will name the account,” Levine wrote. (Levine’s piece, published in Spy, featured a sidebar ranking the ethical behavior of Washington lobbyists: It found Black, Manafort the worst of the bunch.) The client list included Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos (with a $900,000 yearly contract) and the despots of the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, and Somalia. When the Center for Public Integrity detailed the firm’s work, it titled the report “The Torturers’ Lobby.”
Indeed, the firm was an all-purpose image-buffing operation. As the Washington Post has reported, Manafort could book his clients on 60 Minutes or Nightline—and coach them to make their best pitch. He lobbied Congress for foreign aid that flowed to his clients’ coffers. He might even provide a few choice pieces of advice about tamping down domestic critics. Manafort understood the mindset of the dictator wasn’t so different from his corporate clients. According to one proposal unearthed by congressional investigators, the firm boasted of “personal relationships” with administration officials and promised “to upgrade backchannels” to the U.S. government.
This wasn’t empty rhetoric. On a Friday in 1985, Christopher Lehman left his job at the National Security Council. The following Monday, he was flying with Manafort, his new boss, to the bush of Angola to pitch the Chinese-trained guerilla Jonas Savimbi, who wanted covert assistance from the U.S. to bolster his rebellion against Angola’s Marxist government. Savimbi briefly left a battle against Cuban assault forces and signed a $600,000 contract.
The money bought Savimbi a revised reputation. Despite his client’s Maoist background, Manafort reinvented him as a freedom fighter. He knew all the tricks for manipulating right-wing opinion. Savimbi was sent to a seminar at the American Enterprise Institute, hosted by the anticommunist stalwart Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a reception thrown by the Heritage Foundation, and another confab at Freedom House. (Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi, who conscripted soldiers, burned enemies, and indiscriminately laid land mines, as a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior ... one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”)
Manafort’s campaign worked wonders. His lobbying helped convince Congress to send Savimbi hundreds of millions in covert aid. Indeed, every time Angola stood on the precipice of peace talks, Manafort, Black worked to generate a fresh round of arms—shipments that many experts believe extended the conflict. Sen. Bill Bradley was blunt in assigning blame. “When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm, which successfully obtained further funding.” Or as Art Levine concluded, “So the war lasted another two more years and claimed a few thousand more lives! So what? What counts to a Washington lobbyist is the ability to deliver a tangible victory and spruce up his client’s image.”
* * *
Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort, after Trump delivered his foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., April 27, 2016.
Jim Bourg/Reuters
Who pays Paul Manafort? The question can be devilishly difficult to answer. He doesn’t always file the forms demanded by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And he may not even need to disclose who cuts his checks. The law is porous, and over time revisions in the act have created various ways for lobbyists to hide their deeds. Like Henry Kissinger, Manafort can claim that he merely “consults” with foreign governments, relieving him of the legal burden of announcing his benefactors.
Money arrives to Manafort circuitously, sometimes through the dodgiest of routes. We know this because he admitted one instance to investigators. If there’s one place on the planet inhospitable to American political consultants, it is France. So when Manafort wrote a campaign strategy for Eduoard Balladur’s presidential campaign in 1995, his role was kept from the public. Payments traveled beneath the table. In fact, the French investigation revealed, the money came from a good friend and old client of Manafort’s, a Lebanese arms dealer called Abdul Rahman al-Assir. (Manafort took Assir to George H.W Bush’s inauguration in 1989; Assir once loaned Manafort $250,000, as the Washington Post reported this week).
Manafort’s fee was a small piece of a larger kickback scheme. At least $200,000 came to Manafort, some of it via accounts in Madrid. It was part of a deal brokered by Assir. He arranged for France to sell Pakistan three Agosta submarines—with tens of millions of euros in “commissions” returning to the coffers of the Balladur campaign. The scandal, known in France as the “Karachi Affair,” has hovered over the country’s politics ever since it broke in 2010. (The English ex-wife of another Franco-Lebanese arms dealer involved in l’affair revealed the Manafort payments to a French judge.)
It wasn’t the only time that Manafort received money from the Pakistanis. Michael Isikoff has reported that Manafort was paid $700,000 by the Kashmiri American Council—ostensibly a grassroots organization advocating against Indian control of the contested borderland. Funding for the group, however, came from Pakistani intelligence. The assistant U.S. attorney who investigated the Kashmiri American Council has called it a “false flag operation.” Manafort flew his own false flags in the name of his stealth client. In 1993, he traveled to Kashmir to obtain footage for a video his firm was producing on behalf of the Pakistanis. The work entailed interviewing Indian officials, who would have never granted access if Manafort announced his true purpose. To get in the door, he lied about his identity, telling the Indians that he worked for CNN. Manafort has denied that he ever misrepresented himself, but he so offended the Indian government that a spokesman for its foreign ministry issued a public rebuke: “The whole thing was obviously a blatant operation of producing television software with a deliberate and particularly anti-Indian slant by lobbyists hired by Pakistan for this very purpose.”
* * *
Among the Republican establishment, there’s hope that Manafort will prove the turnaround artist who fixes the mess of the Trump campaign, giving it a professionalism that nobody could have expected. Indeed, he has a track record of successfully making over candidates, though his greatest success came in an entirely different political ecosystem.
In 2005, the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Ahmetov summoned Manafort to Kiev. Ahmetov hailed from Donetsk, the Russian-oriented heavy-industry east of the country. Ahmetov had cause for panic. The best political hope for his region, and, more to the point, his own business interests, was a gruff politician called Victor Yanukovych. As a teen, Yanukovych spent three years in prison for robbery and assault. After his release, he was again arrested for assault. None of this past history—these “youthful mistakes,” which he once instructed the KGB to expunge from his record—slowed his rise through the political ranks. In 2002, he served a brief stint as prime minister in a sclerotic pro-Russian government, mired in corruption scandals.
When Ahmetov summoned Manafort, in 2005, his candidate had suffered a crushing defeat. Yanukovych had just run for president of Ukraine, a campaign that involved rampant fraud and the possible poisoning of his opponent with dioxin. His bid ended in massive protests against him and his crude attempts to overturn the will of the people. The protests, the Orange Revolution, were a burst of optimism that Ukraine might transcend its past and take its seat as a European-style democracy. They should have destroyed Yanukovych’s career.
Viktor Yanukovich
Former prime minister of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich, on April 2, 2004.
Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images
Yanukovych seemed a hopeless case. “A kleptocratic goon, a pig who wouldn’t take lipstick” is how one American consultant who worked in Ukraine described him. Yet Manafort saw hope, as well as a handsome paycheck. Despite Yanukovych’s Soviet style, Manafort considered him political clay that could be molded. “He saw raw talent where others didn’t and he shaped it brilliantly,” one former State Department official told me. Manafort set about giving Yanukovych a new look: well-tailored suits, shirts and ties that matched, a haircut that tamed his raging bouffant. Manafort taught the pol a few simple lessons that helped sand down his edges. He showed him how to wave to a crowd, rather than keep his arms locked to his sides. He instructed him to refrain from speaking off the cuff. He taught him how to display a modicum of empathy when listening to the stories of voters. “I feel your pain,” Yanukovych would now exclaim at his rallies. One Ukrainian columnist cheekily asked his readers to identify the 10 elements of Yanukovych rallies that Manafort had imported from the Republican conventions he’d run.
The buffed image was born from opinion surveys, conducted by a team of pollsters Manafort brought to Kiev. He found that the hope of the Orange Revolution had curdled into frustration with the government’s incompetence. So Manafort crafted a new image of Yanukovych—businesslike, not likable but persistent—that stood as a pragmatic antidote to the hapless Orange Revolutionaries. People believed that when Yanukovych was prime minister, “there had been an order to things,” Brian Mefford, a Ukraine-based consultant told me. “That’s the sentiment they tried to run on.”
At the same time, Manafort understood how to accentuate divisions in the Ukrainian electorate. He had overseen Reagan’s Southern strategy; he understood the power of cultural polarization. His polling showed that Yanukovych could consolidate his base by stoking submerged grievances. Even though there was little evidence of the mistreatment of Russian language speakers by the Ukrainian state, he encouraged his candidate to make an issue of imagined abuses to rally their base. To the same end, he instructed Yanukovych to rage against NATO, which he did by condemning joint operations the alliance was conducting in Crimea.
When American Ambassador William Taylor arrived in Kiev in 2006, he summoned Manafort to a meeting in his office. Manafort would become a fixture in the offices of American ambassadors to Ukraine, the U.S. government’s primary conduit to Yanukovych and the pro-Russian camp. As Taylor told a group of American democracy activists just after the meeting, he had asked Manafort to tamp down Yanukovych’s criticisms of the joint operations NATO was conducting with the Ukrainians. The implications of his ask were clear: The interests of American security were hurt by such rhetoric. “American to American, I’m asking you to talk to him.” Manafort scoffed at the notion. He bluntly announced that he wouldn’t ask Yanukovych to dial back the rhetoric. It polled too well.
To be fair, Manafort was hardly the only American in Yanukovych’s orbit. Bernie Sanders’ consultant Tad Devine went to work for him in 2009. Ukrainians spent heavily in Washington, hiring a small army of top-drawer Republican lobbyists, including former congressmen Vin Weber and Billy Tauzin, to bolster Yanukovych’s image in Washington and ultimately stave off American support for Ukrainian democracy. But Manafort set up the largest shop in Kiev, housed in a well-guarded office just off Independence Square. During elections, his operation swelled to six American consultants, in addition to Ukrainian translators and drivers. He procured a special role in the Yanukovych camp. Anders Aslund told me, “Manafort became Yanukovych’s closest political advisor.”
* * *
In 2005, John McCain received a call from a staffer on the National Security Council. There was a problem, the staffer told the senator. The man orchestrating McCain’s presidential campaign was Paul Manafort’s partner, a lobbyist named Rick Davis. The administration wanted the senator’s help dialing back the duo’s work in Ukraine, two top McCain aides told me. By promoting enemies of the Orange Revolution, they were undermining American policy.
The call came after Manafort and Davis had already drawn McCain into their eastern escapades. It wasn’t just Ukraine. That year, the pair had consulted on behalf of pro-independence forces in the tiny principality of Montenegro, which wanted to exit Serbia and become its own sovereign republic. On the surface, this sounded noble enough, so noble that McCain called Montenegro’s independence the “greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War.”
A report in the Nation, however, showed that the Montenegrin campaign wasn’t remotely what McCain described. The independence initiative was championed by a fantastically wealthy Russian mogul called Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska had parochial reasons for promoting independence. He had just purchased Montenegro’s aluminum industry and intended to buy broader swaths of its economy. But he was also doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, on whose good graces the fate of all Russian business ultimately hangs. The Nation quoted Deripaska boasting that “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.”
Manafort and Davis didn’t just snooker McCain into trumpeting their client’s cause; they endangered him politically, by arranging a series of meetings with Deripaska, who the U.S. had barred from entering the country because of his ties to organized crime. In 2006, they steered McCain to attend a dinner with the oligarch at a chalet near Davos, where Deripaska speechified for the 40 or so guests. (The Washington Post reported that the oligarch sent Davis and Manafort a thank-you note for arranging to see the senator in “such an intimate setting.”) Seven months later, Manafort and Davis took McCain to celebrate his 70th birthday with Deripaska on a yacht moored in the Adriatic.
Not everyone within the McCain camp felt comfortable with this relationship. One group of aides pushed hard for McCain to fire Rick Davis for sullying the senator with the firm’s muck. McCain intended to do just that. The senator had backed the cause of Ukrainian democracy and he couldn’t stomach his top aide’s firm working to undermine it. What’s more, aides had come to McCain with the rumor that Deripaska had purchased an apartment in Trump Tower for Davis and Manafort. But in the moment, McCain lost his nerve, as his aides have recounted the episode. Davis supplied a tear-filled soliloquy that saved his job. “Rick’s plea somehow worked—and that was the root of the divisions that tore apart the campaign,” one of McCain’s top advisers told me.
It was just unsubstantiated hearsay that Deripaska had paid for Manafort’s flat. Yet McCain aides were right to suspect the relationship. Manafort and Davis were hungry for the oligarch’s cash. As the Washington Post reported, they even convinced Deripaska to invest in a $200 million private equity fund they created. For their efforts, Deripaska paid Davis, Manafort, and another one of their partners a $7.5 million management fee. But apparently they didn’t do very much managing, or investing either. When Deripaska asked for an audit of the fund in 2008, Manafort and Davis never delivered one. In fact, according to a complaint that Deripaska filed in court, Davis and Manafort “provided no additional updates.” Deripaska was desperate to get his money back—which, the Post noted, coincided with Manafort’s strange disappearance from public view. At the time, Roger Stone wrote friends a cryptic email titled, “Where’s Paul Manafort?” He supplied a multiple-choice set of answers including “Was seen chauffeuring Yanukovych around Moscow” and “Was seen loading gold bullion on an Army Transport plane from a remote airstrip outside Kiev and taking off seconds before a mob arrived at the site.”
Deripaska wasn’t the only dubious oligarch to invest with Manafort. He orchestrated a major deal with a Ukrainian called Dmitry Firtash. A fireman and soldier, Firtash found ways to flourish in the post-Soviet economy as a middleman, selling natural gas—by his own admission, he did so thanks to his connections with Seymon Mogilevich, the Russian Mafia’s “boss of bosses.”
But his crucial connection was to Vladimir Putin. Firtash’s grand scheme was detailed in a thorough investigation published by Reuters. Gazprom, the Russian state-owned natural gas conglomerate, would sell to Firtash at a deep discount. Firtash, in turn, resold the gas to the Ukrainian government, investing the profit in funding for pro-Putin politicians, including Victor Yanukovych.
Reuters was blunt in describing the pernicious effect of Firtash’s dealings:
It demonstrates how Putin uses Russian state assets to create streams of cash for political allies, and how he exported this model to Ukraine in an attempt to dominate his neighbour, which he sees as vital to Russia’s strategic interests. With the help of Firtash, Yanukovich won power and went on to rule Ukraine for four years. The relationship had great geopolitical value for Putin: Yanukovich ended up steering the nation of more than 44 million away from the West’s orbit and towards Moscow’s until he was overthrown in February.
After Firtash made billions off the scheme, he and Manafort partnered to buy the site of the old Drake Hotel on Park Avenue. With a longtime Trump family aide and the developer Arthur Cohen, Manafort and Firtash hatched a grand plan. They called their project the Bulgari Tower, and it would feature a mall, private club, and spa. Or at least that’s what they described in their plans. In 2008, Firtash wired $25 million to New York to bankroll the project. According to court documents, he also set up a $100 million investment fund, paying Manafort and his partners a $1.5 million fee for managing the money.
It was a good moment for Firtash to park his cash in Manhattan. His arch-enemy Yulia Tymoshenko, an old natural gas broker herself, had come to power a year earlier. She moved aggressively against Firtash, whose company she described as “a wart on the body.” She cut her own deal with Putin for the supply of energy, eliminating Firtash from the business. And she seized his massive stockpile of gas, effectively nationalizing the source of his fortune.
Defeating Tymoshenko thus became Firtash’s primary goal in life. He spent heavily on Yanukovych’s campaign against her in 2010. Fortunately for Firtash, Manafort was on the job. When the consultant first arrived in Kiev, Yanukovych was the subject of near universal derision. But his years of grooming Yanukovych, and perfecting his political machinery, carried him to victory—a narrow win rooted in the missteps of his opponents, but one that would have never happened without skilled reinvention. Marveling at this accomplishment, the Ukranian journalist Mustafa Nayeem wrote that Manafort was “the only person who really adapted to Ukrainian political reality.”
As soon as Yanukovych came to power, he restored Firtash’s business. Most important, the new government settled a lawsuit that Firtash had filed objecting to Tymoshenko’s seizure of his gas. As part of the settlement, the government handed $3 billion worth of natural gas to Firtash: his old stash plus an extra billion cubic meters of gas thrown into the deal as compensation for his troubles. Der Spiegel, which reviewed the text of the settlement, concluded, “Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, served the commercial interests of an oligarch with whom he has close ties—at the expense of his own country. And, in doing so, he also did Moscow a favor.”
As for Bulgari Tower, the project sputtered and shuttered in January 2009. Yulia Tymosehnko didn’t like the smell of things. She sued Manafort and Firtash for racketeering in the Southern District of New York. “The money kept going in and out,” her lawyer Kenneth McCallion told me. “Real estate was the ostensible reason for sending money to New York. But they never wanted to close on the project, they wanted to keep the cash liquid, so it could keep going back to Ukraine.” The suit never had much of a chance, because it didn’t offer enough supporting evidence to justify its grandiose claim: that Manafort and Firtash were laundering money to finance human rights abuses on a grand scale. But her case raised all manner of troubling questions, and reinforced an old one: Why would Paul Manafort so consistently do the bidding of oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin?
* * *
That’s hardly a question to bother Donald Trump, who has professed his own admiration for Putin’s bare-chested leadership. Over months of tweets and taunts, Donald Trump has terrified most of the Republican establishment, who view him as a brand-shattering electoral debacle in the making. But that’s precisely why Paul Manafort has gravitated toward him, and what makes the client such a perfect match for the consultant.
Manafort has spent a career working on behalf of clients that the rest of his fellow lobbyists and strategists have deemed just below their not-so-high moral threshold. Manafort has consistently given his clients a patina of respectability that has allowed them to migrate into the mainstream of opinion, or close enough to the mainstream. He has a particular knack for taking autocrats and presenting them as defenders of democracy. If he could convince the respectable world that thugs like Savimbi and Marcos are friends of America, then why not do the same for Trump? One of his friends told me, “He wanted to do his thing on home turf. He wanted one last shot at the big prize.”
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wapo
...At one point, attorneys for the Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, claimed that they could not locate Manafort or his partner, Richard Gates. The tycoon hired a private investigator to track them down, according to a 2014 petition that Deripaska’s attorneys filed in a Cayman Islands court seeking recovery of the money.
“It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared,” the petition states.
Manafort’s attorney, Richard Hibey, did not respond to repeated Washington Post requests for comment on the current status of the Cayman Islands dispute.
Court records show that, as of August 2015, seven years after Deripaska requested his money back, the Russian businessman was still seeking to recover the funds. A Deripaska representative said last week that the matter still angers Deripaska and that the tycoon’s “accountants and lawyers are looking at this right now.”
...
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http://www.odwyerpr.com/story/public/6607/2016-03-29/trump-hires-manafort-for-delegate-push.html
Presidential hopeful Donald Trump has enlisted veteran lobbyist and political PR consultant Paul Manafort in an effort to lock up his delegate lead in the Republican primaries, according to a report yesterday by the New York Times.
Longtime Republican strategist Manafort served as coordinator for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, and later advised the presidential runs for Sens. Robert Dole and John McCain, as well as the successful campaigns of George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.
Manafort was founding partner of Republican lobbying powerhouse Black, Manafort & Stone, which he left in 1996. That firm — later renamed Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly — is now part of Prime Policy Group, a subsidiary of WPP’s Burson-Marsteller.
Manafort is currently senior partner at Davis, Manafort and Freedman. That firm is led by Rick Davis, who was national campaign manager for John McCain's 2008 presidential run.
Manafort made headlines when he worked as an advisor for the parliamentary election campaign of Ukrainian prime minister Viktor Yanukovich, who later became that country's president. Yanukovich was removed from his post in early 2014.
The New York Times posited that Trump has brought in the seasoned strategist to help him sweep up the remaining delegates needed to secure his position as the Republican party's presidential candidate, as well as to prepare for a potential showdown in July at the Cleveland Republican National Convention, where many of Trump’s detractors within the GOP are still hoping for a contested convention.
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Maddow described a Politico report, released Wednesday, that revealed authorities investigated Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, over Kilimnik’s suspected ties Russian intelligence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communications-trump.html
Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election, according to four current and former American officials.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted the communications around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee, three of the officials said. The intelligence agencies then sought to learn whether the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russians on the hacking or other efforts to influence the election.
The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.
But the intercepts alarmed American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, in part because of the amount of contact that was occurring while Mr. Trump was speaking glowingly about the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin. At one point last summer, Mr. Trump said at a campaign event that he hoped Russian intelligence services had stolen Hillary Clinton’s emails and would make them public.
The officials said the intercepted communications were not limited to Trump campaign officials, and included other associates of Mr. Trump. On the Russian side, the contacts also included members of the government outside of the intelligence services, they said. All of the current and former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the continuing investigation is classified.
The officials said that one of the advisers picked up on the calls was Paul Manafort, who was Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman for several months last year and had worked as a political consultant in Ukraine. The officials declined to identify the other Trump associates on the calls.
The call logs and intercepted communications are part of a larger trove of information that the F.B.I. is sifting through as it investigates the links between Mr. Trump’s associates and the Russian government, as well as the hacking of the D.N.C., according to federal law enforcement officials. As part of its inquiry, the F.B.I. has obtained banking and travel records and conducted interviews, the officials said.
He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”Mr. Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the officials’ accounts in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “This is absurd,” he said. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”
Several of Mr. Trump’s associates, like Mr. Manafort, have done business in Russia.And it is not unusual for American businessmen to come in contact with foreign intelligence officials, sometimes unwittingly, in countries like Russia and Ukraine, where the spy services are deeply embedded in society. Law enforcement officials did not say to what extent the contacts might have been about business.
The officials would not disclose many details, including what was discussed on the calls, the identity of the Russian intelligence officials who participated, and how many of Mr. Trump’s advisers were talking to the Russians. It is also unclear whether the conversations had anything to do with Mr. Trump himself.
A report from American intelligence agencies that was made public in January concluded that the Russian government had intervened in the election in part to help Mr. Trump, but did not address whether any members of the Trump campaign had participated in the effort.
The intercepted calls are different from the wiretapped conversations last year between Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and Sergey I. Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States. In those calls, which led to Mr. Flynn’s resignation on Monday night, the two men discussed sanctions that the Obama administration imposed on Russia in December.
But the cases are part of American intelligence and law enforcement agencies’ routine electronic surveillance of the communications of foreign officials. ...security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications....
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A look at the scope of the intelligence community's investigations into Trump's ties to Russia
Natasha Bertrand
Jan. 24, 2017, 8:43 AM 15,510
no link
The US intelligence community has opened investigations into several members of President Donald Trump's inner circle over the past year, focusing on the advisers' potential ties to Russian government officials throughout Trump's presidential campaign and beyond.
The investigations appear to have begun as early as last spring, when the CIA established a US counterintelligence task force to investigate whether the Trump campaign received funds from Russia. The task force consisted of the FBI, the Treasury and Justice departments, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the National Security Agency.
The BBC first reported on the existence of the investigation earlier this month, which McClatchy also reported was still ongoing. The investigation sought, among other things, to determine who financed the hacks on the Democratic National Committee and of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, and whether any of Trump's associates served as middlemen between his campaign and the Kremlin.
John Brennan, the former director of the CIA, also received a recording of a conversation last year from one of the Baltic states' intelligence agencies suggesting that money from the Kremlin had gone to the Trump campaign, the BBC reported.
One night before Trump's inauguration, The New York Times reported that intercepted communications were part of the investigation into ties between Russia and people close to Trump, but the report said it was "not clear whether the intercepted communications had anything to do with Mr. Trump's campaign, or Mr. Trump himself."
The BBC report indicated that the task force was granted a warrant by a judge in the FISA court — named after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — on October 15 to intercept the electronic records from two Russian banks that could have been implicated in any money transfer. Trump was not named in the warrant, but three of his associates were the subject of the inquiry.
All three associates contacted, but not named, by the BBC, denied the allegations contained in the report.
The 4 big names
Trump's potential ties to Russia have come under increased scrutiny amid allegations contained in a 35-page dossier from a former British intelligence officer. The unverified claims contained in the dossier include that his campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the election to undermine Hillary Clinton.
Paul Manafort, Trump's one-time campaign manager who served as a top adviser to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine from 2004 to 2012, emerged as a central figure in both the dossier and the intelligence community's early inquiries into Trump's ties to Russia.
Secret ledgers uncovered by an anticorruption center in Kiev and obtained by The New York Times revealed that former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych's political party, the pro-Russia Party of Regions, earmarked $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort for his work from 2007 to 2012.
Manafort has denied ever having collected the earmarked payments. But the unverified dossier on which top US leaders have been briefed alleges that Yanukovych "confided directly to Putin that he authorized kickback payments to Manafort," who "had been commercially active in Ukraine right up to the time (in March 2016) when he joined campaign team."
The dossier also alleged that Manafort, who resigned as Trump's campaign manager on August 19, served as a liaison between Trump's campaign team and Russian government officials. The FBI looked into Manafort last year for ties to Russian officials and business interests that Manafort has said do not exist.
"I have never had any relationship with the Russian [government] or any Russian officials," Manafort told The Wall Street Journal. "I was never in contact with anyone, or directed anyone to be in contact with anyone."
Two other Trump allies, Carter Page and Roger Stone, have also been scrutinized by the intelligence community for their relationships with Moscow. Page served as an early foreign-policy adviser to Trump, and Stone advised Trump's campaign until August 2015.
Page's extensive business ties to state-owned Russian companies, stemming from his time as an investment banker in Moscow in the early 2000s, were investigated by the FBI last summer. The bureau also looked into Stone's ties to WikiLeaks, which published the hacked Podesta emails last year.
On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was being investigated by counterintelligence agents over his phone calls to Russia's ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, on December 29. That was the day that President Barack Obama sanctioned Russia over its election-related hacking and expelled 35 Russian diplomats from the US.
Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, said at the time that Flynn's calls to Kislyak "centered around the logistics of setting up a call with the president of Russia and the president-elect after he was sworn in."
But CNN reported on Monday that the calls, "captured by routine US eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats," raised "enough potential concerns that investigators are still looking into the discussions amid a broader concern about Russian intelligence-gathering activities in the United States."
Flynn's ties to Russia were scrutinized after he attended a gala in Moscow in 2015 celebrating the 10th anniversary of the state-sponsored news agency Russia Today. Flynn was photographed sitting next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at the gala's dinner.
==
https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/trumpworld/blob/master/data/person-person-connections.csv
| PAUL MANAFORT | ABDUL RAHMAN AL-ASSIR | Manafort secured a loan from al-Assir | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-business-as-in-politics-trump-adviser-no-stranger-to-controversial-figures/2016/04/26/970db232-08c7-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html?utm_term=.de35331c8594 | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-business-as-in-politics-trump-adviser-no-stranger-to-controversial-figures/2016/04/26/970db232-08c7-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html?utm_term=.de35331c8594 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PAUL MANAFORT | ARTHUR G. COHEN | "negotiated a deal to buy the site of the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan," per the New York Times | https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html | |
| PAUL MANAFORT | DMITRY FIRTASH | Worked together in bid for site of Drake Hotel in NYC | https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-business-as-in-politics-trump-adviser-no-stranger-to-controversial-figures/2016/04/26/970db232-08c7-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html?utm_term=.de35331c8594 | |
| PAUL MANAFORT | DMYTRO FIRTASH | Manafort and Firtash,"an oligarch who made billions as a middleman for Gazprom," were partners in "a deal to buy the site of the Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan," per the New York Times | https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html | |
| PAUL MANAFORT | RINAT AKHMETOV | Manafort worked to improve image of Akhmetov's companies | https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html | |
| PAUL MANAFORT | SERHIY LYOVOCHKIN | Manafort ran PR for Lyovochkin's campaign | https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/us/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html | |
| PAUL MANAFORT | VIKTOR F. YANUKOVYCH | Manafort ran PR for Yanukovych's campaign | Manafort ran PR for Yanukovych's campaign |
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/2016-donald-trump-paul-manafort-ferinand-marcos-philippines-1980s-213952
Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure
As Ferdinand Marcos used his fortune to cling to power, he found an ally in Trump’s campaign chairman.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL June 10, 2016
When Paul Manafort met Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s, each had something the other wanted.
Marcos, then in his third decade as leader of the Philippines, had developed a reputation in Washington as a stalwart ally in the fight against communism. But he was facing rising concerns about rampant corruption, plundering of public resources and human rights violations under his increasingly despotic leadership, during which Amnesty International now estimates 34,000 people were tortured and 3,240 killed. Meanwhile, Marcos amassed a fortune estimated at $10 billion, spending big on paintings by Pissarro and Manet, a fleet of private planes and helicopters and Mercedes-Benzes.
Manafort, then in his 30s, was a hotshot Republican operative who had made his name helping Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and was pioneering a new form of international political consulting. The model, which allowed him to indulge his taste for the high-life, parlayed his clout with the emergent conservative ruling class into lucrative gigs representing foreign leaders looking to buff their reputations in Washington.
A Marcos front group would eventually hire Manafort to try to help him retain his grip on power, agreeing to pay Manafort’s firm $950,000 a year — one of the first big foreign gigs landed by the firm. But back then, during the Wild West days of the international political industry, there was more buzz in Washington and Manila about Manafort’s proximity to Marcos during a period of epic spending to support a lavish lifestyle and to curry favor with influential Americans.
One example, according to documents, including some published here for the first time: Marcos earmarked huge sums of cash for Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns — as much as $57 million, according to one claim made to Philippine investigators. There’s no evidence that any cash ever made it into Reagan’s coffers, which would have been illegal since U.S. election laws ban donations from foreigners. And, despite extensive government investigations on both sides of the Pacific into the freewheeling spending of the Marcos regime, there’s never before been much serious inquiry of what ultimately happened to the cash intended for political contributions. The lack of a transparent paper trail — combined with the larger than life personas of Marcos and Manafort — spawned a swirl of theories.
In a phone interview this month, Manafort, now 67, acknowledged that for the better part of 30 years, he’s been dealing with speculation that he accepted millions of dollars in Marcos’s cash — either as a bonus or as a donation intended for Reagan.
“It was circulating way back when, when people were out to just pass rumors and things about me. It’s old stuff that never had any legs anywhere,” said Manafort. “It’s totally fiction,” he said, asserting that every penny he received from Marcos’ allies was disclosed to the U.S. Justice Department in mandatory filings. “We’d have done everything by the book,” he said, attributing persistent claims to the contrary to rivals and former colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and suggesting that some are reviving the talk now for political purposes.
After largely disappearing from the U.S. political spotlight for the past 20 years to build to a portfolio of foreign clients, Manafort reemerged in late March as a key adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He was quickly promoted to chief strategist and chairman, and has been working to put his international affiliations behind him (when POLITICO asked him to describe his relationship with Marcos, he laughed and said, “I’ve got to go”).
But Trump’s broadsides against the corrupt political establishment — and his increasing attacks on the foreign cash raised by the charitable foundation of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — continue to bring attention to the often-secretive international work that became Manafort’s lifeblood. Recent stories have called attention to Manafort’s huge paydays through arrangements with controversial foreign leaders and businessmen, including Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko, Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych and France’s Eduard Balladur, among others.
Yet those deals look like middle school civics classes next to Manafort’s efforts to help Marcos maintain his grip on power, according to documents and interviews with more than 40 people who worked in U.S. and Philippine politics and law enforcement in the mid-1980s.
In October 1984, Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda (center), lead ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the landing of Allied Forces in Red Beach during WWII.
In October 1984, Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda (center), lead ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the landing of Allied Forces in Red Beach during WWII. | AP Photos
Manafort’s Philippine adventure came at a time when international opinion was turning against Marcos’ authoritarian regime. Yet, one of Manafort’s business partners now says that Manafort neglected to inform him of the firm’s contract with the dictator. That created some embarrassment and raised concerns about a style that several of his former associates portrayed as mercenary and envelope-pushing.
POLITICO found that Manafort worked more closely than previously known with Marcos and his wife, Imelda, in Manila, where Manafort and his associates advised the couple on electoral strategy, and in Washington, where they worked to retain goodwill by tamping down concerns about the Marcos regime’s human rights record, theft of public resources, and ultimately their perpetration of a massive vote-rigging effort to try to stay in power in the Philippines’ 1986 presidential election.
In the run-up to that election, aides to Marcos’s leading opponent Corazon Aquino invoked Manafort’s role with the dictator “to vilify Marcos” with the intelligentsia, said Teddy Locsin, a prominent Philippine journalist and operative who worked for Aquino on that campaign. While Aquino also had help from Westerners — the prominent international consulting firm Sawyer Miller accepted $15,000 from her campaign, which appears to have been mostly expense reimbursements — her team found Manafort an appealing target. In the words of Locsin, who was later elected to Congress, “Manafort's name was like Voldemort today.”
***
Manafort’s international consulting career grew out of turmoil on Reagan’s 1980 campaign. A trio of young operatives had been working together in Reagan’s political shop — Manafort as convention director, Charlie Black as field director and Roger Stone as director of the Southern operation — until Black found himself out of a job when the campaign shuffled its hierarchy after the New Hampshire primary. So he started a political consulting firm, which Manafort and Stone joined in short order. The firm quickly began working for Reagan’s campaign, as well as the Republican National Committee and a handful of GOP congressional candidates.
After Reagan won, the firm built a steady, if unspectacular, business representing Republicans from Northeastern moderates like Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey to southern conservatives like Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Paula Hawkins of Florida.
But it wasn’t until after Reagan’s 1984 reelection, on which the firm’s founding partners worked extensively, that the swaggering 30-somethings really began making their mark on Washington’s hidebound consulting world and, in the process, making their fortunes. They split their enterprise into two distinct firms — one dedicated to domestic Republican political consulting lobbying and the other to lobbying and international political work — and added a new high-profile partner for each. Lee Atwater, the legendary GOP operative who served as Reagan’s deputy campaign manager in 1984, joined the political firm, while Peter Kelly, the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, joined the lobbying side, which became known as Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.
K Street veterans grumbled about the breach in the tradition of lobbying shops identifying exclusively with one party or the other. But Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly — headquartered with Black, Manafort, Stone and Atwater in a brick building overlooking the Potomac River in the historic Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia — quickly redefined the influence industry.
It began vacuuming up clients attracted by its growing stable of well-connected Republican and Democratic lobbyists lured to the firm by gaudy salaries from prominent congressional or executive branch posts. The firm’s partners were boasting of $450,000 annual salaries (not including bonuses for bringing in new clients) by 1986, though Black at the time protested that those figures were exaggerated.
Major contracts included Bethlehem Steel, the investment bank Salomon Brothers and the cigarette industry trade group The Tobacco Institute — not to mention Trump. The billionaire real estate developer paid the firm to fight the expansion of Indian casinos that could compete with his Atlantic City gambling business, and to change the flightpath of planes at West Palm Beach International Airport, which he said disturbed guests at his newly purchased Mar-a-Lago club.
It was on the international stage, however, that the firm found some of its most lucrative work, landing contracts representing the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Portugal and an anticommunist rebel group in Angola, among others. In 1986, the two firms — Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, and Black, Manafort, Stone and Atwater — combined with Manafort personally to collect $2.4 million from international clients, according to filings with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, young Republicans political operatives, pose for a Washington Post photograph in 1985.
Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, young Republicans political operatives, pose for a Washington Post photograph in 1985. | Getty Images
Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly’s pitch to win the business from the ruling party of the Bahamas, which at the time was being accused of ties to drug trafficking, spelled out the approach of its principals. The firm’s relationships with State Department officials could be “utilized to upgrade a backchannel relationship in the economic and foreign policy spheres,” according to a portion of the pitch published by TIME magazine in 1986.
One of the firm’s associates, Riva Levinson, who worked under Manafort on the Philippines account, recalled that he was not impressed when she informed him that she had to believe in what she was doing. Manafort predicted that “will be my downfall in this business,” she recalled in her memoir, published this month. She wrote that a running joke inside the firm was that its work was “like playing one big game of Stratego: building armies and scheming to take over the world. That is exactly what it feels like working with Manafort. In fact, at times, that is exactly what is going on.”
Peter Kelly, the Democratic partner in the firm, said Manafort was attracted to trappings of wealth and cultivated an aura of an international jet-setter. He would disappear for days or even weeks without telling people at the firm where he was going or what he was doing and would return to submit expenses including Concorde flights to Paris and bills for stays in a suite at the extravagant Hotel de Crillon, according to Kelly and other former employees at the firm.
According to interviews and property records, Manafort drove a top-of-line Mercedes sedan and has purchased, built or rented pricey estates in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia; Palm Beach, Florida and the Hamptons, as well a horse farm in Virginia and a condo in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, where his new boss’ campaign headquarters are located. Several former colleagues and associates recall Manafort boasting about paying to relocate the swimming pool outside the home he built in Mount Vernon because he didn’t like the shade/sun balance, but a former Manafort neighbor told POLITICO it was because the pool was causing problems with the home’s foundation as it settled.
Manafort has told associates that he’s not drawing a salary from Trump’s campaign, and there don’t appear to be any payments to him in the campaign’s Federal Election Commission filings, leading multiple operatives in and around Trump’s campaign to speculate that Manafort is positioning himself to receive a cut from ad buys, polling or other contract work. Manafort rejected that speculation. “No, no, no, no. I’m a volunteer. I’m at a point in my life where I can volunteer my time,” he told POLITICO.
Kelly, in an interview, said Manafort’s driving motivation always seemed to be “to be in the middle of the action. He loved the action. I think that’s what gets him off more than anything. At a certain point, money becomes irrelevant.”
Manafort brushed aside questions that he misled his partners, suggesting that politics was motivating the criticism from Kelly, who was a top adviser to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns. “Peter Kelly was the only Democrat in the firm at that time, so guess what? He has a vested interest in helping Hillary right now,” said Manafort. “That’s all. He’s playing a game.”
But Kelly wasn’t the only former colleague who expressed misgivings about Manafort’s behavior to POLITICO. And Kelly said Manafort sometimes failed to alert the firm of what he was up to, accepting gigs with authoritarian regimes with which some other firm officials felt uncomfortable.
“Paul did a lot of vile things that weren’t appropriate for a firm like ours. We represented 11 Fortune 500 companies, so we didn’t need them worrying about some deals he was making in Paris,” Kelly said. “There was so much of his business that we didn’t know about.”
That included Manafort’s courtship of — and contract with — Marcos, according to Kelly, who said he had to abruptly resign from an election observation mission in the country after learning that his firm was working for Marcos.
It’s unclear when precisely Manafort first began working with Marcos, but multiple Black Manafort officials said the relationship started before 1985. Manafort himself said he had “no idea” when he first connected with Marcos, but emphasized that he followed all disclosure rules.
The Philippine strongman was in dire need of help in Washington after the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr., who was Corazon Aquino’s husband. Marcos started taking heat from Congress and even the administration, despite the deep ties he and his wife had cultivated to Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom the Marcoses had befriended as far back as 1969, when the Reagans attended a Manila gala marking the opening of a lavish cultural center. Ronald Reagan reportedly twirled Imelda Marcos around the dance floor at the gala. The couples remained close, and Philippine investigators later found records indicating that Imelda Marcos gave then-first lady Nancy Reagan a $60,000 “tube emerald necklace,” which Reagan would have been barred from keeping and which the White House said she never received.
“There were congressional hearings at least once a month on the Philippines, and there was talk of withholding aid,” said John F. Maisto, an American diplomat who served as the State Department’s director of Philippine affairs during Marcos decline and fall. “Hell, I was on the Hill arguing for the State Department that we should withhold military and even economic assistance from the Philippines in order to pressure them to put the regime back on a democratic path. And what the regime needed back then was people on the Hill arguing the opposite,” he said. “Manafort was a logical choice. He was close to Reagan, and also to his allies in Congress.”
***
In October 1985, Reagan dispatched his closest friend and ally in the Senate, Nevada’s Paul Laxalt, to Manila to advise Marcos that the U.S. was tiring of his abuses and would pull its support if he didn’t clean up his act.
Laxalt, who had chaired Reagan’s presidential campaigns and remained a key confidant, suggested that Marcos hire Manafort to help address Marcos’s grievances that he was being unfavorably depicted in the U.S. press, according to Stanley Karnow’s 1989 book “In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines.”
U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt (R-NV) talks with reporters at the Manila Airport, Oct. 17, 1985 at the end of a four-day visit to the Philippines on a mission from President Ronald Reagan.
U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt (R-NV) talks with reporters at the Manila Airport, Oct. 17, 1985 at the end of a four-day visit to the Philippines on a mission from President Ronald Reagan. | AP Photos
Not long after the meeting, Laxalt explained to TIME: “Everybody needs a Washington representative to protect their hind sides, even foreign governments.” As a result he said “the constituency for [lobbyists representing foreign governments] is the entire free-world economy.”
Manafort sought and received approval from the Reagan White House before accepting the work, according to Raymond Bonner’s 1988 book “Waltzing with a Dictator; The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy.” Manafort’s firm signed its contract to represent Marcos with a front group called The Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters & Tourism Associations, in November 1985, according to the firm’s foreign agent filings with the Justice Department. The Philippine official who executed the contract was a key Marcos’ ally named Ronaldo “Ronny” Zamora, who would resurface later as a key player in the mystery of the missing millions.
According to Bonner’s book, the month before the contract was officially executed, first lady Imelda Marcos personally delivered the first $60,000 of what was intended to be a $950,000 contract during a visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly (where she ironically decried “injustice, intolerance, greed and dominance by the strong”).
Shortly after her speech, her husband, in a dramatic effort to prove he was not anti-democratic, announced in an appearance on ABC’s "This Week with David Brinkley," that he would call for a snap election with more than one year left in his term.
Manafort revved into high gear, laying the groundwork for the Philippine foreign minister, Pacifico Castro, to visit the United States for three days to try to meet with U.S. officials, according to Justice Department documents and news accounts. He made plans for three prominent American conservative journalists—Robert Novak, John McLaughlin, and Fred Barnes—to visit the Philippines, according to Bonner’s book. And he worked to seed the idea in Washington conservative circles that Aquino, Marcos’s leading rival in the impending election, was soft on communism and would not be a reliable U.S. ally, according to the book.
Then, as the election approached, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly stepped up its lobbying contacts of influential congressional and State Department officials, according to the firm’s foreign agent filings with the Justice Department. A young Manafort protégé named Matthew C. Freedman played a particularly key role with the Marcoses as they fought to protect their power and fortune, according to multiple former colleagues.
Freedman, then 30, had joined Black Manafort as an associate after stints at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He was assigned to the Marcos account in the months before the election, and, according to the firm’s Justice Department filings, he set about lobbying officials at his former agency (U.S. AID) about foreign aid to the Marcos regime and the election.
The firm also helped the Reagan administration put together its election observation delegation, vetoing some names submitted by the State Department and adding other names seen as more acceptable, according to Bonner’s book.
Manafort and Freedman spent the weeks before the election in Manila advising Marcos on public relations and electoral strategy, according to published reports and interviews with three people working on the election in the Philippines. Manafort privately urged Marcos to administer the elections in a way that would appear credible to American observers: "What we've tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico's," Manafort told TIME around the elections.
His efforts apparently fell on deaf ears. There was widespread fraud and violence on Election Day and during the vote-counting, which independent international observers attributed mostly to Marcos’ supporters. The state election commission received a litany of complaints, including "threats and coercion" against voters, shootings in polling places, falsified ballots and theft of ballot boxes.
Many members of the U.S. delegation wanted to issue a harsh statement condemning the election. But some conservative members of the delegation argued against that, and the final statement instead highlighted the enthusiasm of the voters, only briefly mentioning “disturbing reports” of fraud and “serious charges … made in regard to the tabulation system.”
While the state election commission called the election for Marcos, an independent international watchdog named Aquino the victor. A tense three-week standoff ensued during which Marcos barricaded himself in the presidential palace while Aquino’s supporters waged peaceful protests, and the world watched, fearing bloodshed.
In Washington, Black Manafort’s associates repeatedly lobbied Laxalt’s office about the possibility of putting out a statement on the election, DOJ filings show, presumably supporting Marcos’s claim that it was legitimate.
Even as the State Department reported to the White House that Marcos’s allies had been responsible for widespread fraud, Marcos and his allies with help from Manafort’s firm worked to perpetuate the idea that there was fraud on both sides, but that Marcos had prevailed, according to interviews with U.S. diplomats. That was the White House’s line initially, even as international support increasingly mounted behind Aquino.
Black Manafort reported receiving its final payment on record from the Chamber — $258,000 including reimbursements for all manner of pricey meals and travel — on February 24, 1986, according to the firm’s filings with the Justice Department, bringing its total recorded payments for the account to $508,000.
At 3 a.m. the next morning, Manila time, an increasingly desperate Marcos reached Laxalt by phone on the Hill, proposing a power-sharing coalition with Aquino, and trying to suss out whether Reagan really wanted him to step down. Laxalt said he’d check with the president, and, when the Nevada senator phoned the presidential palace in Manila two hours later without a definitive answer, Marcos, exhausted and frail, asked Laxalt for his personal advice. “Cut and cut cleanly. The time has come,” Laxalt famously answered, leading to a long silence on the other end of the line, and prompting Laxalt to ask whether Marcos was still there. “I am so very, very disappointed,” Marcos answered, according to Laxalt’s account of the dramatic calls.
While Marcos, in a symbolic act of defiance later that day, had the oath of office administered for another term, within hours he had left the palace and fled the country under U.S. protection.
A young protester slashes at an oil painting of Ferdinand Marcos as looters storm the presidential palace in Manila, February 1986.
A young protester slashes at an oil painting of Ferdinand Marcos as looters storm the presidential palace in Manila, February 1986. | AP Photos
Manafort had left the Philippines before that historic final day. But Freedman remained behind, holed up in the presidential palace with the Marcoses, from which he remained in regular contact by phone with Manafort, according to multiple former colleagues who had spoken to Manafort and Freedman about the situation. At one point, Imelda Marcos asked to talk to Manafort, so Freedman gave her the phone and she thanked Manafort profusely for his services, according to the former colleagues.
Freedman joined the Marcoses and their entourage in Hawaii, and assisted them for several weeks as they located accommodations, according to a lawyer who worked with the Marcoses. The lawyer said that Freedman so endeared himself to Imelda Marcos that she expressed a desire to give him as a wedding present an iconic Manhattan office building that the Marcoses had secretly purchased in 1981 with the help of a Saudi arms dealer and others.
Freedman did not respond to questions about his time with the Marcoses, or why he continued to work for the Marcoses after his firm reported the relationship was over. Later, Freedman reportedly taunted a consultant at Sawyer Miller, which had worked for free for the victorious Aquino. According to James Harding’s 2008 book “Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business,” Freedman told the Sawyer Miller consultant “We lost, but we got paid.”
***
When Marcos arrived in Hawaii, U.S. customs officials seized thousands of pages of financial documents that detailed his stashing and spending of an enormous fortune plundered from the people of the Philippines. Among them: a one-page ledger obtained by POLITICO from a lawyer who sued the Marcos estate. The document, published here for the first time, appears to detail Marcos’ intended donations to U.S. political campaigns in 1980 and 1982, including $50,000 each to the competing 1980 campaigns of Reagan and the Democratic incumbent President Jimmy Carter. That cash, as well as $75,000 in donations slated for congressional and local candidates between 1979 and 1982, was to have come from a San Francisco-based company that was linked to a Philippine intelligence fund, the ledger suggests. POLITICO was unable to reach the Marcos associate who administered the company, an American citizen who donated tens of thousands of dollars to U.S. campaigns that he claimed came from his own funds.
Another document — a letter from to Marcos from a senior aide that was obtained when his opponents ransacked his files — seems to refer to accounts set up for Reagan and his 1980 campaign manager, the late William J. Casey. The letter catalogues other documents, including "1980-SEC-014: Funds to Casey" and "1980-SEC-015: Reagan Funds Not Used,” according to a 1996 report by The Associated Press former investigative reporter Robert Parry.
A third document — a whistle-blower letter from a group of anonymous bankers — alleged that the dictator planned to donate $7 million to Reagan’s 1980 campaign, $50 million to his 1984 reelection bid and $10 million to “various candidates” in the 1982 congressional midterm elections, according to contemporary media accounts. The letter was delivered to the Philippine commission that investigated Marcos’ plunder of public resources, the Presidential Commission on Good Government, by a former banker named Antonio Gatmaitan in the days after Marcos stepped down.
In an interview, Gatmaitan stood by the claims in the letter, and questioned the degree to which they were investigated by the PCGG, which itself has been the target of corruption allegations, even as it’s recovered an estimated $3.6 billion in Marcos’ assets.
“I don’t believe that they took it seriously, because Marcos was gone already by that time,” he said. “That’s typical here. Once the principals are gone, the stories die.”
Richard Roger T. Amurao, the acting chairman of the PCGG, said he couldn’t find the letter from the anonymous bankers, nor any records suggesting that the commission investigated its charges or other evidence that Marcos intended to donate to U.S. campaigns.
“Somehow our agency … did not look into the matter you were referring,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO. He declined an interview request, pointing out that his term expires at the end of this month, when the incoming presidential administration gets to appoint new commissioners. “Our time now is consumed by the transition work we need to hand over to the incoming administration,” he wrote.
But Philippine observers wonder whether the PCGG and its hunt for Marcos’ loot will survive, given the fading memories of the Marcos clan’s plunder and their resurgence as a political power. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., who goes by the nickname “Bongbong,” is a senator who narrowly lost a bid for vice president in last month’s elections, while his sister Imee Marcos is a governor and their mother, Imelda Marcos, serves as a member of Congress.
On this side of the Pacific, it doesn’t appear their late patriarch’s attempted donations to Reagan were investigated any more rigorously. It’s unclear whether U.S. authorities ever obtained or looked into Gatmaitan’s letter. And the U.S. Justice Department declined to investigate the ledger detailing donations made between 1979 and 1982. That’s because, by the time U.S. Customs officials obtained the ledger in 1986, the three-year statute of limitations for prosecuting federal election law violations had passed. When word of Marcos’ planned donations first broke in 1986, Reagan’s White House press secretary Larry Speakes denied any knowledge of the effort.
It’s also unclear whether the full bounty of documents have been accounted for, or whether there are other documents detailing how Marcos spent his cash.
Marcos had worked to try to prevent documents and assets from being released to American and Philippine authorities, hiring a Washington law firm with deep connections to Manafort and the White House to block the seizure of key possessions that the Marcos’ entourage brought with them to Hawaii. (In addition to the documents, the Marcoses arrived at the Air Force base Hickam Field outside of Honolulu with 27 million freshly printed Philippine pesos, 67 racks of clothes, 413 pieces of jewelry and 24 gold bricks, among other items valued at a total of $15 million).
The law firm, Anderson, Hibey, Nauheim & Blair, also represented Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, and Manafort personally, according to a lawyer who worked with it. The firm worked closely with the Black Manafort associate Freedman in the early days of the Marcoses’ Hawaiian exile. Richard Hibey, the partner at the firm who worked mostly closely with the Marcoses, is currently representing Manafort in a case brought by the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who accuses Manafort and a partner of accepting $19 million in investment cash, then disappearing and failing to account for it.
Hibey did not respond to requests for comment.
Most of the investigations by U.S. and Philippine authorities appear to have paid little attention to charges that some of the cash was intended for illegal political contributions in the U.S.
A U.S. congressional subcommittee chaired by the late New York Rep. Stephen Solarz devoted significant attention to tracking Marcos’ ill-gotten gains. But it doesn’t appear to have delved deeply into the donation allegations.
Stanley Roth, who served as staff director of Solarz’s subcommittee, said “there was an allegation that we were never able to prove" related to political contribution Marcos intended to make. But he stressed that the subcommittee’s investigative work centered on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York real estate deals linked to the Marcoses. “The driving force was not politics or campaign contributions. It was the guy looting the Philippines,” said Roth, adding that he doesn’t remember Manafort’s name being raised at all during the investigation.
***
Marcos, who had struggled noticeably during the snap election with health problems related to diabetes and lupus, declined precipitously while in exile and died in 1989.
But the mystery surrounding the earmarked donations got new life a couple years later. In the run-up to the Philippines’ next presidential election, the veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins traveled to Manila as part of a delegation from the internal consulting firm Sawyer Miller colleagues to help Aquino’s party in the 1992 presidential election.
Rollins and a couple other Western consultants working on the race attended a Manila dinner party with assorted Philippine politicos from Aquino’s party. Among those in attendance was Ronny Zamora, the former Marcos lawyer who had signed the contract with Black Manafort years earlier. According to multiple sources, Zamora had been among a group of Marcos confidants who helped the dictator move and invest the billions that he plundered from the public trough, with some of the so-called “Marcos cronies” becoming quite wealthy themselves.
Bob Rich, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, said Zamora “was one of the cronies who we felt was handling some of the money, but it wasn’t an official position.” Rich later accompanied the Marcoses during their exile in Hawaii, overseeing the logistics around their accommodations and the two planeloads of possessions they brought with them. He said the U.S. had a tough time tracking the flow of cash around Marcos and his cronies, explaining “we didn’t always know where the money was coming from.”
Like most Marcos cronies, Zamora did not face legal charges and later reemerged in Philippine politics backing other parties — in Zamora’s case, Aquino’s.
At the dinner, Zamora boasted that he provided $10 million in cash from Marcos to Manafort to donate to Reagan’s campaign, two attendees told POLITICO.
In demonstrations on February 2, 1986, anti-Marcos protesters carry a box containing the caricatured heads of President Ronald Reagan and Ferdinand Marcos. The sign on the box reads “Seal of the Dictator of the Philippines.”
In demonstrations on February 2, 1986, anti-Marcos protesters carry a box containing the caricatured heads of President Ronald Reagan and Ferdinand Marcos. The sign on the box reads “Seal of the Dictator of the Philippines.” | AP Photos
In Rollins’ 1996 memoir, he recounts the conversation that followed, without naming either Zamora or Manafort, referring to them only as “a prominent member of the Philippine congress” and a “well-known Washington power lobbyist who was involved in the campaign,” respectively.
“I delivered the suitcase with the cash personally to him, and helped get it out the country,” the Philippine congressman boasted, according to Rollins’ book, “Bare Knuckles and Backrooms; My Life in American Politics.” The congressman continued, telling Rollins that the lobbyist had indicated “he would give it to you for the campaign. It was a personal gift from Marcos to Reagan.”
Rollins in the book recalls being “stunned” by the story. “Not in a state of total disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank,” Rollins wrote, bemoaning “I ran the campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash.”
Rollins, who is now running a super PAC supporting Trump, said in an interview with POLITICO that, as soon as he got back to Washington, he asked Bay Buchanan, who served as treasurer of all three of Reagan’s presidential campaigns, whether there was any chance that foreign money had made its way into the campaign’s coffers. “Absolutely not,” Rollins recalls her saying. (Buchanan says she doesn’t recall this conversation).
Later, according to Rollins’ book, he shared the story with Laxalt, a close friend. Laxalt immediately responded “Christ, now it all makes sense,” according to Rollins’ book, which quotes Laxalt’s recollection of his October 1985 meeting with Marcos at which he recommended the dictator hire Manafort, but also passed along Reagan’s message of the importance of reform.
“When I was over there cutting off Marcos’ nuts, he gave me a hard time. ‘How can you do this?’ he kept saying to me. ‘I gave Reagan $10 million. How can he do this to me?’ ” Laxalt said, according to Rollins’s book. “I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Now I get it.”
Two GOP operatives told POLITICO that when Rollins’ book came out in 1996, he told them that the lobbyist in question was Manafort. Some Republicans familiar with the book attributed the passage in the book to tension between Rollins and Manafort, who were both considered contenders for the position of Reagan’s reelection campaign manager, which Rollins ultimately got. Rollins dismissed the idea that he has any bad blood with Manafort. (The two men are ostensibly on the same team now, though Manafort’s allies have tried to steer donors away from Rollins’ super PAC, and to a new super PAC run by a former associate at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.)
The operatives who discussed the Manila dinner anecdote with Rollins said he told them he had withheld Manafort’s name from his book out of concern for then-U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP nominee for president and for whom Manafort was working at the time.
Rollins would not confirm or deny those conversations, but he told POLITICO that when the book came out, “every reporter in the world” chased the story. “Several had come to me and said, ‘I know it was Manafort.’ And I said ‘I’m not confirming it.’“
Manafort called the story “totally fiction,” asserting “there never was any $10 million. … He made it up.”
Charlie Black, Manafort’s lobbying partner, said of the book: “I don’t know where Ed would have gotten that,” adding “I’m pretty confident Paul wasn’t involved in any of that. Paul is a lawyer, so he would have known it was illegal. Plus, he has more integrity than that.” And he said “$10 million was a lot of money in those days and if it had happened, I don’t think we would have seen hide nor hair of Paul again.”
In fact, Black said he and Manafort discussed the book when it came out, since it seemed obvious to informed readers that Manafort was the undisclosed lobbyist. But Black said “Paul didn’t sound like he was losing any sleep over it.”
As for Zamora, who returned to the Philippine congress after being term-limited out in 2010, he rejected Rollins’ account. “I certainly didn’t do anything like that,” he proclaimed, when reached by phone this month. He asserted he’d never met Manafort and added “I’m not even sure that I had that dinner” with Rollins.
Zamora said he and Marcos “never even talked about donating to any presidential campaign.” Pointing out that Marcos also was a lawyer (he boasted of receiving a near-perfect score of 98.8 percent on his bar exam, though that was later disputed), Zamora said Marcos “was careful about complying with election laws, especially American election laws, because you are even more strict than we are.”
Besides, Zamora added with bemusement, “How do you carry $10 million in cash? You know, not to sound too familiar with United States currency, but your currency is a little difficult to carry in cash.” Off the top of his head, he calculated that $10 million in $100 bills must weigh “a couple hundred pounds.” (The precise weight is 220 pounds, according to a U.S. Treasury estimate.)
Zamora did acknowledge signing a contract with Manafort’s firm on behalf of The Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters & Tourism Associations. But he said he only did so at the request of Marcos’s late brother-in-law Benjamin Trinidad Romualdez. “He was the one who asked me to sign for the group of the president,” said Zamora, professing ignorance to Black Manafort’s work or anything about the contract beyond the fact that he signed it.
“That’s all that I did, which of course, under American law is more than enough … to get you liable if something comes up,” he said. “But you know after that, remember, we had lost. We were all kicked out, and I never heard anything about this until – well, until now.”
***
Rollins, who was close with Laxalt, told POLITICO that the two discussed Manafort’s work with Marcos and the mystery of the campaign-donation-that-wasn’t for years afterward, but that Laxalt “never wanted to get involved in that because of his own relationships there.”
Laxalt is 93 and in declining health, but his daughter Michelle Laxalt, who worked for Reagan during his campaigns and in his administration on foreign policy issues, says her father occasionally speculated about what happened to Marcos’ campaign cash.
“The rumor about the case of the missing Manila millions was clearly a part of the chatter I was intrigued to listen to Ed and dad most closely to,” she told POLITICO, adding that she also “had heard rumblings in certain circles” beyond her father and Rollins. She stressed, though, that she never heard Manafort’s name in connection with that chatter, and didn’t think her father had either, though that conflicts with the recollection of Rollins.
It’s theoretically possible that Marcos’ money could have made its way into an independent group supporting Reagan’s campaign, said Reagan’s treasurer Buchanan. But she added that there was never any evidence of any outside group spending big money supporting Reagan.
And she stressed that there was absolutely no way that any foreign money made it by her staff, and into the campaign, itself.
“Watergate made a very strong impression on me,” said Buchanan, whose older brother Pat Buchanan worked for Richard Nixon during the Watergate break-in scandal, which also involved illegal campaign contributions. Pat Buchanan was untarnished by the scandal, but his sister said the experience made her doubly diligent about adhering to campaign finance rules.
“I made copies of every single check that was deposited in our account, because we took matching funds in the primary, so we had a 100 percent federal audit. And, in the general, we took the money from the federal government, so we didn’t raise any money at all,” she said, referring to a now-obsolete system that provided taxpayer money for presidential campaigns that agreed to spending restrictions.
Even if Reagan’s campaign had wanted to accept a huge lump sum payment from a foreign leader, it would have been immediately flagged as illegal by the Federal Election Commission, which enforces campaign finance laws. And it would have required a massive amount of clerical chicanery to funnel $10 million into a campaign in a manner that evaded detection, since the individual campaign contribution limit for individuals in 1984 was $1,000 — meaning the cash would have had to have been divided into individual donations from at least 10,000 different so-called straw donors.
“First of all, it would have been illegal,” Buchanan said. “And second, by 1984, it wouldn’t have been necessary, because he was the incumbent president, and we didn’t have any trouble raising money.”
By that point, though, Marcos’s political future was almost entirely dependent on keeping Reagan in the White House and on his side, especially after his Democratic general election opponent, Walter Mondale, came out against Marcos during the 1984 campaign.
So an under-the-table financial contribution might have made sense to him, said the American diplomat Maisto.
“Politically speaking, that’s the way Marcos thought back then. He had all the money in the world, and he knew the American political system functioned on contributions, not unlike the Philippine oligarchy,” said Maisto. “He thought that his ace in the hole was Ronald Reagan, and he didn’t want Reagan to leave the White House, so it makes that he would do whatever he could to ensure that Ronald Reagan was reelected.”
==
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html?_r=0
KIEV, Ukraine — On a leafy side street off Independence Square in Kiev is an office used for years by Donald J. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, when he consulted for Ukraine’s ruling political party. His furniture and personal items were still there as recently as May.
And Mr. Manafort’s presence remains elsewhere here in the capital, where government investigators examining secret records have found his name, as well as companies he sought business with, as they try to untangle a corrupt network they say was used to loot Ukrainian assets and influence elections during the administration of Mr. Manafort’s main client, former President Viktor F. Yanukovych.
Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr. Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to 2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials.
In addition, criminal prosecutors are investigating a group of offshore shell companies that helped members of Mr. Yanukovych’s inner circle finance their lavish lifestyles, including a palatial presidential residence with a private zoo, golf course and tennis court. Among the hundreds of murky transactions these companies engaged in was an $18 million deal to sell Ukrainian cable television assets to a partnership put together by Mr. Manafort and aRussian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Photo
Mr. Manafort’s involvement with moneyed interests in Russia and Ukraine had previously come to light. But as American relationships there become a rising issue in the presidential campaign — from Mr. Trump’s favorable statements about Mr. Putin and his annexation of Crimea to the suspected Russian hacking of Democrats’ emails — an examination of Mr. Manafort’s activities offers new details of how he mixed politics and business out of public view and benefited from powerful interests now under scrutiny by the new government in Kiev.
Anti-corruption officials there say the payments earmarked for Mr. Manafort, previously unreported, are a focus of their investigation, though they have yet to determine if he actually received the cash. While Mr. Manafort is not a target in the separate inquiry of offshore activities, prosecutors say he must have realized the implications of his financial dealings.
“He understood what was happening in Ukraine,” said Vitaliy Kasko, a former senior official with the general prosecutor’s office in Kiev. “It would have to be clear to any reasonable person that the Yanukovych clan, when it came to power, was engaged in corruption.”
Mr. Kasko added, “It’s impossible to imagine a person would look at this and think, ‘Everything is all right.’”
...
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wapo
Manafort has a history of working for strong men.
Over a 40-year career as a lobbyist and political consultant, Manafort and his firms have advised, in no particular order, a business group tied to Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines; Viktor Yanukovych, the ousted Ukrainian president and ally of Vladimir Putin; and Lynden Pindling, the former Bahamian prime minister who was accused of ties to drug traffickers.
Now, he works for Donald Trump.
On Thursday, Trump announced that Manafort would play an increasingly influential role in his campaign as it heads toward a possibly contested Republican convention in Cleveland. In a statement, the business mogul announced that “he is consolidating the functions related to the nomination process” and “assigning” them to Manafort.
“Mr. Manafort will oversee, manage, and be responsible for all activities that pertain to Mr. Trump’s delegate process and the Cleveland Convention,” the statement said. “Mr. Manafort will direct the campaign’s activities in areas including delegate operations, Washington, DC outreach and the DC office opening next week.”
Friends, lobbyists and former foes say that Trump is picking the right man for the job at a time when he is seeking to professionalize his political operation as it fends off talk that he will be unable to secure the 1,237 delegates needed to clinch the GOP presidential nod outright. If that doesn’t happen, then Trump will be relying on the longtime party operative to corral delegates in a race that could go to a second ballot and beyond.
Manafort comes with the right calling card: He fiercely protected Gerald Ford’s delegates at the last contested convention in 1976, in what Bay Buchanan, national treasurer for Ronald Reagan’s insurgent campaign, called “hand to hand” combat.
“You’re down to the number of people you can count and meet,” Buchanan said, noting that Manafort didn’t lose a single Ford delegate. “If you’re not tough, you will lose. To suggest he’s tough is saying he’s competent.”
Since then, Manafort has been involved in many a convention operation. But that doesn’t mean Manafort is a conventional Washington figure — indeed, he remains somewhat of a mystery on K Street.
*[As contested convention looms, Trump to hire ‘seasoned operatives’ to help*]
Friends say Manafort hasn’t lived full time in the Washington area for years. He resides, at least part of the time, in Trump Tower in Manhattan, where he has an apartment. He and Trump have met over the years in the lobby and elevators.
Manafort splits time in Florida, New York and Alexandria, Va., and travels internationally often, and for weeks or months at a time, consulting for foreign governments, several friends said. Corporate lobbyists describe such work as “a different cup of tea” than the typical contract lobbying for corporations that keeps most K Street types in Washington full-time.
But despite his low inside-the-Beltway profile, no one underestimates Manafort, seen as a formidable opponent who is unafraid to go to the mat for controversial, polarizing clients. The Trump job marks his reemergence onto the U.S. political scene, one longtime friend said.
“He’s going to be a major influence on Trump,” said Scott Reed, senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a longtime Manafort friend. “They’re close in age, so Trump doesn’t look to him like he’s some kid. He brings a level of professionalism to the Trump operation at an important time because they have to pivot from being this band of merry campaigners that fly around to actually grinding out a convention where every delegate matters.”
Reed was campaign manager for Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and hired Manafort to run the San Diego convention. The two previously worked together on the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984, when Manafort was heavily involved in the convention planning.
“Paul is very much into the basics of this business,” Reed said. “Blocking and tackling. Message discipline. Those are the things that really matter. We’ll see if he can get it done. The jury is still out.”
If anyone is capable of whipping the Trump campaign into a more organized, disciplined operation, it’s Manafort. He was recommended for the job by Roger Stone, the longtime Trump associate who officially parted ways with the campaign last summer but remains influential.
Manafort is the co-founder of two lobby and consulting firms, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMS&K) and, later, Davis Manafort. Even in the lobbying industry, where the buying and selling of influence can blur ethical lines, both businesses garnered considerable scrutiny for their tactics and clients.
BMS&K, founded in 1980, was investigated by a congressional panel in 1989 for its role in obtaining millions of dollars in federal grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to rehabilitate a low-income housing complex in New Jersey.
In exchange, Manafort and his partners received consulting fees from developers. During the investigation, Manafort acknowledged that the work he performed in return for consulting fees could be termed “influence peddling,” The Post reported in 1991. The firm was sold to public relations giant Burson-Marsteller in 1991 for an undisclosed price.
BMS&K also appears to be the early link that connected Manafort and Trump decades ago. The firm lobbied on behalf of the Trump Organization on gaming, taxes and other issues related to Trump’s hotels, at both the federal and state levels in New York and Florida, said lobbyist and GOP strategist Charlie Black, Manafort’s former business partner.
Manafort “has taken on a tough task, but certainly it’s a good decision for Trump,” said Black, who has been friends with Manafort for 40 years. Black is an adviser to John Kasich’s presidential campaign.
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for an interview with Manafort. But on Thursday, in the Trump release expanding his role, Manafort described winning the GOP nod “as an intricate series of steps that requires a comprehensive strategy.”
“As part of the campaign team, my job is to secure and protect Mr. Trump’s nomination and that is what we will do,” he vowed, adding he intended to work closely with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and deputy campaign chief Michael Glassner. “I am honored that he has allowed me to join him in this effort. Mr. Trump has created a historic campaign that has moved the American people. He is on the verge of an incredible victory.”
For much of his career, Manafort seemed to be a part of the establishment that Trump routinely rails against.
He made a name for himself working for leading Republican figures, including Ford, Reagan, Dole and George H.W. Bush.
“Paul has been involved in internal Republican politics for almost all of his adult life,” said Vin Weber, a lobbyist and a Republican former congressman from Minnesota who is a longtime friend of Manafort. “He’s one of the true first-rate professionals in the Republican Party. There’s only a handful of people, I really mean that, that can honestly say they know how a national convention works. He’s one of them.”
Weber, who advises Kasich, is no fan of Trump but lauded his choice of Manafort all the same.
“This is one of the most impressive things I’ve seen the Trump organization do,” Weber said. “Maybe the only impressive thing.”
After BMS&K was sold to Burson-Marsteller, Manafort formed Davis Manafort in 1995 with former John McCain adviser Rick Davis. It effectively disbanded after the 2008 election, Politico reported in 2014. Davis did not immediately return a request seeking comment.
Manafort then founded DMP International, a business and international-affairs firm. The firm was formed in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2012, according to the state’s business records.
Along the way, he seems to have picked up a masterful command of the unique traits critical to securing delegates, a dance that combines math, management skills, discipline and a knack for knowing when and how to apply pressure. He has a keen ability to “size people up pretty well” to gauge whether they can be trusted, Black said.
“A delegate operation is a big undertaking,” Black said. “You need several hundred people contacting the delegates to back up the efforts the candidate and others are making. You have to be very organized and make sure people are following through and accountable.”
Buchanan recalls the aggressive convention strategy deployed by the Reagan campaign to try to win over Ford-aligned delegates. Not a single one budged. “The spirit in the room was so pro-Reagan, it was astounding, yet we didn’t get one [delegate] to come over,” Buchanan said. “That says a great deal about Paul Manafort’s ability to know these delegates, become familiar with them and make certain they remained in the camp he needed them to be in. Paul Manafort made certain no delegate moved no matter what we did.”
In Cleveland, Manafort will find himself on the opposite side of some of his former business partners — and not for the first time, in what seems to be a small circle of delegate wranglers. In 1976, Manafort worked for Ford and Black worked for Reagan. In 1988, Manafort backed Dole and Black worked for Jack Kemp.
Black said he has not spoken to Manafort since he was tapped for the Kasich campaign and Manafort signed on with Trump. But to Black, it’s business as usual.
“We’ll be friends regardless,” Black said. “We don’t always have to be on the same side to be friends.”
==
Donald Trump Meets the Wizard of Oz
When Dorothy meets the Wizard of Oz, there is a revelation.
The Wizard, it turns out, is from Kansas (actually New Britain, Connecticut). He even helped secure the nomination for Bob Dole in 1996. Dole was an awful nominee, but it’s not about excellence, or even winning. It’s about process, the chase, the ritual of capturing the nomination, even if nothing good comes of it; and, of course, churning massive amounts of campaign cash to achieve nothing more than enshrine the Democrat opponent, meaning that year the reelection of Bill Clinton. Bob Dole’s general election campaign was miserable, but it enriched the Beltway Consultant Class, a metric that matters in Washington.
In my focus group that year, I asked panelists why they felt Dole was old. It wasn’t his age, they said: “It’s just the way he is.” And for decades, mediocrity is just the way it is for the Establishment.
In December, just a few months ago that now seem an eternity, Dole endorsed Jeb Bush. This nostalgic accolade hardly sent shock waves among the body politic. It is true Dole was a hero in World War II who has served honorably for decades. And Jeb is a man of substance and accomplishment whose candidacy, however, was a fool’s errand apparent to every simpleton, except those brilliant and savvy (and gullible) super-wealthy visionaries, who contributed the bulk of $150 million that went down the toilet.
Some of the donors were billionaires, thus a prima facie case for Bernie Sanders, but not that these people have too much influence in politics (they showed themselves to be duds), but that they obviously have money to burn.
Sadly, Jeb proved to be a prop for the insurgent Donald Trump. If Jeb were not around, Trump would have had to invent him. As for Dole, his endorsement of Jeb had the unintended consequence of losing votes for Jeb. That’s because it telegraphed conclusively that Jeb, who had been out of public office and public life for eight years before he announced for president, was mired even deeper in the past.
When the Wizard revealed himself to Dorothy, he further explained that he came to Oz in a hot-air balloon. And hot air is what brings us to the developing battle for the heart and soul of delegates en route to the momentous convention, the gathering of Republicans in Cleveland.
“My job,” the Delegate Wizard says, “is to secure and protect Mr. Trump’s nomination and that is what we will do.” And this high profile Delegate Wizard is Paul Manafort, a competent and able insider, better suited to the Stop Trump coalition, for which he might have been a match. Manafort’s first convention experience was in 1976 against the insurgent candidacy of a man named Ronald Reagan. Manafort’s background includes Washington lobbying, against which reformer Donald Trump rails.
Manafort realizes that his unique qualifications notwithstanding, his job for frontrunner Trump is, paradoxically, no cakewalk. Trump waited too long to learn that he needed Manafort, or someone like him. Manafort’s name in Italian means “strong hand.” And, per Trump folklore, we do not know the size of Manafort’s hands. But Manafort made it a point to write and edit the news release announcing his appointment as Mr. Trump’s consigliere. And he then made himself widely available to the news media, to announce that he reported directly to the candidate, though he would work collaboratively, we are supposed to believe, with the discredited campaign manager, whose public exposure has seemingly concluded, concurrently with a retroactively defined Phase One of the campaign.
That manager — Corey Lewandowski — regularly interpreted his managerial portfolio to include being the campaign’s bouncer. This was only natural because in his Walter Mitty mode, the political activist once aspired to a career in law enforcement. He is now charged not with assuming other responsibilities, but with... battery.
As for Mr. Manafort, he is sharp enough to know this: If Mr. Trump does not make it on the first ballot or come very close, it will be tough for him to win on the second ballot. And he realizes that unless Trump stops his litany of widely reported self-destructive personal attacks and offensive tweets and weird policy pronouncements, it will be hard to prevent delegate hemorrhage, let alone get converts. It is a trivial matter, but campaign operatives are not supposed to be in the news, and surely not negatively.
And speaking of news, consider the context for the Wizard, now part of the story.
When Ted Cruz spoke despairingly of “New York values,” some liberals (now called progressives) suggested that Cruz, who is known for his respect for Judaism and affection for the Jewish people, and his love of Israel and support for the Jewish state, was somehow using code words to inflame anti-Semitism. Falsely accusing Ted Cruz or anyone else of racial or religious bigotry or prejudice is reprehensible.
For months the opponents of Donald Trump have recklessly defamed him as a “fascist” or a “Hitler.” Trump may be many things, but nothing in his life’s history or his policy pronouncements suggest that his nationalism is akin to fascism, or his legitimate, though politically incorrect, concern about, say, Muslim immigrants, makes him anything remotely resembling the incarnation of pure evil that ruled the Third Reich. Even if Trump were not once Grand Marshal of New York’s Israel parade, the politically correct Anti-Defamation League should have come to his rescue.
But no one except Trump can rescue himself from his recurring incivility, questionable judgment, and imprudent outbursts. Last week Manafort sequestered his candidate, hopefully for needed R&R and policy briefings. For Trump to win the nomination, and if so, for him to have any chance to win the presidency, Trump would have to enroll in WA, Wounds Anonymous, to stop his recycled self-inflicted wounds.
Yet, in order to establish rapport with his client, Mr. Manafort seemingly has self-inflicted his own deep wound, for which he may need Urgent Care. After Ted Cruz and his team this weekend took all the Colorado delegates up for grabs, Manafort for good measure went berserk. He accused his competitors of “Gestapo tactics.”
Kayleigh McEnany is an intelligent and thoughtful advocate for Trump on CNN. She enhanced her credibility when she deplored Trump’s tweet-photo on Heidi Cruz. Days later Trump finally, if belatedly, admitted his folly. But McEnany is the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, Trump has a chattering class of flacks who never walk back any Trumpism, no matter how egregious, or apologize for any of the candidate’s behavior, no matter how offensive. Thus, it was hardly surprising that the predictable and shrill Katrina Pierson eagerly defended Manafort’s words.
In Corey Lewandowski, Trump had an agitator. Now, it was thought that with Manafort, Trump had found stability. But then, this.
Perhaps Manafort did not spend enough time with his client of yesteryear, Bob Dole of WWII vintage. Dole would have explained that the Geheime Statspolizei, known more commonly as the Gestapo, were the Nazi secret police created by Hermann Goering. The Gestapo played a major role in Hitler’s “Final Solution” to exterminate Jews. If you want the gruesome details of what constitute Gestapo tactics, do a Google search.
In short, Manafort is not merely engaging in hyperbole.
He is off the charts.
Appeared earlier:
http://spectator.org/articles/66023/donald-trump-meets-wizard-oz
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Mystery man: Ukraine's U.S. political fixer :{By: Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman March 5, 2014 05:01 AM EDT}: |
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His friends once called him the Count of Monte Cristo. Today, Paul Manafort is more like The Invisible Man — a worldly political pro whose latest adventure, whispering in the ear of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, has handed him a supporting role in a bona fide international crisis. Over three decades in Washington, Manafort built a storied career as a Beltway man of mystery: a famously discreet operative who worked for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, steered the 1996 GOP convention and built not one but two white-shoe D.C. lobbying shops, a pair of firms that bore Manafort’s name and catered to an eclectic stable of clients including anti-communist Angolan rebels and Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines. Then, Manafort all but vanished from the Washington scene. (PHOTOS: American political consultants in Ukraine) Once-intimate colleagues say they have not seen Manafort, 64, in years and hear from him only in occasional email missives. His most recent firm, Davis Manafort, functionally broke up shortly after the 2008 presidential election. As that campaign was unfolding in the United States, the notorious political fixer emerged overseas, playing a familiar role in an unfamiliar place: advising Yanukovych, the pro-Russian strongman whose ouster last month has triggered an international crisis reminiscent of a Cold War spy novel. On Monday, as Russian gunships menaced the Ukrainian fleet in the Black Sea, Manafort’s former business partner Roger Stone sent out an email to a small group of friends asking wryly: “Where is Paul Manafort?” A multiple-choice list of options followed, including: “Was seen chauffeuring Yanukovych around Moscow,” and “Was seen loading gold bullion on an Army Transport plane from a remote airstrip outside Kiev and taking off seconds before a mob arrived at the site.” The final option was: “Is playing Golf in Palm Beach.” (Also on POLITICO: What the White House is thinking on Ukraine) The answer to Stone’s query is currently unclear. Manafort’s current location and involvement in Ukraine, not surprisingly, are a mystery. He did not respond to messages sent to half a dozen email accounts or answer calls to nearly as many phone numbers at addresses in Virginia and South Florida. What’s already certain is this: Even among the many American strategists who test their fortunes abroad, Manafort’s journey from the front lines of the Reagan revolution to the right hand of a Moscow-backed Eastern bloc pol straight out of central casting ranks as one of the more unusual escapades of the Washington consulting class. To past associates of Manafort, it comes as little surprise that he would be tied into tumult half a world away. “We fondly used to refer to him as ‘The Count’ — ‘The Count of Monte Cristo.’ It was just the whole air about him,” recalled Scott Reed, who managed Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Another Manafort colleague said the nickname came from Manafort’s penchant for swirling his coat around his shoulders dramatically. Manafort’s friends describe his relationship with Yanukovych as a political love connection, born out of Yanukovych’s first downfall when he was driven from power by the 2004 Orange Revolution. Feeling that his domestic political advisers had failed him, Yanukovych turned to a foreign company, Davis Manafort, which was already doing work for the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. The former Ukrainian PM and Manafort, the Georgetown-educated son of a Connecticut politician, hit it off. Manafort’s firm had a set of international clients and produced an analysis of the Orange Revolution that Yanukovych found instructive, according to one operative involved in Yanukovych’s political rehabilitation. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites and managing teams of consultants and attorneys in both Ukraine and the United States ahead of an anticipated Yanukovych comeback. While it’s difficult to track payments in foreign elections, a former associate familiar with Manafort’s earnings say they ran into the seven figures over several years. After Yanukovych’s 2010 victory, Manafort stayed on as an adviser to the Russia-friendly president and became involved in other business projects in Eastern Europe. In 2012, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft told the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda that he had met with Manafort, though he declined to elaborate on the American’s role there. (On POLITICO Magazine: The steel in President Obama's spine) Several consultants who worked with Manafort during the Yanukovych election say the Republican truly believed in the now-deposed politician’s capabilities as a leader and doubted that his competitors — widely seen as more pro-Western — had more productive aspirations for the country. To view foreign political schisms less in terms of ideology than pure power politics would be characteristic, Manafort’s colleagues say, of such an experienced political mercenary — a deliberately secretive man who was advising Ferdinand Marcos a decade before Yanukovych even entered politics in the mid-1990s. “Paul is a very, very smart and experienced political strategist,” said Charlie Black, the veteran Republican consigliere who co-founded the lobbying firm Black, Manafort and Stone in 1980. “I do know that Yanukovych kept him around as an adviser, so he must have thought he had done a good job for him.” (Also on POLITICO: Putin: U.S. doing lab rat experiments) When Black and Manafort worked together, the Yanukovych booster was no stranger to controversy. In 1989, Manafort was hauled in front of a congressional panel for allegedly working to steer funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development into a slum-like New Jersey real estate development. Manafort, caused a stir then on the Hill with a tart defense of his profession. “You might call it influence-peddling,” he said, according to reports. “I call it lobbying.” Stone, another named partner of the long since disbanded firm, described his former collaborator as “charming, entertaining, well-tailored and he certainly understands power and how it works.” And Stone would know: Manafort, helped run Stone’s campaign to lead the Young Republicans. “Yanukovych came to power through a series of elections and would never have won without Manafort’s counsel,” Stone said. “After all, what do Russian political consultants know about democratic elections?” In contemporary reports on the 2010 Ukrainian election, Manafort declined to discuss the specifics of his work for Yanukovych. Consultants who worked with him on the race described him as a “hands-on” manager with a sharp sense of how to communicate the Yanukovych message. He brought on other American politicos, including Democratic ad man Tad Devine and the public relations giant Edelman, to bolster his efforts both in Ukraine and internationally.” A 2008 disclosure form filed by Edelman under the Foreign Agents Registration Act described the Yanukovych team’s determination to “share [Yanukovych’s] vision for Ukraine, his reform slated for 2008, his accomplishments in economic development as well as Ukraine’s business development.” The PR firm earned $35,000 a month for its services. Devine, who cut ties with the Ukrainian leader after his election, said Manafort was obsessively focused on the race. “There was no hour of the day or night when he was not available to respond to an email,” Devine said. Another Manafort friend described his drive as “maniacal.” And one operative closely involved in Ukraine emphasized that what may have started as a straightforward business transaction between Davis Manafort and Yanukovych grew into a “real and close relationship” between Manafort and his candidate over the course of the election. “Manafort really believed that Yanukovych had what was in the best interest of Ukraine at heart,” the operative said, adding that Manafort’s influence ruffled some feathers among other strategists in the Yanukovych camp. “Just from a purely business perspective, the political consultants that were from Russia were in no way, shape or form allies of Manafort.” Indeed, if dozens of top-flight American consultants dabble in lucrative foreign elections, Manafort seems to have gone native — think Colonel Kurtz — in a way that unsettled even his close allies. By the end of the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, the partnership between Manafort and Yanukovych had effectively triggered Davis Manafort’s disintegration. On paper, Davis Manafort still exists as a company registered in Delaware. In practice, Manafort and his business partner, Rick Davis, have not worked together for years. That’s because even before the Yanukovych campaign revved up, Davis had signed on to manage Arizona Sen. John McCain’s bid for the White House. Manafort attended a handful of meetings for a McCain 2008 advisory council, according to one Republican involved in the race — but when Manafort expressed interest in chairing the 2008 convention and reprising the role he played in 1996, he was firmly rebuffed. With lobbying already toxic in U.S. politics, the last thing Republicans needed was an international hired gun as their event planner. Davis declined to comment on his association with Manafort. In 2010, he quietly joined the private equity fund Pegasus Capital Advisers, where he now serves as COO. The same year, in late February, Pravda published a photo of Manafort in a story about Yanukovych’s installation as president. The caption described Manafort as “in a hurry on the inauguration of his client.” At the inauguration, Manafort was greeted with a kiss on the cheek by Akhmetov, the tycoon who introduced him to Yanukovych in the first place, according to one observer. Associates say Davis and Manafort are not in touch. The listed phone number for Davis Manafort has been disconnected. “After they separated, Rick moved on to a successful partnership at a private equity [company] and has left Washington and Manafort in his rear-view mirror,” said Reed, the former Dole adviser. While Manafort has not publicly surfaced — in the United States or abroad — since Yanukovych was forced out of office in late February, traces of his presence in Ukraine have. Ukrainian journalist Sergii Leshchenko, who was among the journalists who sifted through records in Yanukovych’s lavish estate outside Kiev last week, said he turned up a Davis Manafort business card for a former employee who has since moved to another PR firm. Leshchenko — who met with Manafort in 2007 in Davos, where he had accompanied Yanukovych for a conference — said the American counselor was viewed with some suspicion in Ukraine. Asked then about the nature of his work, Manafort was evasive. “He wouldn’t answer, Leshchenko said. Americans for Tax Reform president Grover Norquist, who in the 1980s worked with the Angolan rebel group that retained Black, Manafort and Stone, recalled that even then Manafort had some of the makings of an international adventurer. “Unlike the other guys in Black, Manafort and Stone-world, he was consistently interested in foreign policy,” Norquist said. “He showed up in foreign policy talks, party-to-party work with Britain, Europe, etc., and I would see him in that zone. Bright. Hardworking.” Norquist added: “I have not seen him in many years now.” Kenneth P. Vogel contributed to this report. |
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http://www.newsweek.com/mccains-convention-chair-worked-burmas-junta-90151
After John McCain nailed down the Republican nomination in March, his campaign began wrestling with a sensitive personnel issue: who would manage this summer's GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.? The campaign recently tapped Doug Goodyear for the job, a veteran operative and Arizonan who was chosen for his "management experience and expertise," according to McCain press secretary Jill Hazelbaker. But some allies worry that Goodyear's selection could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists.Goodyear is CEO of DCI Group, a consulting firm that earned $3 million last year lobbying for ExxonMobil, General Motors and other clients.
Potentially more problematic: the firm was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma's military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today. Justice Department lobbying records show DCI pushed to "begin a dialogue of political reconciliation" with the regime. It also led a PR campaign to burnish the junta's image, drafting releases praising Burma's efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing "falsehoods" by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses. "It was our only foreign representation, it was for a short tenure, and it was six years ago," Goodyear told NEWSWEEK, adding the junta's record in the current cyclone crisis is "reprehensible."
Another issue: DCI has been a pioneer in running "independent" expenditure campaigns by so–called 527 groups, precisely the kind of operations that McCain, in his battle for campaign-finance reform, has denounced. In 2004, the DCI Group led a pro-Bush 527 called Progress for America, which was later fined (along with several other 527s on both sides of the political divide) for violating federal election laws. Goodyear, however, says that DCI is "not in the 527 business anymore."
Ironically, Goodyear was chosen for the post after the McCain campaign nixed another candidate, Paul Manafort, who runs a lobbying firm with McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis. The prospect of choosing Manafort created anxiety in the campaign because of his long history of representing controversial foreign clients, including Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. More recently, he served as chief political consultant to Viktor Yanukovich, the former Ukrainian prime minister who has been widely criticized for alleged corruption and for his close ties to Russia's Vladimir Putin—a potential embarrassment for McCain, who in 2007 called Putin a "totalitarian dictator." "The Ukrainian stuff was viewed as too much," says one McCain strategist, who asked not to be identified discussing the matter. Manafort did not return calls for comment.
Editor's Note: Not long after Newsweek published this item, McCain's convention manager resigned.
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Paul J. Manafort, Jr.
"The President today [1981] announced his intention to nominate Paul J. Manafort, Jr., to be a member of the Board of Directors of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, United States International Development Cooperation Agency.
"Mr. Manafort is currently a partner with the firm of Black, Manafort & Stone, specializing in government relations, public affairs, and political consulting. He was personnel coordinator, Office of Executive Management, during the transition period. In 1978-80 he was southern coordinator, Reagan for President Committee, and deputy political director, Republican National Committee. In 1977-80 Mr. Manafort was an attorney with the firm of Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease in Washington, D.C. He was Associate Director of the Presidential Personnel Office at the White House in 1975-77. In 1976 he served as a delegate-hunt coordinator for eight States for the President Ford Committee. In 1974-75 he was general counsel and executive officer of Family Realty.
M"r. Manafort was graduated from Georgetown University (B.S., B.A., 1971) and Georgetown University Law School (J.D., 1974).
"Mr. Manafort is married and resides in Alexandria, Va. He was born in New Britain, Conn., on April 1, 1949." [1]
- Former Director (1985), Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions
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