Paul Manafort

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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 27, 2017 5:44 am

and that means people above him are also

Jerky » Wed Dec 27, 2017 4:16 am wrote:Oh man oh man... the Thot Plickens!!!

Manafort is ManaFUCKED.

J
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 03, 2018 3:59 pm

Trump ex-Campaign Chair Manafort sues Mueller, Rosenstein, and Department of Justice

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has sued special counsel Robert Mueller, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and the U.S. Department of Justice, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.

Manafort was indicted Oct. 27 on 12 counts related to unlawful financial dealings.

This story is breaking. Check back for updates.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/03/trump-e ... stice.html



PAUL MANAFORT HAS CONDUCTED HIS OLEG DERIPASKA DALLIANCE ON PRISM PROVIDER GOOGLE’S SERVERS

January 3, 2018/5 Comments/in Mueller Probe /by empty wheel

The government just docketed this declaration pertaining to its accusation that Paul Manafort contributed to an op-ed defending his actions in violation of the judge’s prohibition on trying his case in public.

The substance of the declaration (and another copy of the op-ed showing track changes) is interesting enough. But I’m most interested in this:



While Manafort is using a company email (DMP International, LLC), his interlocutor, Konstantin Kilimnik, the guy through whom Manafort was offering to provide private briefings on the Trump campaign to Russian oligarch (and former Manafort client to whom he still owed millions) Oleg Deripaska, is using GMail.

Particularly once the government developed counterintelligence concerns about Paul Manafort (but probably his ties to powerful Russians are sufficient in any case), Kilimnik is easily targetable under Section 702. While I’m sure they’ve got Deripaska wired up in a slew of other ways, NSA can collect this email just by asking Google nicely. And once it opened a full investigation into Manafort, the FBI has been able to get whatever NSA gets in raw form.

That means, among other things, that Kilimnik (and, I assume, Deripaska) want this to be discovered. Perhaps that’s arrogance, a belief that somehow Manafort will remain untouchable by Mueller for the more substantive coordination between him and Russia. Or perhaps Deripaska is just happy to let Manafort be exposed for what he is.

Whatever it is, when obvious Russian targets use PRISM providers, they’re just inviting easy scrutiny.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/01/03/p ... providers/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jan 05, 2018 8:20 pm

Paul Manafort's Ukrainian billionaire lobbying client and Yanukovich-backer just had his assets frozen in Cyprus over a telecom dispute.

Court freezes $820m of Ukrainian oligarch’s assets

Case centres on Rinat Akhmetov’s dispute with rival over telecoms company

Rinat Akhmetov is estimated by Forbes to have a fortune of $4.6bn © AFP
Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man, has been served with an order from a Cyprus court freezing $820m of his assets in a long-running legal dispute with a rival over the country’s biggest fixed-line telecoms group.

Mr Akhmetov, estimated by Forbes magazine last year to have a fortune of $4.6bn, has assets spanning coal, steel, energy and telecoms, as well as Shakhtar Donetsk, the Uefa Champions League football club.

Assets potentially affected by the freeze include an apartment in London’s One Hyde Park development in Knightsbridge. When it was bought, that property was the most expensive private residence in the UK.

The Cyprus ruling means that three out of Ukraine’s five richest oligarchs now have asset freezes of varying sizes in place against them. In an unrelated case last month, the High Court in London granted an order to freeze more than $2.5bn of assets belonging to Igor Kolomoisky and Gennady Bogolyubov, linked to the near-collapse of PrivatBank, Ukraine’s biggest commercial lender which they then owned, in 2016.

The interests of Ukraine’s powerful oligarchs are being challenged by disputes and investigations, as well as the economic downturn since Ukraine’s pro-democracy revolution in 2014 that toppled Viktor Yanukovich and led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.

The decision by the District Court of Nicosia related to Mr Akhmetov and nine other parties was made on December 27. A copy was provided to the Financial Times by Raga Establishment, the claimant.

Raga, which is owned by Denis Gorbunenko, a former Ukrainian banker, has been pursuing Mr Akhmetov and others seeking full payment for the sale of the fixed-line telecoms group Ukrtelecom. Raga said it sold Ukrtelecom to Mr Akhmetov for $860m in 2013, with Mr Akhmetov paying $100m upfront but nothing since.

Under the freeze order, Mr Akhmetov and other respondents are free to deal with their property so long as assets worth at least $820.5m — the amount sought by Raga in the litigation — are preserved and certain large transactions are notified to Raga in advance.

Raga won an award at the London Court of International Arbitration against Mr Akhmetov’s company, SCM Financial Overseas, in June last year based on a parallel claim.

Mr Akhmetov has the right to appeal against the asset freeze on January 8.

Mr Akhmetov’s businesses declined to comment on the order or on the allegations. Contacted about the dispute with Raga last month, a representative said no comment would be made because “various legal proceedings in this matter are still pending”.

It was not immediately clear how the asset freeze might affect Mr Akhmetov’s rights over Ukrtelecom. His ownership of the former state telecoms group is being challenged by Ukraine’s government, which is seeking through the courts to renationalise the company on the grounds that initial privatisation obligations have not been upheld.

The case also potentially affects the interests of another Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitry Firtash, now in exile in Austria awaiting possible extradition to the US on corruption charges that he has described as trumped up. His company, Group DF, is owed $300m by Raga, according to Mr Gorbunenko, after having partially financed the initial privatisation of Ukrtelecom in 2011.

Asked if Group DF was a creditor to Raga and to the initial privatisation of Ukrtelecom, the group declined to comment because “the legal process is still ongoing”.

Ukrtelecom was privatised through a tender in 2011, when it was sold to the Vienna-based Epic investment group for $1.3bn.

At the time, Mr Akhmetov and Mr Firtash were political backers of Mr Yanukovich, then Ukraine’s Moscow-friendly president.

The involvement of Yanukovich-linked oligarchs in the initial Ukrtelecom privatisation was long suspected by industry insiders but information has only surfaced as a result of Raga’s claim.

Mr Gorbunenko purchased Raga, which owned the rights to Ukrtelecom, from Epic in 2013. But the London arbitration ruling from June 2017 stated it was SCM’s case that discussions about Mr Akhmetov’s purchase of an Ukrtelecom stake began in August 2012 at “the request” of Mr Yanukovich.

After Kiev’s appellate business court upheld a lower court’s ruling last month that Ukrtelecom be nationalised, Mr Akhmetov’s SCM Group said it would appeal against the decision and take “all procedural steps to protect our rights”.
https://www.ft.com/content/1a92bacc-f15 ... c3086a2625
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Jan 10, 2018 10:04 pm

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska used details from Mueller's indictment in a new lawsuit against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates

3h 2,046
Paul Manafort Former Donald Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort looks on during Game Four of the American League Championship Series at Yankee Stadium on October 17, 2017 in the Bronx borough of New York City. Elsa/Getty Images

Wealthy Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his associate, Rick Gates, alleging that they defrauded Deripaska's company.
The lawsuit relied, in part, on details included in special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment against the two men.
Manafort came under renewed scrutiny last year after The Atlantic published emails that appeared to show him using his elevated role in the Trump campaign to resolve the dispute with Deripaska.
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska filed a lawsuit Wednesday against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, alleging that Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, "vanished" $18.9 million that Deripaska's company gave to them to invest in a failed Ukrainian TV venture, called the "Black Sea Cable," in 2008.

The complaint was filed in a New York state court and is not the first time Deripaska has sued Manafort. His representatives also made similar claims in legal complaints filed in the Cayman Islands in 2014 and Virginia in 2015.

Per the lawsuit, Deripaska's company, Surf Horizon Ltd., gave Manafort and Gates nearly $19 million to purchase Black Sea Cable. As the economy dipped into a recession in the late 2000s, Surf recommended that Manafort and Gates sell Black Sea Cable, which they agreed to.

However, the complaint said, Manafort and Gates "took no steps to find a buyer for Black Sea Cable." After Surf repeatedly asked about the status of the investment, Gates said in an email that "efforts to sell Black Sea Cable were still underway."

Later, Deripaska learned that Surf did not own Black Sea Cable through the joint venture with Manafort and Gates, and "Surf had no knowledge that Black Sea Cable had been sold or transferred to another party."

The lawsuit relied, in part, on allegations that were outlined in special counsel Robert Mueller's office's indictment against Manafort and Gates, which was unsealed in late October.

Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty to 12 counts including money laundering, tax fraud, failure to register as foreign agents, and conspiracy against the US.

The indictment, Deripaska's lawsuit said, "provides detail regarding movement of funds from bank accounts in Cyprus to accounts in the United States controlled by Manafort and Gates."

"The dealings of Manafort and Gates with Surf mirror the pattern of corporate dealings alleged in the indictment," it continued.

Deripaska's company is seeking over $25 million in damages.

Last October, The Atlantic published several emails that appeared to show Manafort using his elevated role in the Trump campaign to resolve the dispute with Deripaska.

Manafort reportedly wrote an email to his associate, Russian-Ukrainian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, offering to give Deripaska "private briefings" about the campaign.

"I assume you have shown our friends my media coverage, right?" Manafort reportedly wrote to Kilimnik, who has suspected ties to Russian intelligence.

"Absolutely," replied Kilimnik. "Every article."

"How do we use to get whole," Manafort responded. "Has OVD operation seen?"

Former intelligence officials told Business Insider last year that Manafort was likely trying to repay his debt to Deripaska. Investigators have concluded that "OVD" was a reference to his full name: Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska.

Kilimnik reportedly told Manafort in a later email that he had been "sending everything to Victor, who has been forwarding the coverage directly to OVD." Victor was a senior aide to Deripaska, according to The Atlantic.

Deripaska and Manafort worked together in 2006 as well, when Deripaska signed a $10 million annual contract with Manafort for a lobbying project in the US that Manafort said would "greatly benefit the [Vladimir] Putin Government."
http://www.businessinsider.com/oleg-der ... ent-2018-1





Russian tycoon sues former Trump campaign manager Manafort


The billionaire Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska filed suit in New York State Court Wednesday against President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul J. Manafort and his partner Rick Gates, claiming the two had defrauded him of $18.9 million.

The case was filed by Surf Horizon, a firm controlled by Deripaska. It alleged that Manafort and Gates had used as “their personal piggy banks” a web of partnerships financed with funds invested by Deripaska in 2007 and 2008.

The lawsuit refers often to the indictment brought against Manafort and Gates by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The lawsuit said that “the dealings of Manafort and Gates with Surf mirror the pattern of corporate dealings alleged in the Indictment” and that the special counsel’s case “provided further support” for the allegations.

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Deripaska also says that bank records obtained May 2017 in a Cyprus lawsuit showed that Manafort and Gates moved funds in and out of accounts “without any apparent business reason, but ultimately making payments of millions of dollars to them individually or to their personal vendors or creditors.”

Surf Horizon also alleges that Manafort and Gates gave false testimony in the Cyprus case.

The lawsuit asks for legal fees, $1.1 million in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.

A similar case was filed in the Cayman Islands in 2014.

“We are surprised by this filing,” said Jason Maloni, president of public relations firm JadeRoq and a spokesman for Manafort. “This is a commercial matter which we thought had been addressed and resolved years ago. We will respond, if we must do so, in the appropriate manner.”

Gates could not be reached for comment.

Manafort and Gates in 2006 had wooed Deripaska to invest in a $200 million fund to make private equity deals, primarily in Russia and Ukraine. Manafort and Gates formed a Cayman Islands partnership called Pericles Emerging Market Partners. Deripaska knew Gates, who had helped arrange meetings for him with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). He invested $18.9 million through Surf Horizon and paid $7.35 million in management fees.

However, the lawsuit says, there were no other investors and the fund’s sole investment was a Ukrainian cable TV station called Black Sea Cable. It adds that Manafort and Gates overstated the cost of the station. The suit says that Manafort and Gates “had siphoned for themselves millions of dollars.”

During the 2008 credit crunch, Deripaska had asked for his money back but never received any of it.

The suit adds that Manafort and Gates “grossly” mismanaged the investment, “resulting in a total loss of the amount invested.”

Surf Horizon said that it wasn’t until one of its affiliates, Adoptol, filed a proceeding in Cyprus that it obtained the partnership records it sought from Manafort and Gates. Those records, it said, “provided proof for the first time that Manafort and Gates had defrauded Surf.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business ... 929c687933
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 25, 2018 10:15 am

Why did Manafort’s defense lawyers leak an internal memo about the ‘DOJ and the press’?
Bob Brigham BOB BRIGHAM
24 JAN 2018 AT 22:25 ET

Lawyers for former Donald Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort released an internal memo against the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller, Law and Crime reported Wednesday.

The document, titled, “DOJ [Department of Justice], OSC [Office of Special Counsel] and The Press” reportedly focused on Associated Press coverage of the Ukrainian “black ledger” of payments.

“Because the notes are so cryptic, it’s a bit hard to interpret what exactly the Manafort lawyers are after,” Law and Crime explained. “However, the Manafort team seems to be trying to figure out (or at least document) who was giving information to the Associated Press about Manafort’s finances.”

The question of whether the internal memo was inadvertently or intentionally released has been a matter of online speculation.

Former West Wing star Bradley Whitford, portraying defense attorney Albert Forest on the NBC show Chicago Justice, used a similar trick in the episode titled “Fake.”
https://www.rawstory.com/2018/01/manafo ... doj-press/


Image


Paul Manafort’s lawyers just accidentally released his Trump Russia PR strategy memo
BY GRANT STERN
PUBLISHED ON JANUARY 25, 2018


Paul Manafort’s lawyers just revealed confidential notes about his team’s public relations strategy which confirms the Associated Press’ bombshell story that knocked him out of the Trump Campaign.

Manafort’s notes indicate that damning evidence of secret payments from Ukraine’s pro-Putin Party of Regions was acquired by the AP via a whistleblower, who since has delivered the data to Special Counsel Mueller’s probe responding to a search warrant. Manafort’s notes seem to validate the AP’s well-placed, whistleblower source, inside his Ukrainian political consulting company.

Rachel Maddow revealed Manafort’s memo on her MSNBC program without explanation, but careful examination of the contents downloaded from the federal court docket reveals the AP’s big scoop and confirms the utmost importance of their prior stories:

Amazingly, lawyers for the accused ex-Trump Campaign Chairman revealed that a third Kremlin-linked oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, whose relationship has only been scarcely reported, was also paying Paul Manafort to work for the pro-Putin Party of Regions.



Akhmetov hiring Manafort is significant because he is the wealthiest man in Ukraine.

Just after the election campaign, Manafort’s consultancy deal with Rinat Akhmetov was highlighted in the Democratic Coalition’s Dworkin Report about Trump’s direct ties to Russia and the Kremlin, which was delivered to the White House. Dworkin’s report unearthed the only known photo of the two men together that’s available on the internet today.


Paul Manafort and his pro-Putin oligarch client Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s wealthiest man. Source: The Dworkin Report
Manafort’s notes reveal the existence of two previously unknown memos between Rinat Akhmetov and the wealthiest oligarch in Ukraine and Paul Manafort detail his political work for the Party of Regions starting in 2005.



The existence of secret memos between Manafort and Akhmetov is significant because Manafort has been charged with laundering payments from the foreign political party in order to avoid registering as a foreign agent of influence for a second, heretofore unknown, pro-Putin Ukrainian oligarch.

Manafort’s lawyers confirm, that the AP has those two memos.

Today’s notes about Paul Manafort’s spokesman also reveal a major tactical error in the criminal case when his PR flack took copies of the crucial documents from the AP to verify them, which exposed the records to Mueller’s search warrant.



Pre-election reporting by Politifact only revealed that Paul Manafort worked for Akhmetov as a business consultant. His political work has been ascribed mainly to his relationship with Dimitry Firtash, an oligarch currently detained in Austria, awaiting extradition to America on federal bribery charges.

In August 2016, the AP revealed Manafort’s dark past as an unregistered foreign agent of the Party of Regions without explaining which oligarchs for whom he worked.

Those public revelations spurred Manafort to abandon his formal role in the Trump Campaign.

In March 2017, Manafort’s secret deal with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska for $10 million per year to promote his good friend Vladimir Putin’s interests in America was revealed by the AP.

Then in April 2017, Ukrainian journalist turned lawmaker Serhiy Leshenko revealed the “black ledger” which has become subject to Special Counsel Mueller’s initial indictment last October. The AP reported:

Donald Trump’s campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.

The revelation, provided to The Associated Press by people directly knowledgeable about the effort, comes at a time when Trump has faced criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It also casts new light on the business practices of campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department. A violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.


The story of that ledger showed part of Manafort’s scheme to hide his lobbying activities for Dymtro Firtash, a gas baron who ran the company RusUkrEnergo that Putin created to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars directly from Russian state-owned gas company Gazprom and the Party of Regions.

The Trump Campaign Chairman’s private PR strategy notes indicate that AP reporters obtained information far in excess of what the Special Counsel previously held.

Expect a new bombshell report from the Associated Press about Paul Manafort’s furtive foreign lobbying business now that we’ve got confirmation from inside his legal team about the quality of their sources.
http://washingtonpress.com/2018/01/25/p ... tegy-memo/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 28, 2018 9:45 pm

The Plot Against America

Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

Franklin Foer

Mark Peterson / Redux
I. The Wisdom of Friends

The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.

His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.

Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands.

Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her “wedding weekend kick off” party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.

He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his offshore accounts; an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in Ukraine had begun not long after Yanukovych’s fall. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska had been after Manafort to explain what had happened to an $18.9 million investment in a Ukrainian company that Manafort had claimed to have made on his behalf.

Manafort had known Deripaska for years, so he surely understood the oligarch’s history. Deripaska had won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called aluminum wars of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry. In 2006, the U.S. State Department had revoked Deripaska’s visa, reportedly out of concern over his ties to organized crime (which he has denied). Despite Deripaska’s reputation, or perhaps because of it, Manafort had been dodging the oligarch’s attempts to contact him. As Deripaska’s lawyers informed a court in 2014 while attempting to claw back their client’s money, “It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared.”

Nine months after the Ukrainian revolution, Manafort’s family life also went into crisis. The nature of his home life can be observed in detail because Andrea’s text messages were obtained last year by a “hacktivist collective”—most likely Ukrainians furious with Manafort’s meddling in their country—which posted the purloined material on the dark web. The texts extend over four years (2012–16) and 6 million words. Manafort has previously confirmed that his daughter’s phone was hacked and acknowledged the authenticity of some texts quoted by Politico and The New York Times. Manafort and Andrea both declined to comment on this article. Jessica could not be reached for comment.

Collectively, the texts show a sometimes fraught series of relationships, by turns loving and manipulative. Manafort was generous with his family financially—he’d invested millions in Jessica’s film projects, and millions more in her now-ex-husband’s real-estate ventures. But when he called home in tears or threatened suicide in the spring of 2015, he was pleading for his marriage. The previous November, as the cache of texts shows, his daughters had caught him in an affair with a woman more than 30 years his junior. It was an expensive relationship. According to the text messages, Manafort had rented his mistress a $9,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons, not far from his own. He had handed her an American Express card, which she’d used to good effect. “I only go to luxury restaurants,” she once declared on a friend’s fledgling podcast, speaking expansively about her photo posts on social media: caviar, lobster, haute cuisine.

The affair had been an unexpected revelation. Manafort had nursed his wife after a horseback-riding accident had nearly killed her in 1997. “I always marveled at how patient and devoted he was with her during that time,” an old friend of Manafort’s told me. But after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters. Manafort had committed to couples therapy but, the texts reveal, that hadn’t prevented him from continuing his affair. Because he clumsily obscured his infidelity—and because his mistress posted about their travels on Instagram—his family caught him again, six months later. He entered the clinic in Arizona soon after, according to Andrea’s texts. “My dad,” she wrote, “is in the middle of a massive emotional breakdown.”

By the early months of 2016, Manafort was back in greater Washington, his main residence and the place where he’d begun his career as a political consultant and lobbyist. But his attempts at rehabilitation—of his family life, his career, his sense of self-worth—continued. He began to make a different set of calls. As he watched the U.S. presidential campaign take an unlikely turn, he saw an opportunity, and he badly wanted in. He wrote Donald Trump a crisp memo listing all the reasons he would be an ideal campaign consigliere—and then implored mutual friends to tout his skills to the ascendant candidate.

Shortly before the announcement of his job inside Trump’s campaign, Manafort touched base with former colleagues to let them know of his professional return. He exuded his characteristic confidence, but they surprised him with doubts and worries. Throughout his long career, Manafort had advised powerful men—U.S. senators and foreign supreme commanders, imposing generals and presidents-for-life. He’d learned how to soothe them, how to bend their intransigent wills with his calmly delivered, diligently researched arguments. But Manafort simply couldn’t accept the wisdom of his friends, advice that he surely would have dispensed to anyone with a history like his own—the imperative to shy away from unnecessary attention.

His friends, like all Republican political operatives of a certain age, could recite the legend of Paul Manafort, which they did with fascination, envy, and occasional disdain. When Manafort had arrived in Washington in the 1970s, the place reveled in its shabby glories, most notably a self-satisfied sense of high duty. Wealth came in the form of Georgetown mansions, with their antique imperfections and worn rugs projecting power so certain of itself, it needn’t shout. But that old boarding-school establishment wasn’t Manafort’s style. As he made a name for himself, he began to dress differently than the Brooks Brothers crowd on K Street, more European, with funky, colorful blazers and collarless shirts. If he entertained the notion, say, of moving his backyard swimming pool a few feet, nothing stopped him from the expense. Colleagues, amused by his sartorial quirks and his cosmopolitan lifestyle, referred to him as “the Count of Monte Cristo.”

His acts of rebellion were not merely aesthetic. Manafort rewrote the rules of his adopted city. In the early ’80s, he created a consulting firm that ignored the conventions that had previously governed lobbying. When it came to taking on new clients, he was uninhibited by moral limits. In 2016, his friends might not have known the specifics of his Cyprus accounts, all the alleged off-the-books payments to him captured in Cyrillic ledgers in Kiev. But they knew enough to believe that he could never sustain the exposure that comes with running a presidential campaign in the age of opposition research and aggressive media. “The risks couldn’t have been more obvious,” one friend who attempted to dissuade him from the job told me. But in his frayed state, these warnings failed to register.

When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures didn’t just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the character of a man who would very likely commandeer the campaign to serve his own interests, with little concern for the collective consequences.

Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.

II. The Young Man and His Machine

In the spring of 1977, a 28-year-old Paul Manafort sat at a folding table in a hotel suite in Memphis. Photos from that time show him with a Tom Selleck mustache and meaningful sideburns. He was surrounded by phones that he’d specially installed for the weekend. The desk held his copious binders, which he called “whip books.” Eight hundred delegates had gathered to elect a new leader of the Young Republicans organization, and Manafort, a budding kingmaker, had compiled a dossier on each one. Those whip books provided the basis for deal making. To wheedle and cajole delegates, it helped to have an idea of what job they wanted in return for their support.

Control over the Young Republicans—a political and social network for professionals ages 18 to 40—was a genuine prize in those days. Presidential hopefuls sought to harness the group. This was still the era of brokered presidential conventions, and Young Republicans could descend in numbers sufficient to dominate the state meetings that selected delegates. In 1964, the group’s efforts had arguably secured Barry Goldwater the GOP nomination; by the ’70s every Republican aspirant understood its potency. The attention paid by party elders yielded opportunities for Young Republican leaders. Patronage flowed in their direction. To seize the organization was to come into possession of a baby Tammany.

In Memphis, Manafort was working on behalf of his friend Roger Stone, now best known as a pioneer in opposition research and a promiscuous purveyor of conspiracy theories. He managed Stone’s candidacy for chairman of the group. Stone, then 24, reveled in the fact that he’d received his political education during Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972; he even admitted to playing dirty tricks to benefit his idol. Stone and Manafort had met through College Republicans. They shared a home state, an affection for finely tailored power suits, and a deeper love of power itself. Together, they campaigned with gleeful ruthlessness.

Even at this early stage in his career, Manafort had acquired a remarkable skill for managing a gathering of great size. He knew how to command an army of loyalists, who took his orders via walkie-talkie. And he knew how to put on a show. In Memphis that year, he rented a Mississippi River paddleboat for a booze cruise and dispatched his whips to work over wavering delegates within its floating confines. To the Young Republican elite, the faction Manafort controlled carried a name that conveyed his expectation of unfailing loyalty: the Team. And in the face of the Team’s prowess, Stone’s rival eventually quit the race, mid-convention. “It’s all been scripted in the back room,” he complained.

Manafort had been bred for politics. While he was in high school, his father, Paul Manafort Sr., became the mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, and Manafort Jr. gravitated toward the action—joining a mock city council, campaigning for the gubernatorial candidate Thomas Meskill as part of his Kiddie Corps. For college and law school, he chose Georgetown University, a taxi ride from the big time.

In the ’70s, the big time was embodied by James A. Baker III, the shrewdest Republican insider of his generation. During the epic Republican National Convention of 1976, Manafort holed up with Baker in a trailer outside the Kemper Arena, in Kansas City, Missouri. They attempted to protect Gerald Ford’s renomination bid in the face of Ronald Reagan’s energetic challenge; Manafort wrangled delegates on Baker’s behalf. From Baker, he learned the art of ostentatious humility, how to use the knife to butter up and then stab in the back. “He was studying at the feet of the master,” Jeff Bell, a Reagan campaign aide, remembers.

By the late ’70s, Manafort and Stone could foresee Ronald Reagan’s ascendance, and both intended to become players in his 1980 campaign. For Manafort, this was an audacious volte-face. By flipping his allegiance from the former Ford faction, he provoked suspicion among conservatives, who viewed him as a rank opportunist. There was little denying that the Young Republicans made an ideal vehicle for his ambitions.

Manafort, Stone, and Atwater in 1985
Paul Manafort (left), Roger Stone (center), and Lee Atwater (right) in 1985. Their efforts helped transform how Washington works. (Harry Naltchayan / The Washington Post / Getty)
These ambitions left a trail of damage, including an Alabama lawyer named Neal Acker. During the Memphis convention, Acker had served as a loyal foot soldier on the Team, organizing the southern delegates on Stone’s behalf. In return, Manafort and Stone had promised to throw the Team behind Acker’s campaign to replace Stone as the head of the Young Republicans two years later, in 1979. Manafort would manage the campaign himself.

But as the moment of Acker’s coronation approached, Manafort suddenly conditioned his plan. If Acker wanted the job, he had to swear loyalty to Reagan. When Acker ultimately balked—he wanted to stay neutral—Manafort turned on him with fury, “an unprecedented 11th-hour move,” the Associated Press reported. In the week leading up to the 1979 Young Republicans convention, Manafort and Stone set out to destroy Acker’s candidacy. At Manafort’s urging, the delegates who were pledged to Acker bolted—and Manafort took over his opponent’s campaign. In a bravura projection of power that no one in the Reagan campaign could miss, Manafort swung the vote sharply against Acker, 465 to 180. “It was one of the great fuck jobs,” a Manafort whip told me recently.

Not long after that, Stone and Manafort won the crucial positions in the Reagan operation that they’d coveted. Stone directed the campaign in the Northeast, Manafort in the South. The campaign had its share of infighting; both men survived factional schisms and purges. “They were known as the Young Republican whizzes,” Jeff Bell told me. Their performance positioned them for inner-sanctum jobs in the Reagan administration, but they had even grander plans.

III. The Firm


During the years that followed World War II, Washington’s most effective lobbyists transcended the transactional nature of their profession. Men such as Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, Bryce Harlow, and Thomas Corcoran were known not as grubby mercenaries but as elegant avatars of a permanent establishment, lauded as “wise men.” Lobbying hardly carried a stigma, because there was so little of it. When the legendary lawyer Tommy Boggs registered himself as a lobbyist, in 1967, his name was only 64th on the active list. Businesses simply didn’t consider lobbying a necessity. Three leading political scientists had studied the profession in 1963 and concluded: “When we look at the typical lobby, we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all.”

On the cusp of the Reagan era, Republican lobbyists were particularly enfeebled. Generations of Democratic majorities in Congress had been terrible for business. The scant tribe of Republican lobbyists working the cloakrooms included alumni of the Nixon and Ford administrations; operating under the shame-inducing cloud of Watergate, they were disinclined toward either ambition or aggression.

This was the world that brash novices like Manafort and Stone quickly came to dominate. The Reagan administration represented a break with the old Republican establishment. After the long expansion of the regulatory state, business finally had a political partner eager to dismantle it—which generated unprecedented demand for lobbyists. Manafort could convincingly claim to know the new administration better than anyone. During its transition to power, he had run the Office of Personnel Management, which meant that he’d stacked the incoming government with his people. Along with Stone and Charlie Black, another veteran of the Young Republican wars, he set up a firm, Black, Manafort and Stone, which soon compiled an imposing client list: Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Trans World Airlines.

Whereas other firms had operated in specialized niches—lobbying, consulting, public relations—Black, Manafort and Stone bundled all those services under one roof, a deceptively simple move that would eventually help transform Washington. Time magazine deemed the operation “the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling.” Fred Wertheimer, a good-government advocate, described this expansive approach as “institutionalized conflict of interest.”

The linkage of lobbying to political consulting—the creation of what’s now known as a double-breasted operation—was the real breakthrough. Manafort’s was the first lobbying firm to also house political consultants. (Legally, the two practices were divided into different companies, but they shared the same founding partners and the same office space.) One venture would run campaigns; the other would turn around and lobby the politicians whom their colleagues had helped elect. The consulting side hired the hard-edged operative Lee Atwater, notorious for pioneering race-baiting tactics on behalf of Strom Thurmond. “We’re getting into servicing what we sell,” Atwater told his friends. Just as imagined, the firm’s political clients (Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Arlen Specter) became reliable warhorses when the firm needed them to promote the agendas of its corporate clients. With this evolution of the profession, the effectiveness and influence of lobbying grew in tandem.

In 1984, the firm reached across the aisle. It made a partner of Peter Kelly, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had earned the loyalty of lawmakers by raising millions for their campaigns. Some members of the firm worked for Democratic Senate candidates in Louisiana, Vermont, and Florida, even as operatives down the hall worked for their Republican foes. “People said, ‘It’s un-American,’ ” Kelly told me. “ ‘They can’t lose. They have both sides.’ I kept saying, ‘How is it un-American to win?’ ” This sense of invincibility permeated the lobbying operation too. When Congress passed tax-reform legislation in 1986, the firm managed to get one special rule inserted that saved Chrysler-Mitsubishi $58 million; it wrangled another clause that reaped Johnson & Johnson $38 million in savings. Newsweek pronounced the firm “the hottest shop in town.”

Demand for its services rose to such heights that the firm engineered a virtual lock on the 1988 Republican primary. Atwater became the chief strategist for George H. W. Bush; Black worked with Bob Dole; Stone advised Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to Time, “Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?” Manafort cultivated this perception. In response to a questionnaire in The Washington Times, he declared Machiavelli the person he would most like to meet.

Despite his young age, Manafort projected the sort of confidence that inspires others to have confidence, a demeanor often likened to that of a news anchor. “He is authoritative, and you never see a chink in the armor,” one of his longtime deputies, Philip Griffin, told me. Manafort wrote well, especially in proposals to prospective clients, and excelled at thinking strategically. Name-dropping never substituted for concrete steps that would bolster a client. “If politics has done anything, it’s taught us to treat everything as a campaign,” he once declared. He toiled for clients with unflagging intensity. His wife once quipped, according to the text messages, that Andrea was conceived between conference calls. He “hung up the phone, looked at his watch, and said, ‘Okay, we have 20 minutes until the next one,’ ” Andrea wrote to her then-fiancé.

The firm exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s. Each year, it hosted a golf outing called Boodles, after the gin brand. “It would have to move almost every year, because we weren’t invited back,” John Donaldson, an old friend of Manafort’s who worked at the firm, says. “A couple of women in the firm complained that they weren’t ever invited. I told them they didn’t want to be.” As the head of the firm’s “social committee,” Manafort would supply a theme for the annual gatherings. His masterwork was a three-year progression: “Excess,” followed by “Exceed Excess,” capped by “Excess Is Best.”

Partners at the firm let it be known to The Washington Post that they each intended to take home at least $450,000 in 1986 (a little more than $1 million today). “All of a sudden they came into a lot of money, and I don’t think any of them were used to earning the money that we were earning,” Kelly said. Senior partners were given luxury cars and a membership to the country club of their choosing. Manafort would fly the Concorde to Europe and back as if it were the Acela to New York. “I must confess,” Atwater swooned to The Washington Post, “after four years on a government payroll, I’m delighted with my new life style.”


Manafort with the Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole at the 1996 GOP convention, which Manafort managed (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times / Getty)
The firm hired kids straight out of college—“wheel men” in the office vernacular—to drive the partners around town. When Roger Stone’s old hero, Richard Nixon, came to Washington, the wheel men would shuttle him about.

Many of these young associates would eventually climb the firm’s ladder, and were often dispatched to manage campaigns on the firm’s behalf. Climbing the ladder, however, in most cases required passing what came to be known as Manafort’s “loyalty tests”—challenging tasks that strayed outside the boundaries of standard professional commitment and demonstrated the control that Manafort expected to exert over the associates’ lives. At the last minute, he might ask a staffer to entertain his visiting law-school buddies, never mind that the staffer had never met them before. For one Saint Patrick’s Day party, he gave two junior staffers 24 hours to track down a plausible impersonator of Billy Barty, the 3-foot-9-inch actor who made movies with Mickey Rooney and Chevy Chase—which they did. “This was in the days before the internet,” one of them told me. “Can you imagine how hard that was?”

IV. Man of the World

By the 1990s, the double-digit list of registered lobbyists that Tommy Boggs had joined back in 1967 had swelled to more than 10,000. Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly had greatly abetted that transformation, and stood to profit from the rising flood of corporate money into the capital. But by then, domestic politics had begun to feel a little small, a bit too unexotic, for Paul Manafort, whom Charlie Black described to me as a self-styled “adventurer.”

Manafort had long befriended ambitious young diplomats at the trailhead to power, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. When Bandar attended the 1984 Republican National Convention, Manafort dedicated a small group of advance men to smooth his way. Manafort arranged for Bandar to arrive at the presidential entrance, then had him whisked to seats in the vice-presidential box.

Foreign lobbying had certainly existed before the ’80s, but it was limited in scale and operated under a penumbra of suspicion. Just before World War II, Congress had passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, largely in response to the campaigns orchestrated by Ivy Lee, an American publicist hired by the German Dye Trust to soften the image of the Third Reich. Congress hadn’t outlawed influence peddling on behalf of foreign interests, but the practice sat on the far fringes of K Street.

Paul Manafort helped change that. The Reagan administration had remade the contours of the Cold War, stepping up the fight against communism worldwide by funding and training guerrilla armies and right-wing military forces, such as the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahideen. This strategy of military outsourcing—the Reagan Doctrine—aimed to overload the Soviet Union with confrontations that it couldn’t sustain.

All of the money Congress began spending on anti-communist proxies represented a vast opportunity. Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would arrange for image-buffing interviews on American news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster their standing in Washington.

The firm won clients because it adeptly marketed its ties to the Reagan administration, and then the George H. W. Bush administration after that. In one proposal, reported in The New York Times in 1988, the firm advertised its “personal relationships” with officials and promised to “upgrade” back channels “in the economic and foreign policy spheres.” No doubt it helped to have a friend in James Baker, especially after he became the secretary of state under Bush. “Baker would send the firm clients,” Kelly remembered. “He wanted us to help lead these guys in a better direction.”

But moral improvement never really figured into Manafort’s calculus. “Generally speaking, I would focus on how to bring the client in sync with western European or American values,” Kelly told me. “Paul took the opposite approach.” (Kelly and Manafort have not spoken in recent years; the former supported Hillary Clinton in the last presidential campaign.) In her memoir, Riva Levinson, a managing director at the firm from 1985 to 1995, wrote that when she protested to her boss that she needed to believe in what she was doing, Manafort told her that it would “be my downfall in this business.” The firm’s client base grew to include dictatorial governments in Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others. Manafort’s firm was a primary subject of scorn in a 1992 report issued by the Center for Public Integrity called “The Torturers’ Lobby.”

The firm’s international business accelerated when the Philippines became a client, in 1985. President Ferdinand Marcos desperately needed a patina of legitimacy: The 1983 assassination of the chief opposition leader, Benigno Aquino Jr., had imperiled U.S. congressional support for his regime. Marcos hired Manafort to lift his image; his wife, Imelda, personally delivered an initial payment of $60,000 to the firm while on a trip to the States. When Marcos called a snap election to prove his democratic bona fides in 1986, Manafort told Time, “What we’ve tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico’s.” The quip was honest, if unintentionally so. In the American political lexicon, Chicago-style elections were generally synonymous with mass voter fraud. The late pollster Warren Mitofsky traveled to the Philippines with CBS News to set up and conduct an exit poll for the election. When he returned, he told the political scientist Sam Popkin the story of how a representative of Manafort’s firm had asked him, “What sort of margin might make a Marcos victory legitimate?” The implication was clear, Popkin told me: “How do we rig this thing and still satisfy the Americans?”

The firm’s most successful right-wing makeover was of the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a Maoist turned anti-communist insurgent, whose army committed atrocities against children and conscripted women into sexual slavery. During the general’s 1986 trip to New York and Washington, Manafort and his associates created what one magazine called “Savimbi Chic.” Dressed in a Nehru suit, Savimbi was driven around in a stretch limousine and housed in the Waldorf-Astoria and the Grand Hotel, projecting an image of refinement. The firm had assiduously prepared him for the mission, sending him monthly reports on the political climate in Washington. According to The Washington Post, “He was meticulously coached on everything from how to answer his critics to how to compliment his patrons.” Savimbi emerged from his tour as a much-championed “freedom fighter.” When the neoconservative icon Jeane Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi at the American Enterprise Institute, she declared that he was a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior … one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”

This was a racket—Savimbi paid the firm $600,000 in 1985 alone—that Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly did its best to keep alive; the firm’s own business was tied to Savimbi’s continued rebellion against Angola’s leftist regime. As the country stood on the brink of peace talks in the late ’80s, after nearly 15 years of bloody civil war, the firm helped secure fresh batches of arms for its client, emboldening Savimbi to push forward with his military campaign. Former Senator Bill Bradley wrote in his memoir, “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.” The war continued for more than a decade, killing hundreds of thousands of Angolans.

V. The Family Business

“Paul’s not especially ideological,” his former partner Charlie Black told me recently. Many of Manafort’s colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly professed to believe in the conservative catechism. Words like freedom and liberty flowed through their everyday musings. But Manafort seldom spoke of first principles or political ideals. He descends from a different kind of political lineage, and in his formative experience one can see the makings of his worldview.

Back in the ’60s, Manafort’s hometown, New Britain, Connecticut, was known as Hardware City. It housed the factory that turned out Stanley tools and was a tangle of ethnic enclaves—Poles, Italians, Irish, Ukrainians. Nancy Johnson, who served New Britain in Congress, told me that when she arrived in the city during those years, she couldn’t believe how little it interacted with the outside world. “It was a small city and very ingrown. When my kids were in high school, the number of their classmates who hadn’t been to Hartford was stunning.” Hartford, the state capital, is a 15-minute drive from New Britain.

In 1919, not long after the Manaforts emigrated from Naples, the family founded a demolition company, New Britain House Wrecking, which eventually became Manafort Brothers, a force in local construction. When Manafort’s father, Paul Sr., ran for mayor in 1965, he was a lonely Republican attempting to seize a blue bastion. But he had the schmoozing gene, as well as an unmistakable fierceness. Paul Carver, a former New Britain City Council member and a protégé of the old man, told me, “It was like going to the bar with your grandfather. He would stick his hand out and buy a round of drinks. He knew almost everybody in town.” Paul Jr., known as P.J. to his friends, idolized his dad, plunging himself into the campaign, whose success he would decades later describe as “magic.” Over the years, he would remain a devoted son. All the partners in his firm came to know his father, running into him at parties that P.J. hosted in his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home. “He was dedicated to him,” Nancy Johnson told me.

The elder Manafort’s outsize capacity for charm made him the sort of figure whose blemishes tend to be wiped from public memory. But in 1981, he was charged with perjury for testimony that he had provided in a municipal corruption investigation. New Britain police had been accused of casting a blind eye toward illegal gambling in the city—and of tampering with evidence to protect Joseph “Pippi” Guerriero, a member of the DeCavalcante crime family.

Several investigations into the tampering drilled through New Britain’s rotten government. The most devastating report came from Palmer McGee, a Hartford lawyer hired by New Britain to sort through its muck. In his findings, he pointed a finger straight at Manafort Sr., calling him the person “most at fault.” According to the testimony of a whistle-blower, Manafort had flatly announced that he wanted to hire someone “flexible” to manage his personnel office, a place that would “not [be] 100 percent by the rules.” The whistle-blower also testified that he had delivered an envelope to Manafort’s home containing the answers to the exam that aspiring police officers had to pass—and that Manafort had given it to two candidates via a relative. Manafort never denied receiving the envelope but insisted that he’d merely asked for “boning-up materials.”

A statute of limitations precluded prosecutors from filing charges against Manafort for the alleged crime of test-fixing—and ultimately he was never convicted of perjury. But his arrest caused the Hartford Courant to compile a list of dealings that reflected badly on him: “Throughout his more than twenty years in public life, he has been the focus of controversy, and several accusations of wrongdoing.” The litany includes a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development accusing him of steering contracts to Manafort Brothers, whose stock he still owned while mayor. When investors from Florida built a jai alai arena in Bridgeport—using the Teamsters’ pension fund to finance the project—Manafort had “improperly” finagled its environmental permit. His family business had then inflated the fees for its work on the arena so that cash could be kicked back to the Teamsters. (The business admitted to inflating its fees, but a grand jury declined to issue an indictment.) Even before this scandal broke, a former mayor of New Britain blasted Manafort for behavior that “violates the very essence of morality.”

Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there. But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp? When Paul Manafort Jr. broke the rules, when he operated outside of a moral code, he was really following the example he knew best. As he later said of his work with his father in an interview with a local Connecticut paper, “Some of the skills that I learned there I still use today … That’s where I cut my teeth.”

VI. Al Assir

By the late 1980s, Manafort had a new friend from abroad, whom he mentioned to his partners more than any other, an arms dealer from Lebanon named Abdul Rahman Al Assir. “His name kept popping up,” Peter Kelly remembered. While Al Assir never rated much attention in the American press, he had a familial connection who did. He was, for a time, the brother-in-law of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the middleman used in the arms-for-hostages scheme that became the Iran-Contra scandal. In the early ’80s, Khashoggi was worth $4 billion; his biography, published in 1986, was titled The Richest Man in the World. At the height of his wealth, Khashoggi spent $250,000 a day to maintain his lifestyle—which reportedly included a dozen houses, 1,000 suits, a $70 million yacht, and a customized airplane, which has been described as a “flying Las Vegas discotheque.”

Al Assir was the Khashoggi empire’s representative in Spain and a broker of big weapons sales to African armies. He’d ensconced himself among the rich and famous, the set that skied in Gstaad, Switzerland, and summered in the south of France. The London-based Arabic-language magazine Sourakia wrote, “The miracle of Al Assir is that he will have lunch with Don Juan Carlos [the king of Spain], dinner with Hassan II [the king of Morocco], and breakfast the next day with Felipe González [the prime minister of Spain].”

Manafort suggested to his partners that Al Assir might help connect the firm to clients around the world. He wanted to increase the firm’s global reach. Manafort’s exploration of the outermost moral frontiers of the influence business had already exposed him to kleptocrats, thugs, and other dubious characters. But none of these relationships imprinted themselves more deeply than his friendship and entrepreneurial partnership with Al Assir. By the ’90s, the two had begun to put together big deals. One of the more noteworthy was an arms sale they helped broker between France and Pakistan, lubricated by bribes and kickbacks involving high-level officials in both countries, that eventually led to murder allegations.

It all arguably began with a 1993 dinner hosted by Manafort in his Virginia home and attended by Pakistan’s prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto had just returned to power after three years in the opposition, and Manafort badly wanted her business. She knew of him as a skilled manipulator of public opinion, and throughout the meal, Manafort displayed his most strategic, most charming self. One former Pakistani official who attended the dinner told me that Bhutto came away determined to make use of his services. She suggested that Manafort work with the Pakistani intelligence service. Spooks in Islamabad had observed the international rush to hire Washington lobbyists, and they had been clamoring for one of their own.

At about that same time, Pakistan was looking to upgrade its submarine fleet, and European arms contractors raced to hawk their wares. In the end, France’s state-owned manufacturer won the contract—and Al Assir was added as an intermediary at the last minute. An ensuing scandal that is still unfolding, some 20 years later, would entangle both Al Assir and Manafort. It entailed alleged kickbacks into the 1995 presidential campaign of Édouard Balladur, apparently arranged by the French defense minister. Al Assir seems to have been a key conduit of the kickbacks. Years later, in 2002, a car bomb went off in Karachi, killing 11 French naval engineers in transit to the shipyard where the submarines were being assembled, along with three Pakistanis. One theory, fervently supported by some of the engineers’ families, holds that the bombing was orchestrated by Pakistani officials who were disgruntled that the bribes promised to them as part of the deal had never arrived.

Manafort was not a central figure in this scandal, and was never charged with any wrongdoing. But as the former Pakistani official told me, “He was an introducer—and he received a fee for his part.” Documents show that Manafort earned at least $272,000 as a consultant to the Balladur campaign, although, as Manafort later conceded to French investigators, it was Al Assir who actually paid him. (Balladur has denied any wrongdoing and doesn’t recall Manafort working for him. Al Assir could not be reached for comment on this story.)

Manafort and Al Assir were more than business partners. “They were very brotherly,” one mutual acquaintance of theirs told me. Manafort took Al Assir as his guest to George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, in 1989. When Al Assir and his second wife had a child, Manafort became the godfather. Their families vacationed together near Cannes. Al Assir introduced Manafort to an aristocratic world that exceeded anything he had ever known. “There’s money, and there’s really big money,” a friend of Manafort’s told me. “Paul became aware of the difference between making $300,000 and $5 million. He discovered the south of France. Al Assir would show him how to live that life.”

Colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly noticed changes that accompanied the flowering of the friendship. Manafort’s sartorial style began to pay homage to Al Assir, with flourishes of the European dandy. Suddenly he started wearing unconventional shirts and suede loafers without socks. In the firm’s early years, Manafort had been a fixture of the office, a general presiding over his headquarters. But now he frequently flew off to France or Spain, collaborating with Al Assir on projects that remained a mystery to his subordinates, and even to his partners. “Paul went off on different foreign things that none of us knew about,” Peter Kelly told me.

Manafort’s lifestyle came to feature opulent touches that stood out amid the relative fustiness of Washington. When Andrea expressed an interest in horseback riding, Manafort bought a farm near Palm Beach, then stocked it with specially bred horses imported from Ireland, which required a full-time staff to tend. John Donaldson, Manafort’s friend, recalls, “He was competing with the Al Assirs of the world—and he wanted to live in that lifestyle.”


Manafort’s Hamptons estate includes a putting green and a basketball court. He believed only “suckers stay out of debt,” a former colleague says. (Google Maps)
There were always suspicions among Manafort’s colleagues in the firm that he was making money for himself without regard for his partners. Al Assir’s occasional appearance in the international press lent these suspicions weight. One deal brokered by Al Assir helped crash a private bank in Lisbon. In 2002, he and Manafort persuaded the bank to invest 57 million euros in a Puerto Rican biometrics company. According to reporting by the Portuguese newspaper Observador, Manafort was the lead American investor in the company; his involvement helped justify the bank’s investment, despite evidence of the company’s faulty products and lax accounting. Al Assir is alleged to have extracted bloated commissions from the deal and to have pocketed some of the bank’s loans. Manafort reportedly made $1.5 million selling his shares of the biometrics firm before the company eventually came tumbling down.

Stories about Manafort’s slipperiness have acquired mythic status. In the summer of 2016, Politico’s Kenneth Vogel, now with The New York Times, wrote a rigorous exegesis of a long-standing rumor: Manafort was said to have walked away with $10 million in cash from Ferdinand Marcos, money he promised he would deliver to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign (which itself would have been illegal). Vogel relied in part on the 1996 memoir of Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant and Reagan’s reelection-campaign director. In the book, Rollins recounted a dinner-party conversation with a member of the Filipino congress who claimed to have personally given a suitcase of cash to a “well-known Washington power lobbyist” involved in the Marcos campaign. Rollins would neither confirm nor deny that the lobbyist was Manafort, though his description doesn’t leave much uncertainty, and he conceded in an email that “it’s a pretty good guess.” Rollins admits in his book to being “stunned” by what he heard—“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.” This irked Rollins greatly: “I ran the [Reagan] campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash.”

Manafort has always denied Rollins’s insinuation—“old stuff that never had any legs,” he told Vogel. And as a practical matter, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could stuff $10 million in a suitcase. Still, Vogel found a raft of circumstantial evidence that suggested the plausibility of the tale. When I asked Manafort’s former colleagues about the apocrypha, they couldn’t confirm the story. But some didn’t struggle to imagine it might be true, either. Even though John Donaldson doubts the veracity of the tale, he told me that it persists because it reflects Manafort’s ethics. “I know how Paul would view it. Paul would sit there and say, ‘These guys can’t get access to Reagan. I can get them access to Reagan. They want to give $10 million to Reagan. Reagan can’t take $10 million. I’ll take the $10 million. They think they’ll be getting their influence. Everybody’s happy.’ ”

Another alumnus of Manafort’s firm answered my questions about the Marcos money with an anecdote. After the election of George H. W. Bush, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly agreed to help organize the inauguration festivities. The firm commissioned a company from Rhode Island to sell memorabilia on the parade route—T-shirts, buttons, and the like. After crews had taken down the reviewing stand and swept up the debris, the alumnus recalled, a vendor showed up in the office with a bag full of cash. To the disbelief of his colleague, Manafort had arranged to take his own cut. “It was a Paul tax,” the former employee told me. “I guess he needed a new deck. But this was classic: Somebody else does the work, and he walks away with the bag of cash.”

Colleagues suspected the worst about Manafort because they had observed his growing mania for accumulating property, how he’d bought second, third, and fourth homes. “He would buy a house without ever seeing it,” one former colleague told me. His Hamptons estate came with a putting green, a basketball court, a pool, and gardens. “He believed that suckers stay out of debt,” the colleague told me. His unrestrained spending and pile of debt required a perpetual search for bigger paydays and riskier ventures.

In 1991, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly was purchased by the mega public-affairs firm Burson-Marsteller, the second-largest agency in the world. It was a moment of consolidation in the industry, where the biggest players came to understand how much money could be made from the model that Manafort had created. But nearly as soon as Burson acquired the firm, Tom Bell, the head of its Washington office, began to notice the ways in which Manafort hadn’t played by the rules. He’d been operating as a freelancer, working on projects that never went to the bottom line. In 1995, Manafort left Burson. Taking a handful of colleagues with him, he started a new firm—Davis, Manafort and Freedman—and a new chapter, one that would see him enter the sphere of the Kremlin.

VII. The Master of Kiev

During the 1980s and ’90s, an arms dealer had stood at the pinnacle of global wealth. In the new century, post-Soviet oligarchs climbed closer to that position. Manafort’s ambitions trailed that shift. His new firm found its way to a fresh set of titans, with the help of an heir to an ancient fortune.

In 2003, Rick Davis, a partner in Manafort’s new firm, was invited to the office of a hedge fund in Midtown Manhattan. The summons didn’t reveal the name of the man requesting his presence. When Davis arrived, he found himself pumping the hand of the Honorable Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, the British-born financier known as Nat. Throughout his young career, Nat had fascinated the London press with his love interests, his residences, and his shrewd investments. For his 40th birthday, he threw himself a legendary party in the Balkan state of Montenegro, which reportedly cost well over $1 million—a three-day festival of hedonism, with palm trees imported from Uruguay.

Russian oligarchs were drawn to Rothschild, whose name connoted power—and he to them. “He likes this wild world,” Anders Åslund, a friend of Rothschild’s, told me. Rothschild invested heavily in post-communist economies and became a primary adviser (and a friend) to the young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

Rothschild and Deripaska fed off each other’s grand ambitions. Like a pair of old imperialists, they imagined new, sympathetic governments across eastern Europe that would accommodate and protect their investments. Their project required the type of expertise that Manafort had spent years accumulating. In 2004, Rothschild hired Manafort’s new firm to resurrect the influence of an exiled Georgian politician, a former KGB operative and friend of Deripaska’s then living in Moscow. This made for a heavy lift because the operative had recently been accused in court as a central plotter in a conspiracy to assassinate the country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze. (He denied involvement.) The rehabilitation scheme never fully developed, but a few years later, Rick Davis triumphantly managed a referendum campaign that resulted in the independence of Montenegro—an effort that Deripaska funded with the hope of capturing the country’s aluminum industry.

Deripaska’s interests were not only financial. He was always looking to curry favor with the Russian state. An August 2007 email sent by Lauren Goodrich, an analyst for the global intelligence firm Stratfor, and subsequently posted on WikiLeaks, described Deripaska boasting to her about how he had set himself up “to be indispensable to Putin and the Kremlin.” This made good business sense, since he had witnessed the Kremlin expropriate the vast empires of oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who’d dared to challenge Putin. In fact, the Kremlin came to consider Deripaska an essential proxy. When the United States denied Deripaska a visa, the Russians handed him a diplomatic passport, which permitted him to make his way to Washington and New York.

Manafort understood how highly Deripaska valued his symbiotic relationship with the Kremlin. According to the Associated Press, he pitched a contract in 2005, proposing that Deripaska finance an effort to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet Republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” (Deripaska says he never took Manafort up on this proposal.)

The Kremlin’s grip on its old Soviet sphere was especially precarious in the early aughts. President George W. Bush’s democratic agenda espoused an almost messianic sense of how the United States could unleash a new age of freedom. The grandiloquent American rhetoric posed an existential threat to entrenched rulers of the region who were friendly to Russia, and who had become rich by plundering state resources. Suddenly, the threat of democratic revolution no longer felt theoretical.

The risks of popular uprising were very much on Rothschild’s and Deripaska’s minds during the last months of 2004, when they handed Manafort a specific task. Ukraine had descended into political crisis, one that jeopardized business interests they’d already developed in the country (Rothschild had various private-equity investments; Deripaska had an aluminum smelter). They sent Manafort to Kiev to understand how they might minimize the dangers.

Of all Paul Manafort’s foreign adventures, Ukraine most sustained his attention, ultimately to the exclusion of his other business. The country’s politics are hardly as simple as commonly portrayed; corruption extends its tentacles into all the major parties. Still, the narrative of Manafort’s time in Ukraine isn’t terribly complicated. He worked on behalf of a clique of former gangsters from the country’s east, oligarchs who felt linguistic and cultural affinity to Russia, and who wanted political control of the entire nation. When Manafort arrived, the candidate of this clique, Viktor Yanukovych, was facing allegations that he had tried to rig the 2004 presidential election with fraud and intimidation, and possibly by poisoning his opponent with dioxin. He lost the election anyway, despite having imported a slew of consultants from Moscow. After that humiliating defeat, Yanukovych and the oligarchs who’d supported him were desperate for a new guru.


Ferdinand Marcos (left), Viktor Yanukovych (center), and Jonas Savimbi (right) are among the many strongmen whom Manafort has advised and assisted. (AP; Dmitry Azarov / Kommersant Photo; Selwyn Tait / Getty)
By the time Manafort first entertained the possibility of working with Yanukovych, the defeated candidate had just returned to Kiev following a brief self-imposed exile at a Czech resort. They met at an old movie palace that had been converted into the headquarters for his political organization, the Party of Regions. When Manafort entered the grandiose building, the place was a mausoleum and Yanukovych a pariah. “People avoided him,” Philip Griffin said. “He was radioactive.”

Manafort groomed Yanukovych to resemble, well, himself. Åslund, who had advised the Ukrainian government on economic policy, told me, “Yanukovych and Manafort are almost exactly the same size. So they are big, tall men. He got Yanukovych to wear the same suits as he did and to comb the hair backwards as he does.” Yanukovych had been wooden in public and in private, but “Manafort taught him how to smile and how to do small talk.” And he did it all quietly, “from a back seat. He did it very elegantly.”

He also directed Yanukovych’s party to harp on a single theme each week—say, the sorry condition of pensioners. These were not the most-sophisticated techniques, but they had never been deployed in Ukraine. Yanukovych was proud of his American turn. After he hired Manafort, he invited U.S. Ambassador John Herbst to his office, placed a binder containing Manafort’s strategy in front of him, and announced, “I’m going with Washington.”

Manafort often justified his work in Ukraine by arguing that he hoped to guide the country toward Europe and the West. But his polling data suggested that Yanukovych should accentuate cultural divisions in the country, playing to the sense of victimization felt by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. And sure enough, his clients railed against nato expansion. When a U.S. diplomat discovered a rabidly anti-American speech on the Party of Regions’ website, Manafort told him, “But it isn’t on the English version.”

Yanukovych’s party succeeded in the parliamentary elections beyond all expectations, and the oligarchs who’d funded it came to regard Manafort with immense respect. As a result, Manafort began spending longer spans of time in Ukraine. One of his greatest gifts as a businessman was his audacity, and his Ukrainian benefactors had amassed enormous fortunes. The outrageous amounts that Manafort billed, sums far greater than any he had previously received, seemed perfectly normal. An associate of Manafort’s described the system this way: “Paul would ask for a big sum,” Yanukovych would approve it, and then his chief of staff “would go to the other oligarchs and ask them to kick in. ‘Hey, you need to pay a million.’ They would complain, but Yanukovych asked, so they would give.”

When Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010, he gave Manafort “walk in” privileges, allowing him to stroll into the inner sanctum of the presidential offices at any time. Yanukovych could be bullheaded, and as his presidency progressed, he increasingly cut himself off from advisers. Manafort, however, knew how to change Yanukovych’s mind, using polling and political arguments to make his case. Oleg Voloshyn, a former spokesman in the foreign-affairs ministry, told me that his own boss, the foreign minister, eventually turned to Manafort to carry messages and make arguments regarding foreign-policy priorities on his behalf. “Yanukovych would listen to him,” Voloshyn told me, “when our arguments were ignored.”

VIII. A Reversal of Fortune

Before everything exploded in Ukraine, Manafort saw the country as his golden land, the greatest of his opportunities. But his role as adviser, as powerful as it was, never quite matched his own buccaneering sense of self. After spending so much time in the company of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, he set out to become an oligarch himself. Rick Davis declared their firm to be mostly “in the deal business,” according to James Harding’s 2008 book, Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin Into a Global Business. “The thing I love,” Davis said, “is that the political elites and the economic elites in every other country but the United States of America are the same.” The elected officials and the people “running the elections are the richest people in the country, who own all the assets.”

In 2006, Rick Gates, who’d begun as a wheel man at the old firm, arrived in Kiev. (Gates did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article.) Manafort placed him at the helm of a new private-equity firm he’d created called Pericles. He intended to raise $200 million to bankroll investments in Ukraine and Russia. “It was a virgin market in virtually any industry you wanted to pick up,” Philip Griffin told me.

Manafort had always intended to rely on financing from Oleg Deripaska to fund Pericles. In 2007, Manafort persuaded him to commit $100 million to the project, a sum that would have hardly made a dent in the oligarch’s fortune. On the eve of the 2008 global financial crisis, he was worth $28 billion.

Deripaska handed his money to Paul Manafort because he trusted him. Manafort repeatedly traveled to the oligarch’s Moscow office, where they would sit for hours and tour the business and political horizon of the former Eastern Bloc. Deripaska had become a billionaire in his 30s, and acquired the noisy pretensions of young wealth. He wanted to become the global face of Russia, he said. But that would require overcoming the reputation that stalked him, and Manafort could help. In 2001, before Manafort and Deripaska met, the World Economic Forum in Davos had withdrawn its invitation to the oligarch, as a court examined his alleged misdeeds in the course of erecting his empire. (The case was eventually dismissed.) Five years after the Davos rejection, Rick Davis shepherded Deripaska around the elite confab, taking him to a party brimming with U.S. senators, including John McCain.

For Pericles’s first deal, Manafort used Deripaska’s money to buy a telecommunications firm in Odessa called Chorne More (“Black Seas,” in English) at a cost of $18.9 million. He also charged a staggering $7.35 million in management fees for overseeing the venture.

But months after the Chorne More purchase, the 2008 financial crisis hit, gutting Deripaska’s net worth. It plummeted so far that he needed a $4.5 billion bailout from the Russian state bank to survive. The loan included an interest payment in the form of abject humiliation: Putin traveled to one of Deripaska’s factories and berated him on television.

As Deripaska’s world came crashing down, his representatives asked Manafort to liquidate Pericles and give him back his fair share. Manafort had little choice but to agree. But that promise never translated to action. An audit of Chorne More that Rick Gates said was under way likewise never materialized. Then, in 2011, Manafort stopped responding to Deripaska’s investment team altogether.

Deripaska wouldn’t let go of the notion that Manafort owed him money. In 2015, his lawyers filed a motion in a Virginia court. They wanted the authority to track down more information on the deal, even though the initial papers for it had been filed in the Cayman Islands. The lawyers had already managed to get their hands on some of the documentation surrounding the deal, and they had extracted a belated explanation of what had happened from Gates. According to a spokeswoman for Deripaska, Gates said that Chorne More had defaulted on a $1 million loan that it had taken out to pay for capital expenditures, allegedly forfeiting the partnership’s entire investment in the process. This explanation struck Deripaska’s lawyers as wildly implausible. Deripaska began to publicly doubt whether Manafort had even bought the telecommunications company in the first place. “At present it seems that the Partnership never acquired any of the Chorne More entities,” his lawyers argued.

All of the papers for the initial deal had included Rick Davis’s name. They suggested that he would serve as Manafort’s partner, and that shares would be divided evenly between the two. But Davis knew nothing of the Chorne More deal. While Manafort had been putting together Pericles, Davis had been on leave from Davis, Manafort and Freedman, running John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Because Davis’s connections to Manafort and Deripaska had caused him a public-relations headache at the outset of the campaign, he’d kept a healthy distance from both men. When Deripaska’s lawyers asked him about the money he supposedly owed their client, Davis was gobsmacked. He soon discovered that Manafort had also registered a new company—Davis Manafort International—to continue trading on the old firm’s name, while cutting him out of consulting fees. Upon returning from the campaign, and witnessing the extent to which Manafort had abused his trust, Davis left the firm they had created together.

Paul Manafort
Mark Peterson / Redux
Deripaska’s attorneys had leveled a serious allegation—and true to his pattern, Manafort never filed a response. Those who have known Manafort the longest suggest that this reflects his tendency to run away from personal crises: “He’ll get on a jet and fly off to Hawaii—and will come back when everything blows over,” an old colleague told me, recalling Manafort’s response to a scandal in the late ’80s. But it was one thing to hide from reporters; it was another to hide from Oleg Deripaska. Though no longer the ninth-richest man in the world, he was still extremely powerful.

The fact is that by then, Manafort’s options were tightly limited: Despite all the riches he had collected in Ukraine, it is unlikely that he could have paid Deripaska back. For years, according to his indictment, Manafort had found clever ways to transfer money that he’d stashed in foreign havens to the U.S. He’d used it to buy real estate, antique rugs, and fancy suits—all relatively safe vehicles for repatriating cash without paying taxes or declaring the manner in which it had been earned.

But in the summer of 2014, in the wake of the revolution that deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the FBI began scrutinizing the strongman’s finances. Manafort had stuck with Yanukovych as the president had initiated criminal investigations of his political opponents, opened the government’s coffers to his cronies, and turned his country away from Europe and toward Russia. He’d stuck with him to the gruesome end, amid growing popular unrest—right up to the slaughter of more than 100 protesters by government forces on the Maidan. He’d remained faithful to Yanukovych while large swathes of the strongman’s circle abandoned him. Perhaps living so long in moral gray zones had eroded Manafort’s capacity to appreciate the kind of ruler Yanukovych was, or the lines he had crossed. (He is now being tried in absentia in Ukraine for high treason, although he has denied any culpability from his perch in Moscow.) The previous December, as protesters had gathered on the Maidan, Manafort had texted his daughter Andrea, “Obama’s approval ratings are lower than [Yanukovych’s] and you don’t see him being ousted.”

The FBI investigation into Yanukovych’s finances came to cover Manafort’s own dealings. Soon after the feds took an interest, interviewing Manafort in July 2014, the repatriations ceased. Meanwhile, Manafort struggled to collect the money owed him by Yanukovych’s cronies. To finance his expensive life, he began taking out loans against his real estate—some $15 million over two years, his indictment says. This is not an uncommon tactic among money launderers—a bank loan allows the launderer to extract clean cash from property purchased with dirty money. But according to the indictment, some of Manafort’s loans were made on the basis of false information supplied to the bank in order to inflate the sums available to him, suggesting the severity of his cash-flow problems. All of these loans would need to be paid back, of course. And one way or another, he would need to settle Deripaska’s bill.

IX. The Prize

“I really need to get to” Trump, Manafort told an old friend, the real-estate magnate Tom Barrack, in the early months of 2016. Barrack, a confidante of Trump for some 40 years, had known Manafort even longer. When Manafort asked for Barrack’s help grabbing Trump’s attention, he readily supplied it.

Manafort’s spell in the Arizona clinic had ended. It hadn’t been a comfortable stay. After having acquired so many properties of his own, he had been forced to share a room with another patient, according to Andrea’s texts. Despite his reticence about his private life, he’d spent his days in group therapy—and he claimed that it had changed him. “I have a real self awareness of why I broke down,” he texted her.

Still, most of the proximate causes of his breakdown remained in place. Once an indispensable man, he had not been missed in professional circles. He was without a big-paying client, and held heavy debts. His attempts to prove his entrepreneurial skills had ended as expensive busts. Because of his biggest bust of all, Deripaska was looking for him. “He has too many skeletons,” Andrea had written her sister soon after he had entered the clinic, noting that his work in Ukraine was legally dubious. “Don’t fool yourself,” she had texted Jessica a few months before. “That money we have is blood money.”

She had not forgiven him for his affair. She complained to a cousin about her father’s treatment of her mother. “We keep showing up and eating the lobster,” she wrote. “Nothing changes.” But Manafort’s ability to provide lavishly for his family—a role he had always played, whatever his other failings—had in fact changed. The millions he’d invested in Jessica’s films were gone; so, too, were the millions he’d blown on her then-husband’s real-estate ventures.

With the arrival of Donald Trump, Manafort smelled an opportunity to regain his losses, and to return to relevance. It was, in some ways, perfect: The campaign was a shambolic masterpiece of improvisation that required an infusion of technical knowledge and establishment credibility.

Barrack forwarded to Trump’s team a memo Manafort had written about why he was the ideal match for the ascendant candidate. Old colleagues describe Manafort as a master pitchman with a preternatural ability to read his audience. He told Trump that he had “avoided the political establishment in Washington since 2005,” and described himself as a lifelong enemy of Karl Rove, who represented the entrenched party chieftains conspiring to dynamite Trump’s nomination. In other words, to get back on the inside, Manafort presented himself as the ultimate outsider—a strained case that would strike Trump, and perhaps only Trump, as compelling.

Manafort could write such a calibrated pitch because he had observed Trump over the decades. Back in the ’80s, his firm had represented Trump when the mogul wanted to reroute planes flying over Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach. Since 2006, Manafort had kept a pied-à-terre in Trump Tower, where he and Trump had occasionally seen each other and made small talk. This exposure yielded perhaps another crucial insight: Trump’s parsimony. When Manafort offered Trump his services, he resisted his tendency to slap a big price tag on them; he would provide his counsel, he said, free of charge. To his family, Manafort described this decision as a matter of strategy: If Trump viewed him as wealthy, then he would treat him as a near-equal, not as a campaign parasite.

But Manafort must have also believed that money would eventually come, just as it always had, from the influence he would wield in the campaign, and exponentially more so if Trump won. So might other favors and dispensations. These notions were very likely what led him to reach out to Oleg Deripaska almost immediately upon securing a post within the campaign, after having evaded him for years. Through one of his old deputies, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, he sent along press clippings that highlighted his new job. “How do we use to get whole,” Manafort emailed Kilimnik. “Has OVD operation seen?” Manafort’s spokesman has acknowledged that the initials refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska. In the course of the exchanges, Kilimnik expressed optimism that “we will get back to the original relationship” with the oligarch.

All of Manafort’s hopes, of course, proved to be pure fantasy. Instead of becoming the biggest player in Donald Trump’s Washington, he has emerged as a central villain in its central scandal. An ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence suggests that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian efforts to turn the 2016 presidential election in its favor. Given Manafort’s long relationship with close Kremlin allies including Yanukovych and Deripaska, and in particular his indebtedness to the latter, it is hard to imagine him as either a naive or passive actor in such a scheme—although Deripaska denies knowledge of any plan by Manafort to get back into his good graces. Manafort was in the room with Donald Trump Jr. when a Russian lawyer and lobbyist descended on Trump Tower in the summer of 2016, promising incriminating material on Hillary Clinton. That same summer, the Trump campaign, with Manafort as its manager, successfully changed the GOP’s platform, watering down support for Ukraine’s pro-Western, post-Yanukovych government, a change welcomed by Russia and previously anathema to Republicans. When the Department of Justice indicted Paul Manafort in October—for failing to register as a foreign agent, for hiding money abroad—its portrait of the man depicted both avarice and desperation, someone who traffics in dark money and dark causes. It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, would treat Manafort’s banking practices while in Ukraine as his first subject of public scrutiny, the obvious starting point for his investigation. The sad truth is that all of the damning information contained within the Mueller indictment would have remained submerged if Manafort had withstood the temptation to seek out a role in Trump’s campaign. Even if his record had become known, it would have felt unexceptional: Manafort’s misdeeds, in our current era, would not have seemed so inconsistent with the run of global play.

From both the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, vast disclosures illuminating previously hidden offshore accounts of the rich and powerful worldwide, we can see the full extent to which corruption has become the master narrative of our times. We live in a world of smash-and-grab fortunes, amassed through political connections and outright theft. Paul Manafort, over the course of his career, was a great normalizer of corruption. The firm he created in the 1980s obliterated traditional concerns about conflicts of interest. It imported the ethos of the permanent campaign into lobbying and, therefore, into the construction of public policy.

And while Manafort is alleged to have laundered cash for his own benefit, his long history of laundering reputations is what truly sets him apart. He helped persuade the American political elite to look past the atrocities and heists of kleptocrats and goons. He took figures who should have never been permitted influence in Washington and softened their image just enough to guide them past the moral barriers to entry. He weakened the capital’s ethical immune system.

Helping elect Donald Trump, in so many ways, represents the culmination of Paul Manafort’s work. The president bears some likeness to the oligarchs Manafort long served: a businessman with a portfolio of shady deals, who benefited from a cozy relationship to government; a man whose urge to dominate, and to enrich himself, overwhelms any higher ideal. It wasn’t so long ago that Trump would have been decisively rejected as an alien incursion into the realm of public service. And while the cynicism about government that enabled Trump’s rise results from many causes, one of them is the slow transformation of Washington, D.C., into something more like the New Britain, Connecticut, of Paul Manafort’s youth.

Last year, a group of Manafort’s longtime friends, led by an old Republican hand named Bill Greener, tried to organize a cadre of surrogates to defend Manafort from the allegations against him, including the worst one: that he collaborated with a hostile foreign power to subvert the American democratic process. Manafort’s old partner Charlie Black even showed up for a meeting, though the two had largely fallen out of touch. A few of the wheel men from the old firm wanted to help too. Yet, when volunteers were needed to go on TV as character witnesses, nobody raised his hand. “There wasn’t a lot to work with,” one person contacted by this group told me. “And nobody could be sure that Paul didn’t do it.” In fact, everything about the man and the life he chose suggests that he did.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... er/550925/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 30, 2018 10:01 am

Three Ukrainian Investigations Into Manafort Deals Are Stalled By US Officials

After agreeing to help Ukraine's prosecutors investigate corruption, US authorities are accused of refusing to turn over interviews with a critical witness — the indicted former Trump adviser Paul Manafort.

Posted on January 29, 2018, at 8:30 a.m.
Tanya Kozyreva

Ukrainian prosecutors say three separate corruption investigations have been stymied because American law enforcement officials won’t turn over evidence from a key witness, Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chair.

Special investigators within the Prosecutor General’s Office are investigating nearly a decade of work by Manafort on behalf of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, and his political group, the Party of Regions.

But Manafort, 68, also faces criminal charges in the United States, and the FBI and US Department of Justice have been reluctant to share testimony, documents, and other evidence they have collected. Manafort was indicted in the US in October and accused of conspiracy to commit money laundering by the Office of the Special Counsel, led by Robert Mueller, which is examining Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with President Donald Trump’s campaign.

Manafort’s lawyers have denied these charges in court. A spokesperson for Manafort, Jason Maloni, declined to comment for this story, citing a gag order issued by the federal judge. Manafort has said in the past his work in Ukraine was legitimate and above board.

In Ukraine, authorities are eager to talk to Manafort. Serhiy Gorbatyuk, head of the special investigations department, called Manafort a “key witness” in three ongoing criminal probes: suspected money laundering by his former lobbying firm, Davis Manafort; a lucrative contract he steered toward the powerful American law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and an investigation of the so-called black ledger, a document that reportedly shows illicit payments by the past regime.

Prosecutors in Kiev said they have made seven separate appeals over the past two years for help in questioning President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, including letters to then-FBI director James Comey and US Justice Department officials. The two countries have an agreement to cooperate during criminal investigations, but Ukraine has so far not received all the help it needs, prosecutors there say, leaving the inquiries in danger of fizzling out.

Gorbatyuk told BuzzFeed News that his last interaction with the Justice Department was in September. He said an FBI agent agreed to question Manafort and employees of Skadden, Arps, and that the Justice Department said it would turn over documents.

Gorbatyuk said the Justice Department has released some information, such as emails and an important contract, but has not released interviews with Manafort and employees of Skadden, Arps.

“We haven’t received an official response,” said Andriy Radionov, another prosecutor in Gorbatyuk's unit.

The FBI and the Justice Department declined to comment.

In one of the three investigations by Ukrainian authorities, prosecutors are examining Ministry of Justice officials for a 2012 contract with Skadden, Arps, the US law firm. Ukraine hired the firm to conduct a review of what happened to former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who was jailed after she challenged Yanukovych during the 2010 presidential election.

Tymoshenko's supporters say her imprisonment is politically motivated. When the Ministry of Justice sought an independent third party to examine the case, Skadden, Arps was awarded a $1.1 million contract without competition, prosecutors said.

But Manafort reportedly boosted that amount by secretly sending an additional $4 million to the law firm through an offshore account he controlled with his partner, Rick Gates, according to the US indictment by the Special Counsel’s Office. The US State Department criticized the report by Skadden, Arps, saying the firm went soft on Manafort’s former boss, Yanukovych.

“Skadden, Arps lawyers were obviously not going to find political motivation if they were not looking for it,” said Victoria Nuland, a spokesperson for the State Department. The report was “incomplete and doesn’t give an accurate picture,” Nuland said in 2012.

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom did not return messages seeking comment. In the past, a spokesperson has said that the firm would cooperate with authorities.

Three years after the General Prosecutor’s Office began investigating, the law firm refunded to the Ukrainian government $567,000 that the firm said had been in an escrow account. Ukrainian prosecutors investigating the matter said that once the money was returned, a high-ranking official at their department, Yevgeny Enin, stopped pushing the US to turn over records and interviews. This has dampened their ability to further understand what happened.

Enin declined to comment.

In the second investigation, a Ukrainian member of parliament, Serhiy Leshchenko, has accused Manafort’s company of money laundering and provided to investigators an invoice reportedly recovered from a safe in Manafort’s former Kiev office. The document shows a consulting company, Davis Manafort, billed an offshore entity based in Belize $750,000 for the sale of 501 computers in 2009. A former principal at the company did not return messages for comment, but has said in the past that the work in Ukraine was proper.

“The original copy was confiscated by the FBI in February,” Leshchenko told BuzzFeed News of the Belize transaction.

The final probe involves the "black ledger," which Ukrainian investigators have been investigating as evidence of off-the-books payments from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

In it, prosecutors say there is evidence of a campaign to clean up the foreign reputation of former president Yanukovych. According to this document, Manafort received $12.7 million for his work on the Party of Regions. A $750,000 entry is listed next to Manafort’s name on the same day his company sold the computers to Belize.

Gorbatyuk said the transaction is suspicious and is being investigated for money laundering.

Manafort’s signature doesn't appear in the ledger. But Vitaly Kalyuzhny, a former Ukrainian member of parliament, signed nine times next to payments to Manafort — including the $750,000 computer payments.

Kalyuzhny was the founding member of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, a nongovernment organization based in Brussels that lobbied in favor of Yanukovych.

The organization was identified in the indictment against Manafort and Gates as having contracted with American lobbying companies. Kalyuzhny is now hiding from Ukrainian law enforcement and could not be reached for comment. Prosecutors said they believe he is in Russia.

In addition to trouble obtaining evidence from US authorities, the three Ukrainian cases face another problem: a turf war between Ukrainian law enforcement officials.

In November, the top prosecutor in Ukraine ruled that the investigation must be transferred to a wholly new department, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. Known as NABU, the bureau was founded in 2014 as part of a wave of measures imposed on Ukraine by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union to root out graft and kleptocracy.

But NABU told BuzzFeed News it has not received the cases — leading to a logjam where officials in both agencies said they no longer have access to sensitive cases' files.

"This is an open obstacle to the investigation,” Gorbatyuk said.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/tanyakozyreva/ ... .kmkExQwYw
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:27 pm

Three lawyers for Paul Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates just quit his case abruptly

Noor Al-Sibai

01 Feb 2018 at 17:32 ET

Image
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates (Photos: Screen capture and social media)

Three lawyers representing former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates quit defending the latter on Thursday.

As Politico reported, lawyers Shanlon Wu, Walter Mack and Annemarie McAvoy withdrew their defense of Gates “effective immediately.”

In their filing, the lawyers requested that the reasoning for their withdrawal be kept under court seal.

Image

Tom Green, a white collar defense lawyer Gates retained this month, met with special counsel Robert Mueller at least twice in recent weeks. The move signals potential cooperation with the special counsel’s investigation into Gates’ and Manafort’s alleged money laundering as part of the larger probe into Russia.

A longtime associate of Manafort’s, Gates allegedly worked alongside the former Trump campaign chairman for a Russian oligarch, and visited the White House as recently as March 2017.


This is either really bad news for Manafort, Trump, or both.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 02, 2018 10:11 am

^^^^^ thanks

moving up the chain.....soon Mueller will hit the top of this treasonous crime family

Scott Stedman
UC Irvine.
Feb 1

The unreported loan: Paul Manafort received seven million dollars in Cyprus from unidentifiable company

The 2012 loan came from a company with no public records.

Days before Paul Manafort received a loan from mob-connected Ukrainian politician Ivan Fursin, one of Manafort’s Cypriot companies received $7 million from a company that doesn’t appear to have existed at the time.
Newly obtained financial statements from one of Manafort’s shell companies — Lucicle Consultants Limited — show that Manafort received his biggest loan from Telmar Investments Limited. The loan was issued to Manafort in February, 2012 during the period of time that he was advising President Yanukovych of Ukraine.


In the Manafort and Rick Gates indictment, Special Counsel Robert Mueller argued that the two men used Lucicle to avoid paying taxes and to purchase lavish items in the United States. Among the purchases made by Manafort using money from Lucicle include three Range Rovers, a Mercedez-Benz, and a $14,000 piece of art. Manafort also sent $1.9 million from Lucicle to a real estate trust in Virginia to purchase his Arlington home.
A New York Times report from June, 2017 identified Lucicle, months before the Special Counsel’s indictment. In the report, the Times found that Manafort had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Trump’s presidential campaign. One of the companies that transferred money to Lucicle is owned by Ukrainian Party of Regions member of Parliament Ivan Fursin. A Daily Beast article in November of 2017 reported that Fursin was a senior member in the Semion Mogilevich criminal organization, citing a fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS’ Center for Transatlantic Relations
By far the largest expenditure to Manafort was the $7 million from Telmar in 2012 — something the Times did not mention. It appears that this money was then transferred to Manafort in the United States. Telmar is the only company that loaned Manafort money that was not mentioned by the Special Counsel’s office in the October indictment of Manafort and Gates. The omission is especially noteworthy because of the meticulous details in the indictment, listing every Manafort-involved Cypriot monetary transaction over a period of nearly a decade.
An analysis of Telmar Investments Limited (also spelled ‘Temar’ in the financial documents) reveals that no such company existed in the public domain at the time the loan was executed. According to OpenCorporates, the only companies sharing the same name were in Gibraltar and the United Kingdom. The Gibraltar company was struck off in 2005, and the United Kingdom company was registered at the end of 2017. Similarly named companies either were dissolved before 2012 or were registered well after. It remains unclear who loaned Manafort the $7 million.
In the months leading up to Manafort joining the Trump campaign, his life was in turmoil. He sobbed daily according to his daughter, following the collapse of President Yanukovych’s regime, the collapse of his marriage, and the collapse of his fortune. He owed millions of dollars to oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine — most notably the Kremlin-insider Oleg Deripaska. Desperate to settle his debts and rebuild his damaged image, he reached out to his friends in Washington and was soon on the Trump campaign.

Oleg Deripaska, left, and Paul Manafort, right
While leading the campaign, Manafort attended the now infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russian officials claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton. According to the transcript of the testimony of Glenn Simpson to House Intelligence investigators, Manafort made a cryptic note during the Trump Tower meeting saying, “value in Cyprus as inter.” Weeks after the meeting, he would be emailing an offer to Oleg Deripaska to give him private briefings about campaign issues. Given the context of the relationship between Deripaska and Manafort, it appears that this offer was a way for Manafort to get even with his Russian business partner.
The newly discovered loan to Manafort calls into question to whom he was indebted when he became Campaign Chair of Donald Trump’s campaign. Manafort and Gates are expected to be on trial in September.
https://medium.com/@ScottMStedman/the-u ... 7188fce1c1
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Feb 04, 2018 10:00 am

Radio Atlantic: Paul Manafort and How the Swamp Was Made
Franklin Foer joins to discuss how the indicted Trump campaign manager brought corruption in Washington, D.C., to new lows.


MATT THOMPSON FEB 2, 2018 RADIO ATLANTIC



“Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there," Franklin Foer writes in his cover story for the March issue of The Atlantic. "But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp?”

Before Paul Manafort led the campaign to position Donald Trump as the ultimate Washington outsider, Manafort had built a career on being the consummate D.C. insider. Foer tells the story of Manafort's rise and fall, his stint as a consigliere to oligarchs, and the lines he was willing to cross in lobbying and political consulting. Foer joins Jeff and Matt to describe how Manafort's career is a window into the rise of corruption in America.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... de/552179/
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 08, 2018 1:29 pm

Navalny Links Kremlin to Trump Campaign Aide Paul Manafort

Alexei Navalny, Paul Manafort, Oleg Deripaska


Navalny Youtube Channel

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has published a video investigation claiming that Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska acted as a messenger between U.S. President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign chief Paul Manafort and a top Kremlin foreign policy official, citing footage of a meeting on a yacht.

Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chief in mid-2016, is suspected of having offered information on the campaign to Kremlin-linked metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska. The offer was seen in Washington as evidence of Russia’s suspected interference in the U.S. presidential elections which saw Trump win the White House.

Read More

Read more: Ex-Trump Advisor Received $10 Million Annually to Assert Russian Interests in the U.S.

In his investigation released on Thursday, Navalny said he found the trail in a video posted by a self-described ‘sex huntress‘ on social media depicting Deripaska and Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko aboard a yacht in August 2016.

In July 2016, Manafort offered private briefings to Deripaska on the Trump campaign’s progress in an email, The Washington Post reported last year.

Navalny’s investigation alleges that the footage of Deripaska’s yacht meeting with Prikhodko, who served as a foreign policy advisor to Russian leaders for more than two decades, proves the oligarch’s role as a conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

"[It’s] because these briefings were actually for Putin, the Kremlin, the Federal Security Service," Navalny says in the video, without providing further evidence. The video had gathered some 470,000 views by Thursday afternoon.

Russia’s Central Elections Committee has barred Navalny from running in next month’s presidential elections, in which Putin is widely expected to win his fourth term.
https://themoscowtimes.com/news/navalny ... fort-60442
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:46 pm

Since we don't have a Gates thread, this seemed like the best place for this:

Exclusive: A top Trump campaign adviser close to plea deal with Mueller

By Katelyn Polantz and Sara Murray, CNN

Updated 6:16 PM ET, Thu February 15, 2018

Washington (CNN)Former Trump campaign adviser Rick Gates is finalizing a plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller's office, indicating he's poised to cooperate in the investigation, according to sources familiar with the case.

Gates has already spoken to Mueller's team about his case and has been in plea negotiations for about a month. He's had what criminal lawyers call a "Queen for a Day" interview, in which a defendant answers any questions from the prosecutors' team, including about his own case and other potential criminal activity he witnessed.

Gates' cooperation could be another building block for Mueller in a possible case against President Donald Trump or key members of his team.

Once a plea deal is in place, Gates would become the third known cooperator in Mueller's sprawling probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. It would also increase the pressure to cooperate on Gates' co-defendant Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, who has pleaded not guilty to Mueller's indictment and is preparing for a trial on alleged financial crimes unrelated to the campaign. Gates pleaded not guilty on October 30 alongside Manafort.

"Nobody (who's charged) goes in to provide incriminating information to the government unless it's part of plea negotiations," said a criminal defense attorney who represents a witness in the case. In a Queen for a Day interview, a defendant can typically admit to crimes with little additional consequences, unless he or she lies.

After the interview, there's a very small chance a defendant could turn back toward fighting the charges, according to several lawyers who specialize in federal criminal cases.

The White House sees little sign that Gates' cooperation could pose any risk to the President. "There'd be no anxiety here" if Gates cooperated with Mueller in exchange for a plea deal, one White House official said.
It's still unclear what Gates, who outlasted Manafort in the campaign and later worked on the Trump inaugural efforts, could share that would be of value to the Russian collusion investigators, outside the Manafort case. The value of what a defendant says factors into the plea negotiation as both sides finalize the deal.

After an interview, prosecutors typically investigate the information a defendant provides. They then negotiate the defendant's ultimate charges or potential sentence.

Gates' plea deal could be announced in the next few days, given that he's asked a judge for an extension until Wednesday to discuss his in-flux legal representation.

At the same time, investigators with the special counsel's office are preparing to file new charges against him, according to people familiar with the probe. The additional charges are tax-related, these people say, which could increase the fines and prison time Gates faces in court. More charges are also being prepared against Manafort related to his work before he joined the Trump campaign, according to another source familiar with the case.

The threat of new charges could be used in the negotiation to pressure Gates into cooperating and pleading. With his current set of eight charges, Gates could face 10 or more years in prison if found guilty.

The options in a criminal case are "either trial or plea," said Brian Stolarz, a white collar lawyer who specializes in federal cases. "You have to have the heart, the stomach and the wallet to proceed with the trial."

Signs of cooperation

Several developments of the past months have pointed to Gates pursuing a different path than a trial -- from Gates' lack of focus in court on fighting the charges to his financial situation at home.

His court case since then has barely focused on trial preparations, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson noted in court on Wednesday as she urged the lawyers to set a trial date.

Gates' legal team quibbled over his bail terms and house arrest for more than two months after his indictment. Recently, they've been focused on a question of who will represent him in court. The three trial lawyers who took on Gates' case shortly after his indictment asked to part ways with their client on February 1. The legal team drama culminated in two long sealed hearings in front of the judge last week and on Wednesday. The two-and-a-half hours spent on that topic suggest the lawyers' situation with Gates is more complicated than a typical attorney changeover.

Working separately from Gates' trial lawyers is the well-known Washington defense attorney Thomas Green. Green, who has known Mueller personally for years, is negotiating Gates' plea deal, according to people familiar with the case. He has visited the special counsel's office multiple times in the last several weeks. Green appeared with Gates yesterday in court, but is not handling his trial situation.

Green did not respond to requests for comment. Two other attorneys for Gates declined to comment.

Gates -- without using an attorney -- asked the judge this week if he could wait until February 21 to clear up his attorney issue with the court.

Aside from the legal maneuvering, the father of four has faced personal and financial pressure to bring his legal proceedings to a speedy resolution, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Gates has told associates he had hoped for outside assistance from a legal defense fund, but deep-pocketed GOP donors have shown little interest in helping either Gates or Manafort cover their legal fees, two sources said.

The judge has already acknowledged that Gates could not show he had $5 million in assets to secure his bail. His financial situation is further hampered by assets he would have to forfeit to the government if found guilty of money laundering charges. A complex criminal case such as this could cost a defendant more than a million dollars in legal fees, especially if he were to go to trial, according to several people familiar with the legal industry.

The stress has taken a toll on Gates' young family, who have urged him to do what is necessary to conclude these proceedings, a source said. Gates lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife and four children.

White House downplays significance

Privately, Trump has expressed sympathy for both Manafort and Gates, believing that the only reason they are in legal jeopardy is because Trump associates have been unfairly targeted in a Russia probe the President has deemed a "witch hunt."

"If Gates cooperates against Manafort that's nothing to us," the White House official said. "They have a hard case to make against Manafort. That's why Gates might get favorable treatment."

The charges against Manafort and Gates center on work they did for Russia-sympathetic politicians in Ukraine between 2006 and 2015. Federal prosecutors said they earned tens of millions of dollars from that work, which they then allegedly laundered through US and foreign companies and bank accounts.

Manafort faces up to 15 years in prison if found guilty of nine charges and is still under house arrest. His attorney has pledged to fight the charges, and has even sued Mueller and the Justice Department for overreaching the purpose of their investigation with this case.

Manafort and Gates were at the helm of the campaign during the critical summer 2016 period when senior campaign officials, including Manafort, met a group of Russians at Trump Tower who had promised damaging information on Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. They were also in charge during the Republican National Convention when a handful of Trump campaign associates met with the Russian ambassador, and when Trump campaign officials intervened to change language on the platform about the Ukraine crisis.

Gates often traveled with Trump during the campaign and grew close to other top advisers. When Manafort was ousted from the campaign in August 2016, Gates' role was diminished, and he later stepped away from the campaign. But he remained in the Trump orbit and worked as a senior official for Trump's inaugural committee.

The White House believes Mueller is primarily interested in information Gates can provide about his long business history with Manafort rather than activities related to the presidential campaign or transition.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:01 pm

^^^^^ thanks
Seth Abramson

Don't listen to the White House on what the Gates deal means. Don't listen to pundits who say Gates can only provide information on the Manafort case. Gates would be given a deal because of what he knows about the Russia investigation. Remember he helped change the GOP platform.

2/ Understand, too, that co-conspirators naturally share information about criminal activities. Gates is a long-time Manafort co-conspirator, as the indictments against him allege. That means he knows many Manafort secrets, including any Russia-related ones. This is a big deal.

3/ As was the case in the Papadopoulos/Flynn deals, Mueller will keep his cards close to the vest in any statement of the facts attached to a Gates plea. The White House will falsely say this is evidence Gates provided no Russia information. Discard such statements out-of-hand.


4/ Don't assume that the sole or even primary purpose of flipping Gates is flipping Manafort (with the aim of eventually prosecuting Trump post-impeachment). If Gates knows what Manafort does, Manafort stays a target and Gates is used in prosecutions of both Manafort *and* Trump.

5/ That said, of course Manafort feels pressure on learning his deputy/co-conspirator is entering into an agreement with Mueller. But Manafort feeling pressure may *not* be Mueller's aim. And even if he's willing to cut Manafort a deal, it doesn't necessarily mean Manafort walks.

6/ Manafort is a legitimate "final" target for Mueller. He'll be flipped only if Mueller truly *needs* him to secure indictment(s) against a higher-up, i.e. Trump (as Pence is for now in the clear). If Mueller can get where he needs to go with Gates but without Manafort, he will.
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 2105914369




Seth Abramson

The White House quote on not being concerned about a Gates plea deal is a bald-faced lie.

Per media reports, Trump has said he fears Manafort flipping on him, implying Manafort could incriminate him. Gates, Manafort's deputy and co-conspirator, knows most of what Manafort does.

(To be clear, I mean to say that Trump does *not* believe Manafort will flip on him, but fears what the consequences would be if he *did*. That has been widely reported, largely because Trump is openly saying it to friends during his impromptu phone calls from the White House.)
https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status ... 2105914369
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 15, 2018 11:22 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Feb 15, 2018 6:46 pm wrote:Since we don't have a Gates thread, this seemed like the best place for this:



yea Gates actually should have had his own thread but he was the sleeper cell in all of this :P

we'll just keep him with Manafort and I will add his name below

4rd person in trump world to be cooperating ....targets getting buggie


emptywheel‏
@emptywheel

Wonder if Mueller told Gates he had to plea before Brand leaves or the price was going up?


Gates STAYED on the Trump campaign till the end, he didn't leave when Manafort did. Flipping means he tells Mueller EVERYTHING he has seen and he knows that happened while he was there. So no, this is definitely not just about Manafucked.


whatever Manafort knows, Gates knows.....the necessity of Manafort cooperating has now nearly vanished.
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Re: Paul Manafort

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 16, 2018 10:02 pm

new charges for Manafort coming :D


yep page 3 of new filing new criminal charges for bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracies

Special Counsel Mueller's prosecutors level new bank fraud allegations at Manafort, including 'conspiracies' w/others. No more charges yet


I wonder why this is dropping tonight :evilgrin


oops maybe Mueller is tired of Manafort and wants to revoke his bail :evilgrin :evilgrin

taking him into custody pending trial :evilgrin :evilgrin :evilgrin

ok here it is

Mueller levels new claim of bank fraud against Manafort

Prosecutors say they've found 'additional criminal conduct' by the former Trump campaign chairman.

JOSH GERSTEIN02/16/2018 08:44 PM EST

The special counsel's office told a judge it has new evidence of bank fraud against Paul Manafort. No charges have been filed stemming from the new allegation. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s office has told a federal judge it has found evidence that Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, committed bank fraud not addressed by the indictment last October in which he was charged with money laundering and failure to register as a foreign agent.

As legal wrangling continues over a $10 million bail package for Manafort, prosecutors this week accused him of submitting false information to a bank in connection with one of his mortgages.

“The proposed package is deficient in the government’s view, in light of additional criminal conduct that we have learned since the Court’s initial bail determination,” prosecutors wrote in a court filing submitted on Tuesday and made public in a redacted form on Friday evening. “That criminal conduct includes a series of bank frauds and bank fraud conspiracies.”

No criminal charges are known to have been filed over the alleged fraud, and Mueller’s office does not say in the filing whether it intends to bring any.

The filing by Mueller’s office says Manafort obtained a mortgage using “doctored profit and loss statements” overstating “by millions of dollars” the income for his consulting company, DMP International. Prosecutors appear to be referring to a $9.5 million mortgage that Federal Savings Bank of Chicago extended in late 2016 to a Manafort-linked firm, Summerbreeze LLC.

Prosecutors’ references to “conspiracies” suggest that someone beyond Manafort was involved in the alleged fraud, but no further details were given.

Defense attorneys for Manafort did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. Lawyers and the defendants are under a gag order imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, limiting their out-of-court statements about the case.

A report in The Wall Street Journal last year said investigators from the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman were examining loans that Manafort obtained in connection with various real estate transactions, including mortgages issued by Federal Savings Bank. That and other articles also noted that the bank’s chairman, Stephen Calk, was an economic adviser to the Trump campaign.

A spokeswoman for the bank did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Friday night.

Manafort has been under house arrest at his condominium in Alexandria, Virginia, since he was indicted in October along with Rick Gates, a business partner and Trump campaign deputy.

Jackson has signaled a willingness to release Manafort in exchange for $10 million in security, but prosecutors, the judge and defense lawyers have been at odds for months over various formulations Manafort has proposed to post that collateral. The latest proposal involves two properties in New York, including a Trump Tower condo, as well as Virginia real estate in Arlington and Fairfax counties.

Jackson met with both sides behind closed doors for more than an hour on Wednesday to discuss the bail issue, but there was no indication of any resolution.

The judge has yet to set a trial date in the case, but she suggested last month that a trial starting in September or October might be feasible.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/ ... ons-416509


WHY RUMORS OF A NEW PLEA DEAL SHOULD TERRIFY TRUMP
Rick Gates is reportedly in the final stages of a negotiation that could lead back to the campaign.

BY ABIGAIL TRACY
FEBRUARY 16, 2018 11:24 AM
Rick Gates & Robert Mueller
Rick Gates departs Federal District Court, in Washington D.C.; Robert Mueller on Capitol Hill.
Left, by Alex Brandon; right, by J. Scott Applewhite, both from AP/REX/Shutterstock.
Even among some of Donald Trump’s allies, there is a sense of astonishment at the White House’s handling of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. “It’s like no one took down the Gambino family,” Steve Bannon told Chris Whipple in a book adaptation the Hive published this week. “Mueller’s doing a roll-up just like he did with the Gambinos. [Paul] Manafort’s the caporegime, right? And [Rick] Gates is a made man!” Indeed, Mueller, who led the F.B.I. takedown of the infamous crime family in the early 1990s, famously cutting a deal with Sammy the Bull to flip on mob boss John Gotti, appears to be executing what some have called a “Gambino-style roll-up.” First, he flipped former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos; then, he turned ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn. Now, CNN reports, Mueller appears to be in the final stages of a plea deal with Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman and a longtime business associate of Manafort, who was indicted alongside him last fall.

The White House reportedly views Gates’s testimony as a threat to Manafort, and not to the president. “There'd be no anxiety here,” a White House official told CNN when asked about the possibility that Gates will cut a deal. The charges against the two, after all, had nothing do with Russian collusion; the 12 counts included failure to register as a foreign agent, false and misleading statements related to that registration, and seven counts of improper foreign financial reporting—all as part of a broader conspiracy to launder millions of dollars from their consulting work in Ukraine into the United States. Manafort has pleaded not guilty, and is fighting the charges. But Gates, who has also pleaded not guilty, has been grappling with financial troubles and difficulties with his legal team. According to CNN, he has been in plea negotiations with Mueller’s team of F.B.I. investigators for about a month, and has already given an interview in which he would have revealed any knowledge he might have of criminal activity that could be traded for leniency or immunity in sentencing.

What this means for the White House isn’t exactly clear. While Manafort’s reign as campaign chairman and Gates’s role as his deputy were short-lived, the duo oversaw a series of events and interactions that have come under intense scrutiny in the ongoing Justice Department probe. Manafort and Gates ran the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, during which Donald Trump Jr. held his infamous Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer. They were also on board during the Republican National Convention, where a number of Trump campaign officials and surrogates met with Russian officials and campaign officials altered the language of the official G.O.P. platform on Ukraine to be more sympathetic to Russian interests. While Manafort was replaced by Bannon after The New York Times alleged that handwritten ledgers showed millions in undisclosed cash payments designated for Manafort in Ukraine—a claim Manafort denies—Gates continued to work with the Trump campaign through the transition, and served as a senior official on Trump’s inaugural committee.

It is entirely possible that Gates is only providing Mueller with additional evidence against Manafort, and not against Trump. But news of his cooperation should still worry the White House. As he did in the Gotti case, Mueller has moved systematically through the lower ranks of Trumpworld up through the president’s inner circle in his efforts to shake out the truth. In December, Hope Hicks—the White House communications director and Trump’s longest serving adviser—reportedly met with the special prosecutor’s team. And Bannon, who served as White House senior strategist after the election, sat for approximately 20 hours’ worth of interviews over the span of multiple days earlier this week. A request for an interview with the president himself is likely next. All the while, Mueller is presumably gathering evidence he can leverage higher up the food chain, and potentially against Trump. While Gates may only flip on Manafort, it is entirely possible that Manafort might then be compelled to give up something better.


For now, the most significant facts in the case remain under lock. Adam Schiff, the top ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that the panel has discovered evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians during the 2016 campaign, as well as evidence of subsequent obstruction. “There is certainly an abundance of non-public information that we’ve gathered in the investigation,” Schiff told reporters. Whether that information is actionable remains to be seen. According to the White House’s own budget request, the administration expects Mueller’s investigation to continue well into next year, despite repeated assurances from the president’s legal team that it was approaching a conclusion. If Gates has the goods, perhaps it will end sooner.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/02 ... nald-trump
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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