2016 Election Attack: Paul Manafort — Putin’s Grey Cardinal
2016 Election Attack: Paul Manafort — Putin’s Grey Cardinal
Fifth in a series investigating 2016 US election interference by Russian military intelligence and a network of US traitors — central characters in the greatest crime in US history
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Paul Manafort — Putin’s Grey Cardinal
“It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved.”—Judge Amy Berman Jackson, as she sentenced Paul Manafort, March 13, 2019
As I reported in my American Monster series — Paul Manafort being the foremost monster — it’s important to revisit Manafort’s resume in order to understand the alarm bells that should have sounded when he offered to chair the Trump 2016 campaign ‘pro bono’:
Manafort’s lobbying group with his friend Roger Stone was colloquially labeled the torturer’s lobby in 1992, because so many of their clients were murderous dictators.
Among the foreign leaders Manafort lobbied for were Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan guerilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Most of Manafort’s clients ended up fleeing from bloody revolutions, living under house arrest, or dying of dictator heart attacks, as I noted in this thread.
With his stellar credentials in reputation washing murderers, Manafort was hired to work in Ukraine for a pro-Russian political party, Party of Regions, which was dedicated to destroying NATO. In his decade as a consultant to POR, he reputation washed its primary leader, Viktor Yanukovych, later convicted of treason. The party itself was financed by Russian friendly oligarchs and along with promoting anti-NATO talking points, it also repeatedly produced anti-Western rhetoric.
The amount of money Manafort earned working for pro-Russian interests, tens of millions of dollars, surely makes him a foreign mob asset, particularly when investigators in the West noted Yanukovych and POR’s ties to organized crime.
Election fraud, a poisoned leader, an opposition leader locked up — all part of the legacy of Manafort’s time in pre-Euromaidan Ukraine.
Who takes the reigns of a presidential campaign without pay? Someone trying to get “whole” with his debts to a Russian oligarch closely aligned with Vladimir Putin.
I ask that you revisit the first four reports in my 2016 Election Attack series, before continuing on:
Context is everything.
I have often spoken of the first morning I slept in after the 2016 election attack. It was after Manafort’s first indictment. I slept like a baby thinking we were finally going to get the mob roll up we so richly deserved.
Well, that’s not what happened. After doing a small stretch, Manafort returned to the general population looking refreshed and smug, and now he’s buzzing around the Trump 2024 campaign like a Kremlin vulture in ostrich plumes. Last seen at the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida, at a podium where he told the audience he had “already” joined Trump’s campaign.
In the film Active Measures, American Kompromat author Craig Unger said he believed that the Trump 2016 election was most likely “the biggest intelligence breach in American history.”
“Donald Trump was a Russian asset, and he was cultivated by the KGB going way back to the 80s.. Russia really owns him, and the myth of Trump, as a great businessman is really ridiculous. He had bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy when he over-expanded into Atlantic City. And he was bailed out again and again by the Russians.
“Russian mafia is part of Russian intelligence. They're not at odds with it. They are an instrument of Russian intelligence.”
And who was his campaign chair — Paul ‘Torturer’s Lobby’ Manafort — who was in hock to oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who also had New York FBI Officer Charles McGonigal on the hook.
“I mean, this is an operation,” Unger told RadPod. “Deripaska is an exceedingly important figure in that he was paying off the FBI. I mean, he was one of the chief targets of the investigation, and he's paying them off. And I think for McGonigal, it’s a question of treason. It's important that we accept the darker parts of our pasts.”
Paul Manafort is the darker part of our past.
Putin’s Grey Cardinal — or eminence grise — a groomer of dictators.
As I reported in American Monster No. 1:
In the 2018 podcast, Russia, If You’re Listening, host Matt Bevan noted how Manafort earned his many rubles in Ukraine:
“Yanukovych is a giant 6’4” guy with resting murder face. He looks more like a mobster’s bodyguard than a president..so Manafort got to work..he switched out his undertaker aesthetic for Italian suits..and got him elocution lessons..but winning wasn’t enough…”
Yanukovych locked up his chief political rival — ‘lock her up’ — a recycled catchphrase from Manafort’s Ukraine job. And he reneged on joining the EU. The people revolted, Yanukovych fled to Moscow with many stolen billions and was later convicted of treason.
It was when Manafort took the Trump gig that his past caught up with him.
Out of the Past
Let’s revisit the criminal trials of Paul Manafort.
The two criminal trials were the first cases brought to trial by the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
“The 'no collusion' mantra is simply a non sequitur.”—Judge Amy Berman Jackson
Manafort ran the Trump campaign from June 20 to August 19, 2016, long enough to ensure the language change at the RNC about arming Ukraine in its fight against Russia was neutered to “appropriate assistance” and “greater coordination with NATO defense planning." In other words, the “Trump campaign gutted Ukraine aid in the official RNC platform,” as journalist and filmmaker Andrea Chalupa wrote.
At the time, Manafort swore that the campaign had nothing to do with the extremist change in the GOP’s position on Ukraine.
He lied, as multiple news outlets reported.
Here is a remarkable clip from Manafort on CBS This Morning in 2016:
In July of 2017, the FBI raided Manafort's home, based on a search warrant related to 2016 election interference. Both Manafort and his colleague Rick Gates were indicted and arrested in October 2017 — the charges:
Conspiracy against the United States
Making false statements
Money laundering
And failing to register as foreign agents for Ukraine
In February 2018, Gates entered into a plea bargain, while Manafort’s first trial on 18 criminal counts began in July 31, 2018. Gates testified that he committed tax evasion and embezzlement with Manafort. Manafort’s high oligarch living of ostrich jackets and five figure rugs, along with his Cyprus offshoring mob lifestyle were revealed. Despite $75 million flowing through offshore accounts, he still owed money to the Russians — $10 million to Oleg, maybe that was why he offered him private briefings when he was on Trump’s campaign and offered up internal polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, now wanted by the FBI.
Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of filing false tax returns, bank fraud, and failing to disclose a foreign bank account. Before his second trial on seven separate criminal counts could begin, Manafort reached a plea bargain on two of those counts — conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering. He also admitted guilt to previous counts from the first trial.
He got a light sentence for all his crimes — in total, 73 months — but was released early, serving less than two years in a low security prison. Although his lawyers claimed gout and wheelchairs and cardiac incidents, he walked out of prison during the pandemic looking like Jon Bon Jovi.
It’s important to note that Manafort had been under investigation since 2014, prior to signing on to the Trump trial, for his role working for the Russians in Ukraine. He’d been wire tapped, including conversations he had with Trump.
His short stretch feels like one of those limited hangouts America has been experiencing a lot these days, because we are so bad at dealing with actual treason.
My podcast partner High Fidelity once referred to Trump as a hitman sent by Putin to destroy democracy. As he sits in bad lighting day after day — a wounded animal contained by our court system — his rhetoric becomes increasingly violent. He reaches for his Gal Fridays — tainted felons he pardoned after their roles in the Greatest Crime in US History, the Greatest Intelligence Failure in US History. He promises Manafort and Stone roles on his 2024 campaign. Those who know what that means recoil, we feel punked. Those in the MAGA Cult will be dazzled by the Hugo Boss suits and The Penguin’s ratfuckery.
Metaphorical ostrich plumes trail Manafort in his red carpet stride to podium’s in America’s alternate universes where reality is dead and in its place, Russian reflexive control.
Spy Curious
As Craig Unger said on RadPod:
“Manafort pimped himself out to Vladimir Putin for about $70 million dollars, which went into his businesses while he and his companies were working in Ukraine and effectively this was hybrid warfare at its best.”
“They got Yanukovych in power in Ukraine and suddenly Putin had his guy running Ukraine, and he’d gotten in there after being groomed by Manafort. That was Putin’s strategy at its most successful and then what we saw immediately was Manafort having groomed Yanukovych and put him in office, comes over to the United States and becomes the campaign manager of Donald Trump.
“One of the staggering lapses in journalism was the New York Times coverage of Manafort. The first piece announcing Manafort taking over the Trump campaign, they characterized him as someone with campaign gravitas who had foreign policy experience. Do I even need to explain how dangerous that was?”
The New York Times has been consistently unreliable, as we reported on RadPod in our Leonard Leo coverage.
As Hillary Clinton was warning us that a Trump victory would result in extremists on the Supreme Court, and the overturning of Roe and environmental protections, the New York Times was But Her Emailsing 24/7, when it wasn’t exonerating Trump links to Russian interference in the 2016 election eight days before the election because the FBI said so.
How nice for them. At the time, the FBI Special Agent of the New York Field Office serving as a Special Agent in Charge of FBI counterintelligence efforts was Charles McGonigal — of the Oleg Deripaska McGonigals — whose indictment revealed the Russian operation to install Trump was real beyond a shadow of Barr-induced doubt.
Funny that, Manafort owed millions to Deripaska and took the free gig grooming Trump for Putin to “get whole”, according to the Mueller Report.
As High Fidelity told Bette Dangerous:
“Paul Manafort is the bloody knife hidden by shadows, a poisoned cup of wine in a $20,000 silk suit. He is the Grey Cardinal, the mob whisperer, the eyelash batting, serpent tongued consort of billionaire criminals and psychopathic dictators. Why this man is allowed to be free after his numerous treasonous actions, let alone an adviser to a sexually assaulting, financially compromised, bloviating fart bag of a presidential candidate can only be an indication of how thoroughly corrupted and impotent the law enforcement apparatus of America has become.”
Surely, our enforcement agencies can do better to protect us from men like him. Surely, a proper investigation into the 2016 Election attack would reveal Trump was an illegitimate president, as President Jimmy Carter has said.
The battle for America is the battle for the facts of the 2016 election - we are running short on time.
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More here:
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From my Mueller Report thread:
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