American Monster — Paul Manafort

The first in a series about convicted US criminals who accelerated the world toward authoritarianism

Paul Manafort was born privileged.

Unlike many felons I interviewed over the years, whose mothers dropped them on their heads and they had to learn some survival skills, that’s not Paul Manafort’s story.

When I worked as an investigative reporter in broadcast news, I was always fascinated when an enterprising criminal would grant me an interview. I knew they were lying, they knew I knew they were lying, and they lied anyway. What they were really saying was they calculated the cost of getting caught — often with negative option schemes and pyramid schemes masked as MLMs, how Trump first came on my radar. I found out he was a fake rich guy in the mid-aughts, when I interviewed victims of a pyramid scheme promoted by Trump. He and his adult children are still being sued for taking money to promote a gamey video phone business called ACN.

Let’s do some math: I exposed the story in 2006, the Trump family was sued in federal court six years ago, accused of promoting the pyramid scheme — which was also featured on his fake NBC show — and the case goes to trial January 29, 2024.

Slow walking justice isn’t justice.

Paul Manafort spent his career doing dark deeds for dictators but once he became the ‘boss’ of the Trump campaign, his past caught up with him. Robert Mueller nailed Trump’s campaign manager dead to rights.

I have written so many threads on these gangsters, and just wrote another one early this morning, because it seems that we may have a window of new interest, finally.

American Monsters

Similar to Jared Kushner, whose father spent time in prison for racketeering — most notably, he hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law in an intimidation scheme — Manafort’s father was trailed by corruption. Manafort Sr. — as thrice mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, was indicted in a corruption scandal, arrested for perjury but skated.

Seems Paul Jr. learned early that rich white people get away with corruption, and he bet his career on it.

A Republican operative for Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole — who inspired the tradition of lobbying for kleptocrats, when he reputation washed Oleg Deripaska. Dole helped him secure a visa after being denied entry to the US for his ties to organized crime. Thanks to Dole, Deripaska was offered unfettered access to politicians, businessmen and members of the FBI. Dole received hundreds of thousands of dollars. America received fresh hell.

Manafort’s lobbying group with his friend Roger Stone was colloquially known as the torturer’s lobby, because many of their clients were murderous dictators.

Among the foreign leaders Manafort lobbied for were Phillipines 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.

The client I am most interested in revisiting is Viktor Yanukovych, as I did in this morning’s thread, citing an old archived NBC report.

As pro-Kremlin actors in the US continue spouting anti-NATO bullshittery, it’s important to revisit the origin story.

Recall, when Trump came back from Russia in 1987, and took out $100,000 in anti-NATO ads? Trump, who everyone in New York knew was broke, spent $100K to do a favor for his Russian handlers. According to one of my New York sources, New Yorkers knew Trump was a money launderer for the Russian mob. That same year, Australian police declined to allow Trump to build a casino in Sydney due to his mob ties.

So it makes sense that Paul Manafort would offer his services for free to Trump’s campaign three decades later, particularly in light of the most recent coup on his resume.

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. The party 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 more spy than consultant, 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 that period in Ukraine.

One of the most memorable summaries of this period comes from my friend Matt Bevan in Australia, who saved my sanity in 2018, with the Russia, If You’re Listening podcast. In his podcast on Manafort, he noted the following three things — how Manafort TV friendly’d up Yanukovych’s mobster aesthetic; how Manafort failed to register under FARA and failed on tax filings; and how the Trump campaign tweaked the RNC speech to benefit Putin:

“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…”

“Manafort took millions of dollars from the Ukrainians, he failed to report himself as a foreign agent, he failed to pay taxes on that money and he hid it through offshore accounts. It’s absolutely cut and dry…”

“At the convention, the Trump campaign asked for just one policy change, just one, ‘don’t sell weapons to the Ukraine to fight the Russians.’”

As Manafort was cleaning up Yanukovych’s image, he was also helping him craft winning slogans — ‘A Better Life Today’ — he made sure POR members wore makeup and Hugo Boss suits for their TV appearances.

Manafort also is credited for creating an environment so toxic that voters were fighting against each other, and after an election loss, POR went all in on anti-NATO speeches.

A popular slogan at the time was ‘NATO No’, and after Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election his promises to ‘Lock Her Up’ — a chant used against former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko — came true. Tymoshenko was sentenced to seven years in prison.

As international courts condemned the conviction, Manafort to the rescue again. The law firm of Skadden Arps was hired to do a legal review and aside from pointing out some procedural snafus, it co-signed the conviction. Later, the firm paid out $11 million to Tymoshenko and $4.6 million to the Justice Department for its work for the pro-Russian party.

But when Yanukovych retreated from fusing Ukraine with Europe — reneging on signing an association agreement with the EU — even Manafort couldn’t save him.

Upwards of a million people showed up to protest against his EU decision in the Revolution of Dignity and an estimated 100 people were killed. The protests continued until Yanukovych was tossed out of office and fled to Russia in February of 2014.

Russia then invaded Ukraine, psychologically tricking the West into thinking it didn’t really happen, then stole Crimea. More on that here:

The newly unemployed dictator’s groomer had to find work so he could make it right with Bob Dole’s old fren Oleg Derispaska, who Manafort owed millions of dollars to because of course he did.

As Dole successfully reputation washed Deripaska, Manafort was partnering with him on various mobbed up business ventures — all roads lead to Cyprus, which is where Manafort’s bank accounts and companies were obscured.

Yanukovych was convicted of treason, and after grooming Trump for the presidency, Manafort was convicted of eight counts of tax fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy, and faced additional charges. He pled guilty to two charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States and witness tampering. He served only two of seven year sentence, getting an early release due to COVID.

It’s worth revisiting my thread on the Mueller Report, where it was revealed Manafort worked for free on the Trump campaign to get whole with Deripaska, which it appears he did by sharing polling information with a Kremlin cutout.

What a world.

When I write about these people, who take big money to make the world a more terrible place, I often think of the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in his sum up to the entitled characters who comprise ‘The Great Gatsby’:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald

We are still cleaning up the mess made by Paul Manafort, and those he worked for who worked for Putin.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa, a journalist who warns that tyranny’s propagandists are winning, as the most recent analysis by Varieties of Democracy — known as V-Dem — indicates that 72 percent of the world’s population lived in autocracies last year, compared to 50 percent a decade ago.

Reversing this trend will take the kind of effort we saw from the Allied Forces in World War II. It will also take support for independent media that holds the powerful to account.

With Manafort’s history available to anyone could use Google, I marveled at corporate news’ interest in pretending that Paul Manafort was just another campaign manager and Trump was just another candidate.

America was under — is still under — attacks from Russia, and broadcast news invited these monsters into our homes and reputation washed them.

Here is an an audio clip from Manafort on CBS This Morning in 2016:

I am still haunted by the documentary ‘Get Me Roger Stone’ where Manafort is interviewed and tells the producer that ‘if Trump is elected president, I think Roger will see one more very significant impact he’s had on world history.’

One more very significant impact on world history from the ‘torturer’s lobby.’

This is America’s nightmare, but not our future.

We were younger in 2016. We’re older than that now.

An acquaintance of mine worked on a project with Manafort’s ‘blood money’ — it ended with guns drawn in a visit by the FBI.

Recognize the monsters, in their makeup and Hugo Boss suits.

And their handcuffs.

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