Paul Manafort

Based on Wikipedia: Paul Manafort

In the summer of 2016, while Donald Trump was accepting the Republican nomination for president, his campaign chairman was a man who had spent decades making dictators look respectable. Paul Manafort had polished the images of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, and an Angolan warlord named Jonas Savimbi. His firm was once listed among the top five lobbying outfits that took money from human-rights-abusing regimes. And yet there he was, running the campaign of a major party nominee for President of the United States.

This is a story about the strange career of a man who operated in the shadows of American politics for four decades, briefly stepped into the spotlight, and then became a central figure in one of the most consequential investigations in modern American history.

The Family Business Was Wrecking Things

Paul John Manafort Jr. was born on April Fools' Day, 1949, in New Britain, Connecticut. His grandfather had immigrated from Italy in the early twentieth century and started a company called New Britain House Wrecking Company. The name was eventually changed to Manafort Brothers Inc., but the original name captured something essential about what the family did: they tore things down.

Paul's father served in the Army combat engineers during World War II, the branch responsible for building bridges and blowing them up. After the war, he went into local politics, eventually serving as mayor of New Britain from 1965 to 1971. In 1981, the elder Manafort was indicted in a corruption scandal, though he was never convicted. The apple, as they say, doesn't fall far from the tree.

Young Paul attended a Catholic high school and then Georgetown University, where he earned a business degree in 1971 and a law degree three years later. He practiced law briefly in Washington before discovering his true calling: helping powerful people win elections, regardless of how they intended to use that power.

The Making of a Power Broker

Manafort's political career began in 1976, when he helped coordinate delegates for President Gerald Ford's re-election campaign. The overall delegate operation was run by a young James Baker, who would later become one of the most consequential figures in American government. Manafort was learning from the best.

By 1980, he had worked his way up to deputy political director at the Republican National Committee and served as southern coordinator for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign. When Reagan won, Manafort got a job in the White House personnel office.

But government work paid government wages. Manafort had bigger ambitions.

In 1980, he co-founded a lobbying firm with two partners who would become infamous in their own right: Charles Black and Roger Stone. Stone would later become a self-proclaimed "dirty trickster" and Trump confidant who got a Nixon tattoo on his back. Their firm, Black, Manafort & Stone, quickly became one of the most influential lobbying operations in Washington.

What made them different was their willingness to represent anyone with money. While other firms might turn away clients with unsavory reputations, Manafort and his partners saw opportunity where others saw risk.

The Dictator's Consultant

The client list reads like a rogues' gallery of twentieth-century authoritarians.

In 1985, Manafort's firm signed a six hundred thousand dollar contract with Jonas Savimbi, the leader of a rebel group in Angola called UNITA. Savimbi was fighting against the Soviet-backed government, which made him useful to the Reagan administration's Cold War strategy. But he was also a brutal warlord who terrorized civilians.

Manafort's job was to make Savimbi presentable to Washington. The firm arranged for him to speak at the American Enterprise Institute, where former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick gave him a glowing introduction. They got him meetings at the Heritage Foundation and Freedom House. The image rehabilitation worked brilliantly. Congress approved hundreds of millions of dollars in covert aid to Savimbi's forces.

Here's the troubling part: Manafort allegedly kept lobbying for continued funding even after the Soviet Union collapsed and withdrew from the conflict. The Cold War justification was gone, but the money kept flowing, delaying peace talks that might have ended the bloodshed years earlier.

Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines paid Manafort's firm nine hundred fifty thousand dollars a year. Marcos had declared martial law in 1972 and ruled as a dictator for two decades, overseeing widespread human rights abuses while he and his wife Imelda accumulated staggering personal wealth. When Marcos was eventually overthrown in 1986, investigators found three thousand pairs of shoes in Imelda's closet.

Then there was Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Mobutu was one of the most corrupt leaders in African history, looting his country of billions while his people starved. Manafort secured a one million dollar annual contract in 1989. He also reportedly attempted to recruit the Somali strongman Siad Barre as a client.

Between 1991 and 1993, the firm lobbied for Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, the Dominican Republic, and Nigeria, earning between six hundred sixty thousand and seven hundred fifty thousand dollars each year. These engagements earned Black, Manafort & Stone a spot on the Center for Public Integrity's list of the top five lobbying firms taking money from human-rights-abusing regimes, a report titled "The Torturers' Lobby."

The Problem with Foreign Lobbying

There's a law in the United States called the Foreign Agents Registration Act, usually abbreviated as FARA. It was passed in 1938, originally to combat Nazi propaganda, and it requires anyone who lobbies on behalf of foreign governments to register with the Department of Justice and disclose their activities.

The theory behind FARA is simple: Americans have a right to know when someone is trying to influence their government on behalf of a foreign power. Transparency allows citizens and policymakers to evaluate whether the arguments being made serve American interests or someone else's.

Manafort had a complicated relationship with FARA. He registered as a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia between 1984 and 1986. But when the Reagan administration refused to grant him a waiver from federal statutes prohibiting public officials from acting as foreign agents, he had to resign from a government board position.

More troublingly, a Justice Department investigation found eighteen lobbying-related activities that Manafort failed to report in his FARA filings, including work for the Bahamas and Saint Lucia. This pattern of incomplete disclosure would come back to haunt him decades later.

Some Truly Strange Side Projects

Manafort's willingness to work for anyone extended to some genuinely bizarre arrangements.

In the 1995 French presidential election, he wrote the campaign strategy for Édouard Balladur. But instead of being paid directly, the money came through an unusual channel: a Lebanese arms dealer named Abdul Rahman al-Assir. The funds, at least two hundred thousand dollars, were skimmed from middlemen fees paid for arranging the sale of three French submarines to Pakistan. This scandal became known in France as the Karachi affair.

Between 1990 and 1994, Manafort received seven hundred thousand dollars from something called the Kashmiri American Council, supposedly to promote awareness of the Kashmir conflict. But an FBI investigation revealed that the money actually came from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the country's powerful spy service. The whole operation was a disinformation campaign designed to divert attention from terrorism.

A former Pakistani intelligence official claimed Manafort knew exactly what he was participating in. While producing a documentary as part of the arrangement, Manafort reportedly interviewed several Indian officials while pretending to be a reporter for CNN.

Pretending to be a journalist to advance a foreign intelligence operation is the kind of thing that would end most careers. For Manafort, it was just another line item on a very long resume.

Ukraine: Where Everything Changed

Manafort's involvement in Ukraine began in 2003, when Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska hired him to work on political projects in the region. Deripaska was extraordinarily wealthy, having made billions during the chaotic privatization of Russian industry in the 1990s. He was also closely connected to Vladimir Putin's government.

The big client, though, was Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych was a Ukrainian politician with a checkered past. He had served prison time twice as a young man, once for robbery and once for assault. Despite this background, he rose through the ranks of Ukrainian politics and became prime minister in 2002.

In 2004, Yanukovych ran for president in an election that became one of the most dramatic events in recent Ukrainian history. After the government declared him the winner, massive protests erupted across the country. Ukrainians were convinced the election had been stolen through fraud. They took to the streets in what became known as the Orange Revolution, wearing orange scarves and ribbons as symbols of their movement.

The protests succeeded. The courts ordered a new election, and Yanukovych lost to the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who had been mysteriously poisoned during the campaign with dioxin, leaving his face permanently disfigured.

This is where Manafort came in. After the Orange Revolution humiliated Yanukovych, he needed help rehabilitating his image. Manafort took on the project.

The makeover was extensive. Manafort advised Yanukovych on everything from policy positions to personal presentation. The rough-edged politician started wearing better suits. His messaging became more polished. And critically, Yanukovych began positioning himself as someone who could maintain good relations with both Russia and the West.

It worked. In 2010, Yanukovych won the presidency.

The Money Trail

For his work in Ukraine, Manafort was paid handsomely. How handsomely? That question would eventually become central to federal investigations.

In August 2016, reports emerged that Manafort may have received twelve point seven million dollars in off-the-books payments from Yanukovych's Party of Regions. These payments were allegedly recorded in a secret ledger, the kind of thing parties use when they want to compensate people without creating official records.

The problem with secret payments from foreign political parties is that they're illegal unless properly disclosed. And Manafort hadn't disclosed them.

Even more troubling was where much of this money ended up. Prosecutors would later allege that Manafort used offshore accounts in Cyprus and elsewhere to hide tens of millions of dollars from the Internal Revenue Service. He allegedly used this hidden money to buy expensive real estate, luxury cars, and custom suits that cost thousands of dollars each.

One particularly memorable detail from later court filings: Manafort owned a jacket made of ostrich leather that cost fifteen thousand dollars. He had a thing for expensive clothing.

The Revolution and the Escape

In February 2014, Yanukovych's government collapsed.

The trigger was his decision to reject an association agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. Ukrainians who wanted their country to move toward Europe were furious. Protests began in Kyiv's main square, the Maidan, and escalated over several months into what became known as the Revolution of Dignity.

The government responded with violence. Snipers shot protesters in the streets. But the crackdown backfired, generating even more opposition. Eventually, Yanukovych's support collapsed, and he fled the country to Russia, where he remains to this day.

With Yanukovych gone, Manafort lost his primary client in Ukraine. But he maintained connections with people in his former client's orbit, connections that would later draw intense scrutiny.

One of those connections was Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian political operative who had worked with Manafort for years. American intelligence agencies would later assess that Kilimnik had ties to Russian intelligence services.

Joining the Trump Campaign

In February 2016, Paul Manafort approached the Trump campaign through a mutual friend named Thomas Barrack, a wealthy real estate investor. Manafort pitched himself as someone with extensive experience managing presidential campaigns, both in America and around the world. He emphasized that he wasn't part of the Washington establishment. And crucially, he offered to work without a salary.

Why would someone with Manafort's expensive tastes work for free? That question would later become very interesting to investigators.

Trump hired him in March to manage the delegate operation as the primary season headed toward the convention. By June, Manafort had been promoted to campaign chairman after the previous manager, Corey Lewandowski, was fired.

For a brief moment, Manafort was one of the most powerful people in American politics. He controlled the campaign's daily operations, its twenty million dollar budget, hiring decisions, advertising, and media strategy.

The Trump Tower Meeting

On June 9, 2016, Manafort attended a meeting at Trump Tower that would become one of the most scrutinized events of the entire campaign.

The meeting was arranged after a British music promoter told Donald Trump Jr. that he could obtain damaging information about Hillary Clinton from sources connected to the Russian government. The offer was presented as part of Russia's support for the Trump campaign.

Trump Jr.'s response, revealed in emails he later released himself: "If it's what you say, I love it."

The meeting included Trump Jr., Manafort, and Jared Kushner on the campaign side. The Russians sent a lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya and several others.

When the meeting became public in 2017, Trump Jr. initially said it had been primarily about Russian adoptions, referring to a ban Russia had imposed in retaliation for American sanctions. He later acknowledged that the promised dirt on Clinton had been the reason for taking the meeting, though he said little useful information was actually provided.

The meeting raised an obvious question: Why would the chairman of a presidential campaign attend a meeting explicitly described as offering Russian government assistance? Manafort never provided a satisfying answer.

The Polling Data Mystery

In January 2019, a court filing by Manafort's lawyers accidentally revealed something explosive.

The filing was supposed to be redacted, meaning certain sensitive portions would be blacked out. But due to a formatting error, the hidden text could be recovered simply by copying and pasting from the document.

The revealed text showed that while serving as Trump's campaign chairman, Manafort had met multiple times with Konstantin Kilimnik, the Ukrainian operative with alleged ties to Russian intelligence. During these meetings, Manafort shared polling data from the Trump campaign.

Why would anyone give internal campaign polling data to someone connected to Russian intelligence? The obvious purpose of polling data is to help target messages and advertising more effectively. If you know which voters are persuadable and what issues they care about, you can craft much more effective outreach.

Manafort asked Kilimnik to pass the data to two Ukrainian oligarchs who had been involved in Yanukovych's political operations. Both had connections to pro-Russian political parties in Ukraine.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, controlled by Republicans at the time, concluded in August 2020 that Manafort's contacts with Kilimnik "represented a grave counterintelligence threat." His position on the campaign "created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign."

This was not a Democratic talking point. This was the conclusion of a Republican-led committee.

The Rapid Unraveling

Manafort's time atop the campaign lasted only about two months.

On August 17, 2016, the same day Trump received his first security briefing as the Republican nominee, the campaign announced a shakeup. Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway were brought in to senior leadership positions, effectively marginalizing Manafort.

Reports indicated that Trump's family, particularly Kushner, had grown uneasy about Manafort's Russian connections and suspected he hadn't been fully honest about them. Two days later, Trump announced that Manafort had resigned.

Newt Gingrich offered a telling comment: "Nobody should underestimate how much Paul Manafort did to really help get this campaign to where it is right now." He then added: "It makes perfect sense for them to distance themselves from somebody who apparently didn't tell them what he was doing."

The Special Counsel

In May 2017, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign.

Manafort was one of the first targets.

On October 27, 2017, Manafort and his longtime business associate Rick Gates were indicted on multiple charges. The indictment focused on their work for Yanukovych in Ukraine, alleging that they had laundered tens of millions of dollars, failed to pay taxes on the income, and acted as unregistered agents of a foreign government.

The charges painted a picture of systematic financial deception. Prosecutors alleged Manafort had hidden more than thirty million dollars in income in foreign bank accounts, then used the money to fund an extravagant lifestyle while paying little or no taxes.

Manafort initially fought the charges. But in June 2018, while under house arrest awaiting trial, he made things much worse for himself by allegedly contacting witnesses and encouraging them to lie on his behalf. This witness tampering led to additional charges and got his bail revoked. He was sent to jail to await trial.

Two Trials, Many Convictions

Manafort faced prosecution in two different federal courts.

The first trial, in the Eastern District of Virginia, focused on tax and bank fraud. In August 2018, a jury convicted him on eight counts. The jury deadlocked on ten additional counts, resulting in a mistrial on those charges.

Rather than face a second Virginia trial, Manafort struck a deal. In the District of Columbia court, he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. In exchange, prosecutors dropped the remaining Virginia charges.

But the cooperation agreement quickly fell apart. In November 2018, Mueller's team reported that Manafort had repeatedly lied to investigators, violating the terms of his plea deal. The judge agreed, voiding the agreement.

In March 2019, Manafort was sentenced. The Virginia judge gave him forty-seven months. The D.C. judge added another forty-three months, though she allowed some of the time to be served concurrently. The combined sentence worked out to about seven and a half years.

Minutes after the D.C. sentencing, New York state prosecutors charged Manafort with sixteen additional felonies under state law. The state charges were eventually dismissed on double jeopardy grounds, a legal doctrine that generally prevents someone from being prosecuted twice for the same conduct.

COVID and the Pardon

Manafort served his sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. In May 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through American prisons, he was released to home confinement. He was seventy-one years old and authorities cited health concerns.

On December 23, 2020, a month before leaving office, President Trump pardoned Manafort. The pardon erased Manafort's federal convictions, though it could not undo the fact that he had been convicted or restore any professional licenses he might have lost.

Trump had previously called Manafort a "brave man" for refusing to cooperate with investigators, praising him for not "making up stories" to get a reduced sentence. Critics noted that Manafort had strong incentives to stay loyal: he may have believed a pardon was coming if he kept quiet about anything that might implicate the president.

The Return

Most people who had gone through what Manafort experienced would retreat from public life. Federal conviction. Prison. The humiliation of having his crimes detailed in court documents and news reports.

Manafort is not most people.

In March 2024, reports emerged that he was returning to politics, working on Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. After Trump won the election, Manafort reportedly worked with other Trump associates as consultants to a political party in Albania led by former Prime Minister Sali Berisha, who was himself facing corruption charges.

The pattern continues: wherever there are powerful people willing to pay for political services, regardless of their backgrounds or intentions, Paul Manafort seems willing to show up.

What Does It All Mean?

The Manafort story raises uncomfortable questions about American democracy.

For decades, a man who helped dictators maintain power and allegedly participated in foreign intelligence operations moved freely through the highest levels of American politics. He advised presidents and ran a major party's presidential campaign. The laws designed to ensure transparency in foreign lobbying proved easy to evade.

The Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that his activities represented a "grave counterintelligence threat." But he was pardoned anyway, by the president whose campaign he had chaired.

Some argue that Manafort's case proves the system works: he was investigated, charged, convicted, and imprisoned. Others point out that he served less than two years of his sentence and is now back doing political work, apparently having learned nothing and suffered no permanent consequences.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect is how unsurprising it all seems now. In an era of constant political controversy, a story about a presidential campaign chairman with ties to Russian intelligence, secret payments from Ukrainian oligarchs, and convictions for financial crimes barely registers as exceptional.

That normalization might be the most concerning thing of all.