In December 2020, President Donald Trump pardoned Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign manager who was serving a seven-year prison term for a number of federal crimes, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction justice.
Manafort was charged in connection with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian meddling during the 2016 Presidential Election.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-pardons-paul-manafort-roger-stone
Manafort’s crimes included, among other things, his lobbying work for a corrupt, pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who fled the country to Russia to avoid prosecution for the murder of protestors.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-pardons-former-campaign-chairman-paul-manafort
https://kyivindependent.com/viktor-yanukovych-ukraines-scandal-ridden-ex-president/
If you are a corrupt dictator and need a lobbyist with no sense of ethics, morality, or shame, who would take your money with no questions asked, Manafort is your guy.
How Manafort ended up working for someone like Donald Trump remains a mystery.
Manafort worked with Yanukovych, who was driven from power because he was a corrupt SOB and Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos, who also was driven from power because he was a corrupt SOB.
Manafort’s other clients included a former Zaire dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who seized control of his country “under the banner of an ideology dubbed ‘authenticity,’ the New York Times reported. “He sought to legitimize his rule by reawakening pride in values supposedly unique to Africans, all the while enhancing his own power as the country’s undisputed chief” and punished those who dissented.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/090897obit-mobutu.html?module=inline
In other words, Make Zaire Great Again.
(You can still buy one of the hats on eBay).
In addition, Manafort, according to Eli Lake, a Bloomberg News columnist, was paid $600,000 to work with Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, who was suspected of torture, and $35 thousand a month working for Yanukovych in Ukraine. Manafort was reportedly paid $250 thousand for his work in Saudi Arabia, which channeled the profits from an arms sale to the government of French prime minister, Edouard Balladur, who resigned after an influence-peddling scandal.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/090897obit-mobutu.html?module=inline
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53054474
In his column, Eli Lake noted the irony of Donald Trump, who promised he would drain the swamp of corrupt politicians, hiring Manafort as his campaign manager.
“Here is an irony of the 2016 election season,” Lake said. “The candidate promising voters that he won’t be influenced by Washington lobbyists is counting on the influence of a Washington lobbyist to save his presidential campaign.”
Of course, there will always be those idealistic do-gooders who think that there’s no place for rapacious whores in politics.
But Donald Trump is not one of them.
“Someone who has had such close relations with notorious kleptocrats doesn’t belong anywhere near any of our presidential candidates,” Charles Davidson, executive director of Kleptocracy Initiative at Hudson Institute, told Lake.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/090897obit-mobutu.html?module=inline
Davidson evidently did not make exceptions for presidential candidates who were also kleptocrats.
Which brings us back to Trump.
Trump’s good friend Thomas Barrack recommended that Trump hire Manafort to run his campaign. Manafort, when he wasn’t shilling for dictators, was working for GOP politicians.
Trump hired Manafort as campaign director to take over from Corey Lewandowski in June 2016.
SEE THOMAS BARRACK
Less than two weeks earlier, Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner met with a Russian attorney and others with Kremlin ties at Trump Tower, who told the Trump campaign they had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. received an email before the meeting telling him about damaging information about Clinton. “If it’s what you say, I love it,” Trump Jr. responded. The New York Times published his response.
In August, two months later, The Times published an article that referred to Manafort’s ties to Viktor Yanukovych and said Manafort may have received more than $12 million from the former Ukrainian president’s pro-Russian party.
This established business connections between Trump and his campaign manager.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/
Manafort, having his work in Russia revealed, resigned.
“I think my father didn’t want to be, you know, distracted by, you know, whatever things Paul was dealing with,” Eric Trump told Fox News said with his usual eloquence.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/paul-manafort-resigns-from-trump-campaign-227197
Manafort and his associate Rick Gates were indicted in October 2017 on several charges related to his consulting work for Yanukovych. He faced additional charges the following June.
Manafort had agreed to cooperate with investigators but that agreement was voided when he repeatedly lied to them, Mueller’s office said.
Manafort became one of six Trump associates convicted in Mueller’s investigation.
The others were Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates, Michael Cones, and George Papadopoulos.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/21/us/mueller-trump-charges.html
Trump pardoned all the six except Rick Gates, who testified against the president.
SEE RICK GATES
In his final report, Mueller said that President Trump had tried to take control of the Russia probe and obstructed the investigation, but was prevented from doing so by those working for him.
Trump’s efforts “were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the President declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” Mueller wrote.
The Washington Post raised the issue of a possible agreement between Manafort and Trump that Trump would reward Manafort with a pardon if Manafort did not cooperate with the Mueller investigation.
“We don’t know whether there was an explicit deal between Trump and Manafort to reward the latter for his silence,” The Post said. “But reports that Trump, through emissaries, floated the idea of a pardon to Manafort as he was talking to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III sound even more plausible now that it’s actually happened.”
In March 2023, Manafort agreed to pay more than $3 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department that charged him with a “willful failure to timely report his financial interest in foreign bank accounts.”
The lawsuit said that Manafort failed to report interest on foreign accounts on his federal income tax returns.
