The Trial of Manafort, King of the Swamp

Last Tuesday, July 31, the trial of Paul Manafort, the former chair of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, began. There are 12 charges against him, including conspiracy against the United States and money laundering. He directed the Trump campaign from March to August 2016. His resignation was associated with the principal charge against him, that he received tens of millions of dollars from Ukraine for lobbying in the United States in favor of the deposed President Viktor Yanukovych.

As head of the campaign, Manafort participated in the sadly famous meeting in Trump Tower, where Donald Trump Jr. talked with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have information about the Hillary Clinton campaign. That meeting is at the heart of the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Was there collusion (or not) with the Russians, by Trump himself or someone from his team, who were evidently spying on the campaign of the Democratic candidate?

Manafort represents corrupt lobbying par excellence. He sells influence to benefit himself, but his ambition on behalf of himself and his family took him farther than Washington, to countries as strange and faraway as the Philippines, Nigeria, Somalia, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine. But they had something in common − autocrats in need of the advice of a U.S. strategist, of a renowned star in the art of selling influence and creating images in the capital of the United States.

Franklin Foer, writer for the monthly magazine The Atlantic, published an extraordinary article last March that details Manafort’s meteoric career. At the beginning of the 1980s, he was part of the transition team for Ronald Reagan, since he had been part of the campaign. Restless and with enormous ambition, he quickly left a government position to create his own lobbying and political consulting firm − Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.

The firm introduced an innovation. It broke with the tradition of keeping lobbying separate from electoral strategic advising. That is to say, Manafort’s office began to lobby the same politicians that he was successful in raising to the highest positions of power in Washington. A marvelous business without moral shame. Foer’s article explains in detail the insatiable thirst of Manafort and his family for extraordinary luxuries. A highly demanding daughter blackmails her father when she finds out that he is conducting an extramarital affair.

One of the first foreign clients was the controversial Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in the mid-1980s. Facing the national and international disrepute of this Filipino, Manafort orchestrated a presidential election that, thanks to electoral fraud, Marcos won with a high percentage [of votes]. Manafort's strategy was that a generous win would grant legitimacy to the Filipino.

He also established a working relationship with Abdul Rahman al-Assir, the well-known arms trafficker, which allowed him to expand his global portfolio and start communicating with great Russian oligarchs like Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Vladimir Putin and was recently sanctioned by Washington. Once in the Kremlin, Manafort met a Ukrainian politician within the Russian orbit, Yanukovych. With Manafort’s advice, Yanukovych became president of Ukraine in 2010. For his services, Manafort received tens of millions of dollars. But at his zenith he would find his downfall. At the point of being defeated, Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Manafort not only lost his King Midas but the new government of Ukraine denounced him. On returning to the United States, defeated and discredited, Manafort managed to move closer to the most heterodox and promising of the Republican candidates for the White House, Trump.

Manafort's current trial is focused on fraud. Still, it will be key to Mueller’s investigation, because there is more than enough evidence that he is someone central to understanding the connections between Russian election interference and the efforts of Trump and his team to defeat Clinton.

Manafort’s professional career represents the worst of the swamp of corruption and intrigue that has made its nest in Washington since its foundation. It is paradoxical that Trump, who supposedly was elected to drain the swamp, gave him his latest opportunity. It is even more paradoxical that Trump may sink down with Manafort, the king of the swamp, if Mueller finds evidence of collusion between Russian interference and Trump himself.