Last week, Tony Podesta, an eminence in the annals of Washington lobbying, threw one of his signature events, a big birthday bash at his stately stone manse in Kalorama. His guests thought he was on top of his world, one of the men who makes the city go.
On Monday, hours after the first indictments in the investigation into ties between President Trump’s campaign and the Russian government, Podesta abruptly quit his post atop the Podesta Group, the capital’s eighth-wealthiest lobbying firm.
.. raised questions about the work Podesta’s firm did with Manafort to buff the image of the Ukrainian government.
.. “It is impossible to run a public affairs firm while you are under attack by Fox News and the right wing media,”
.. For decades, Tony and John Podesta — brothers who share a Jesuit education, a devotion to liberal causes and a passion for politics — have been central players in Washington. And in the past year, both have been drawn into the orbit of scandals.
.. Tony’s Podesta Group is one of two firms described in Monday’s indictment as having been recruited by Manafort and Gates to lobby on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych
.. Both the Podesta Group and the other firm, Mercury Public Affairs, have said they were hired to lobby for a European nonprofit based in Brussels trying to polish Ukraine’s image in the West. But behind the scenes, prosecutors allege, the real client was a political party led by the former Ukraine president, who was friendly with Russia.
.. To their opponents, the Podestas are quintessential swamp rats, exemplars of the permanent Washington establishment. Their defenders, however, view them as the oil that makes the gears of government turn.
.. Tony Podesta has been a pivotal figure in the murky connections between policy and politics, becoming wealthy on fees from industries and foreign entities that want something from Congress and the White House. He also bundles big donations and dispenses them to politicians who might someday be helpful to those lobbying clients.
.. the Podesta Group, representing some of the country’s biggest and most powerful businesses, including Walmart, Bank of America and BP.
.. This year, the firm’s top clients are Mylan, a pharmaceutical company; Wells Fargo; Crawford Group, the parent of Enterprise car rentals; and Lockheed Martin
.. Along the way, the firm also represented a number of foreign entities, including the government of Egypt under ex-dictator Hosni Mubarak.
.. “More and more, foreign countries turn to lobbyists to do work that diplomats once did themselves,”
Did Russia teach Paul Manafort all its dirty tricks?
Manafort is alleged to have laundered money, to have cheated on taxes and to have lied about his clientele. All of this he did in order to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” according to the indictment. Among other things it is alleged that he spent $1,319,281 of his money, illegally hidden from the U.S. Treasury, to pay a home lighting and entertainment company in Florida; to purchase $934,350 worth of rugs at a shop in Virginia; and to drop $655,500 on a landscaper in the Hamptons.
.. Some will find it ironic that Manafort did all of this while coaching candidate Donald Trump to run an “anti-elite” election campaign, one directed at “draining the swamp” and cleaning up Washington.
But in fact, this is exactly the kind of tactic that Manafort perfected on behalf of Russia, in Ukraine, where he worked for more than a decade.
.. in 2006, when he brought dozens of American political consultants to Ukraine to assist in an ethnically charged election that pit Russian and Ukrainian speakers against one another, in an attempt to help Russia retain influence over the country.
.. In 2010, he was one of several advisers — the others were mostly Russians — who helped remake the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the ex-con whom the Russian government then supported for president of Ukraine. Yanukovych charged the sitting government with corruption, declared that the election would be “rigged” and finally won.
.. The exploitation of ethnic tension; the dislike of NATO; the constant talk of opponents’ corruption, whether warranted or not; the shouting about falsified elections — these were Trump tactics, too
.. And he sought to undermine Ukraine’s constitution, first subtly and then openly.
.. For a long time now, a part of the U.S. political and business class has been merging, ideologically and aesthetically, with its post-Soviet counterparts. The use of shell companies and Cypriot bank accounts; the over-the-top spending on clothes and houses; the profoundly cynical manipulation of ethnic or racial divides to win elections — these behaviors are now common to a particular set of sleazy operators on two continents. If this indictment is correct, Manafort is the living embodiment of this Russian-American convergence.
Mueller Drains the Swamp
The Manafort charges are an indictment of a Washington that disgusts Americans.
Tony Podesta resigned so that he could address his firm’s involvement with Mr. Manafort’s firm while lobbying on behalf of then-Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych on, for example, “the propriety of imprisoning” his presidential rival. Yanukovych lives in exile in Russia now.
.. Robert Mueller is opening a drain on the Swamp.
.. That Tony Podesta would jump off the Swamp luxury liner called the Podesta Group suggests the seriousness of the threat Mr. Mueller could pose to the Washington economy.
Any conceivable legal exposure of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, almost certainly is about possible violations while engaged in lobbying work, rather than the standard collusion narrative.
.. When all this is over, President Trump will be seen as one of the greatest political naïfs to come down the Beltway pike in a long time.
.. The largely unheralded Trump effort to reduce regulation—in energy, the environment, land use, education, finance, telecommunications—won’t kill the Swamp but should shrink it.
Trump’s Sellout of American Heritage
For the U.S.A. has the greatest home for sockeye salmon on the planet in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. The Trump administration is putting it at risk in order to aid a foreign mining conglomerate.
This American carnage is led by a man whose job is to protect the natural world within our borders, the E.P.A. administrator, Scott Pruitt. As you may have heard, he has sealed himself off from the public with a $25,000 phone security system and an 18-member security detail. It took a court order to pry loose some of the details of his meetings. No surprise, he holds daily lap-dog sessions with the companies he is supposed to regulate.
Pruitt is the swamp, the only wetland the Trump administration wants to protect. He serves the oil, chemical and mining interests that propped him up when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. He now runs the oil, chemical and mining protection agency out of Washington, with our money.
.. National monuments — not the Confederate kind that Trump wants to preserve, but special places protected in somewhat the same way as national parks — are also in his sights.
.. Half the world’s wild sockeye come from this magical place, a bounty that supports 14,000 jobs. Alaskans are a cantankerous bunch who can’t agree on much of anything. Yet they voted by an overwhelming margin in 2014 to protect Bristol Bay from a gold and copper mine that could generate 10 billion tons of toxic waste.
And unlike big food producers in the heartland, the Bristol Bay salmon industry is not propped up by subsidies, chemicals or compromised politicians.