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.
y Mueller’s moves send message to other potential targets: Beware, I’m coming
“Who else is cooperating that we don’t know about? That’s what people in the White House need to be worried about.’’
.. Toomey called the indictment of Manafort and Gates “extraordinarily intricate’’ and said it will put “enormous pressure’’ on the defendants to cooperate
.. The indictment even seems to go out of its way to kneecap a standard defense argument in such cases — that the defendant got bad advice from his accountant. The indictment charges that Manafort wrote specifically to his accountant that he did not have foreign bank accounts.
.. Nick Akerman, a former assistant special Watergate prosecutor, said the court filings “all spell bad news for President Trump.’’
Akerman said he could not see any defense to the Manafort indictment.
“He has no choice but to plead guilty. That’s what the indictment says to me,’’ he said. “The only defense that you’ve got is to go in there and start singing like a canary to avoid jail time. And once he starts singing, one of the tunes is bound to be Donald Trump.’’
.. What’s striking about the indictment, Nanavati said, is the number of people who worked for Manafort — accountants, lawyers and others — who provided key evidence against him.
.. And unidentified lobbying firms indirectly hired by Manafort, he said, “are in significant trouble’’ because of the written exchanges referenced in the indictment alleging that some people at the firms were aware that Manafort was lying about their work together.
.. Nanavati said a key change in U.S. tax enforcement that began in 2008 — going after foreign bank accounts controlled by Americans — probably played an important role in the case against Manafort.
Before the Justice Department started cracking through the layers of Swiss banking secrecy that hid Americans’ accounts in 2008, he said, the requirement on Americans to declare foreign bank accounts was on the books but “basically, nobody ever did it, and almost no one ever got prosecuted for it. That changed in 2008, and tax return preparers started asking.’’
Former Trump Foreign Policy Adviser Pleads Guilty to Lying to FBI
George Papadopoulos misled FBI about timing of contacts with a professor tied to Russian officials
George Papadopoulos admitted he misled the FBI in a January interview by telling agents that he had only interacted with the professor before joining the Trump campaign. That professor has “substantial connections to Russian government officials” and was offering “dirt” on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
In fact, Mr. Papadopoulos met with the professor in March 2016 after learning he was joining the campaign, court documents say. The professor only took an interest in Mr. Papadopoulos because of his status on the campaign, according to the documents.
In April 2016, the professor told Mr. Papadopoulos about “thousands of emails” related to Mrs. Clinton.
.. After that March meeting, Mr. Papadopoulos emailed Trump campaign officials to say he had just met with his “good friend” the professor, who had introduced him to an individual described in the email as the niece of Russian President Vladimir Putin
General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He’ll Drag You Down
He even seemed to explain how the president’s phone call to the widow of a Green Beret killed in Niger got garbled.
.. Trump needs to know that it is now your way or the highway — not his. That is how you talk to a bully. It’s the only language he understands.Tell him: No more
- ridiculous tweeting attacks on people every morning; no more
- telling senators who forge bipartisan compromises on immigration or health care that he’s with them one day and against them the next; no more
- casual lying; no more
- feeding the base white supremacist “red meat” — no more
- distracting us from the real work of forging compromises for the American people and no more
- eroding the American creed.
.. if you can’t together force Trump onto an agenda of national healing and progress, then you should together tell him that he can govern with his kids and Sanders — because you took an oath to defend the Constitution, not to wipe up Trump’s daily filth with the uniform three of you wore so honorably.