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.
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.’’
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.