Papers were recorded that same day creating a shell company controlled by Mr. Manafort that soon received $13 million in loans from two businesses with ties to Mr. Trump, including one that partners with a Ukrainian-born billionaire and another led by a Trump economic adviser. They were among $20 million in loans secured by properties belonging to Mr. Manafort and his wife.
.. Mr. Manafort never filed lobbying registrations for his work in Ukraine that would have disclosed his compensation. Such registrations are necesssary for activities that involve influencing policy and public opinion in the United States, and some of Mr. Manafort’s Ukraine work appeared to fall into that category. Anti-corruption officials in Ukraine say $12.7 million in “off the books” cash payments were earmarked for him
.. Mr. Manafort has previously claimed the ledger is a fake. On Wednesday, he issued a statement that did not dispute the ledger entries, but suggested that any payments he received were legal because they were not made in cash.
.. In one text written in 2015, Ms. Manafort, a lawyer, called her father’s activities in Ukraine “legally questionable,”
.. “Don’t fool yourself,” Ms. Manafort wrote. “That money we have is blood money.”
.. The New York Times reported in February that Mr. Artemenko worked behind the scenes with Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer, and Felix H. Sater, a former business associate of Mr. Trump’s, to relay a proposed Ukrainian-Russian peace plan to the White House.
To Charm Trump, Paul Manafort Sold Himself as an Affordable Outsider
Paul Manafort is the rarest of professional pitchmen: one who knows how to sell to a salesman.
.. The letters and memos provide a telling glimpse into how Mr. Trump invited an enigmatic international fixer .. to the apex of his campaign with a minimum of vetting. The answer? Through family and friends, handshakes and hyperbole.
.. the memos that described Mr. Manafort in terms that Mr. Trump would like, calling him “the most experienced and lethal of managers” and “a killer.”
.. Manafort urged the recalcitrant candidate to restrain his attacks on fellow Republicans, to stick to a script and, above all, to spend more money on organizing and ads.
.. Mr. Trump thought Mr. Manafort was not tough enough
.. He began by telling the candidate he lived on an upper floor of Trump Tower. This was no trivial point: It signaled his wealth and a willingness to work 15-hour days in a building that housed both his lavish apartment and Mr. Trump’s bare-bones campaign. It also meant Mr. Manafort had already put his money — in the form of an apartment purchase — into Mr. Trump’s brand, which meant a lot to the candidate, a transactional developer and politician, aides said.
Mr. Manafort’s friendship with Mr. Barrack, the private equity investor, helped, too. Mr. Barrack, who did not respond to a request for comment, is one of the few people whom Mr. Trump trusts.
.. Mr. Manafort cast himself as a onetime insider who had turned on the establishment — and a tough guy who would go after Mr. Trump’s harshest critics among the Republican elite.
.. At one point, he described Karl Rove, a former adviser to George W. Bush who was organizing an anti-Trump effort, as “my blood enemy in politics, going back to the College in the 1960s.”
.. a bitter fight for leadership of the College Republicans that pitted a candidate backed by Mr. Manafort and his close friend Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant, against Mr. Rove and Lee Atwater.
.. cast himself as a warrior against the party’s conservatives, even at a time when Mr. Trump was reaching out to the right wing and courting evangelical Christians
.. “I have had to confront the Extreme Right, Tea Party, Rush Limbaughs etc.”
Corruption Currents: Manafort-Linked Accounts in Cyprus Raised Red Flags
The questions surrounding Paul Manafort continue: The Cypriot attorney general said the country’s anti-money-laundering unit handed documents involving bank accounts linked to him to U.S. investigators; a spokesman said the accounts were for legitimate business purposes. All-cash real-estate purchases he made in New York have received attention; he denied wrongdoing. (Quartz, NBC, NBC, WNYC)
‘There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air’
The greatest political scandal in American history was not Aaron Burr’s shooting of Alexander Hamilton, and perhaps wasn’t even Watergate. Rather it may have been Richard Nixon’s secret efforts in 1968 to sabotage a U.S. diplomatic effort to end the Vietnam War.
.. This is guesswork, but it might have seemed natural for Trump aides to try to milk Russian contacts for useful information about the Clinton campaign. Likewise, the Russians despised Hillary Clinton and would have been interested in milking American contacts for information about how best to damage her chances.
.. The Associated Press reports that Manafort had secretly worked for a Russian billionaire close to Putin, signing a $10-million-a-year contract in 2006 to promote the interests of the Putin government. The arrangement lasted at least until 2009.
.. At some point, I suspect, members of the Trump team gained knowledge of Russian hacking into Clinton emails, which would explain why Trump friend Roger Stone tweeted things like “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
.. Treason isn’t necessarily spelled out as a quid pro quo, and it wasn’t when Nixon tried to sink the Vietnam peace initiative in 1968.
.. Republicans should replace Nunes as head of the House Intelligence Committee; he can’t simultaneously be Trump’s advocate and his investigator.