I have a few questions for Trump campaign, before we move past this whole unfortunate Manafort imbroglio.
Presumably, the big news today that Paul Manafort has resigned from the Trump administration is an effort to decisively put to bed a whole set of issues that have been swirling around the Trump campaign recently. Not the least of which are Trump’s underperformance in the polls both during and after the RNC convention, and also the question of Manafort’s continued role on the Trump campaign in the wake of its “shakeup that is not a shakeup” — Trump’s counterintuitive jump from the frying pan to the fire with his hiring of Breitbart’s Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway.
Of course, the really big item that the Trump campaign wants to put behind it with Manafort’s departure is his highly unsavory connections to the Putin administration: the NY Times story demonstrating the existence of a ledger showing what appear to be off-the books payments to Manfort by Victor Yanukovych, the exiled pro-Putin dictator of Ukraine; the recent revelation that Manafort orchestrated anti-NATO protests as part of his shady work as a foreign operative; and who knows what other items are still being pored over by investigative reporters at the NY Times and the Washington Post.
The Trump campaign seems to be learning a lesson from the whole Lewandowski affair: with that guy, it took the Trump campaign several months, following Lewandowski’s assault of a reporter, to decide to let him go — and let him go probably only because Trump’s offspring plunked Trump down in front of Lewandowski to definitively prove to him that the guy didn’t know what he was doing. Ultimately, his incompetence trumped (natch) his morality as a reason to let him go.
So this time, it only took Trump a week following the NY Times “ledger” report (and, yes, countless months after the first insinuations of Manafort’s unsavory connections to Russia) to let him go. That’s record time for damage control on the Trump campaign.
But I’m not really prepared to let the whole thing go. And if I were, say, a high-profile investigative reporter at the NY times or the Washington Post, I’d still find myself wanting to ask the following three questions of the Trump campaign:
1) How did Manafort’s involvement, or the involvement of other pro-Putin connections on Trump’s staff, lead to the alteration of the GOP convention platform? Why did Trump’s people seek to soften language regarding American support for the Ukraine in the wake of Putin’s war of aggression?
2) How did Manafort’s involvement, or the involvement of other pro-Putin connections on Trump’s staff, lead to Trump’s ambiguous words on NATO, his weird statements about Putin not going into Crimea, and his other pro-Putin comments throughout the campaign?
3) Can the Trump campaign release his income tax returns and financial records, so as to reassure all of us that his company’s financing (in the absence of American bank loans, denied because of Trump’s lack of creditworthiness) can in fact not be sourced to Russian oligarchs?
I really think that this is the bare minimum that we all should demand to know from Trump before Manafort returns to his gig propping up corrupt oligarchs and brutal dictators.