Part of what we’ve learned from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s latest indictments from this past Friday concerning Paul Manafort and Rick Gates is the extrapolation of a narrative from data that’s been trickling out in bits for the past year or so but not pulled together so succinctly as what Mueller can do now.
As reported on the Rachel Maddow Show Friday, Manafort has been an unregistered foreign agent working since 2006 for the Ukrainian government that has been supported by Putin and Russia. Utilizing “fake news”, propaganda, and cyber warfare, Manafort became known as the master of the political “dark arts” associated with the usurpation of an independent Ukrainian government by a Russian puppet, techniques which he honed and perfected prior to their unleashing on a largely unsuspecting American democracy. The same tools of social media and the internet that connect people across the globe and enhance democracy, manipulated by Russian intelligence and focused data analysis (see Cambridge Analytics and don’t forget Robert Mercer), were used to attack the 2016 election and subvert that same democracy. We’ll be dealing with that little bit of irony for a long time
Manafort and Gates each pocketed millions of dollars, much of which was laundered through banks associated not only with the Russian Mafia and oligarchs, but with Trump, his family, and members of his cabinet; I’m thinking of Wilbur Ross here for one. Those fraudulently obtained millions in cash funded a lavish lifestyle of mansions with closets full of hundreds of suits, for instance, purchased in bulk prices up to $35,000 dollars at a whack through offshore accounts to escape paying taxes. While these criminal actions are what Mueller has been able to document with plenty of evidence once he was on Manafort’s trail, Manafort still found himself in need of legitimate appearing cash in late 2015 and early 2016. But the Russian connection was closed to Manafort after he got too much into hock to the oligarchs.
As Maddow reported, Manafort desperately but unsuccessfully sought loans until March 2016 when he approached the Trump campaign, which he offered to run without pay. A man in millions of dollars of debt to the Russians who can’t find a loan in the U.S. no matter how hard he doctors the loan applications and misrepresents his assets and worth offers to go to work full time for Donald Trump for free. No need to pay him.
What he offered was his vast experience in Ukrainian politics, which he described as an expertise in “rounding up” votes, in exchange for the opportunity to get Donald Trump elected—for free. Besides he already lived in Trump Tower—Fifth floor—so he would not even have a commute.
With that, this unregistered foreign agent, which really means he was a pro-Putin agent working to win the Ukrainian election for the pro-Russian regime there, and to whom he was in debt despite a $10 million dollar annual contract for the past ten years, joined the Donald Trump for President campaign, along with his right hand man Rick Gates, who stayed well past the campaign and election and remained with the Trump administration after the inauguration. Besides “rounding up” votes at the Republican Convention, Manafort got the Platform committee to reword a plank concerning Ukraine to be more favorable to the Russian position. The list of internal moves associated with Manafort involving Trump’s position on things Russian is perhaps beyond knowing at this time to anyone but Mueller. We know that Manafort sought to use his position and leverage within Trump’s campaign to “make [himself] whole” again with the oligarchs. Wikileaks. The DNC. The missing emails.
We’ll no doubt learn more details about those things as Gates testifies state’s evidence against Manafort, but clearly, at this point, it’s as valid to call Paul Manafort and Rick Gates both “Russian agents” as it is “unregistered foreign agents.” When a Russian agent is interfering with a legitimate U. S. election by way of running the Republican candidate’s campaign, including utilizing data from servers in Trump Tower that communicated directly with Russian owned banks (and therefore essentially with Putin) that was weaponized by Cambridge Analytics (Kushner), then fed to Russian “troll farms” to unleash precisely targeted propaganda on the unaware electorate . . . well, I’d call that collusion in a conspiracy against the United States with all the incumbent breaking of laws related to elections.
Donald “Ain’t no Russians around here” Trump keeps saying there’s NO COLLUSION with Russia. Sure there was. And Manafort was the “Russian”.