A Desperate, Desperate Man
This post covers some ground we’ve covered before. But the Manafort trial and the various documents its producing throw this fact into much sharper relief, as does President Trump’s little-concealed rage and panic over the trial.
In 2015 and 2016 Paul Manafort was a desperate man. The source of most of his income and wealth had been driven from power in 2014. It took a while for the cut-off of funds to really kick in. It also probably took a while before it became totally clear that Viktor Yanukovych wasn’t coming back. At the end of 2014, his daughters (and eventually his wife) found out about an affair he was carrying on. There were teary-phone calls, threats of suicide. The Manaforts went into couples therapy but Paul kept up the affair. He was caught again and by late 2015 he’d entered a clinic in Arizona for what his daughter described as a “massive emotional breakdown.” (The best narrative of this and much else in the Manafort story comes from Frank Foer’s March article in The Atlantic.)
Through this period and escalating into 2016, Manafort was in severe financial distress. Much of this has been retold and expanded upon in the government’s case in the Eastern Virginia trial. Manafort’s financial empire was collapsing. He was trying to borrow money to stave off catastrophe. But he had to lie about his financial situation to get the loans. In other words, he was committing bank fraud.
It is as all this is building that Manafort gets in touch with Tom Barrack for help getting a job with Trump. The precise dates have always been elusive. (If others have more documented details, please let me know.) Manafort’s first pitch to Trump was at the end of February 2016. But the process began earlier. “A couple weeks earlier”, according to the Times, Manafort had met in LA with Barrack to help broker his approach. Put the details together and it appears that Manafort’s first approach to Barrack, an old friend, come more or less right after he gets out of the in-patient mental health clinic in Arizona. And remember, his key pitch is that he’s willing to work for free. His financial world is collapsing and he wants to work for free.
The obvious suspicion is that he was being paid by someone else or being threatened. That’s a pretty good suspicion. In fairness, it’s not the only way to make sense of his actions. Manafort had made his whole professional life Ukraine. For him, Ukraine had basically disappeared. He needed something new. Getting rejuiced in US politics, even if he didn’t get paid directly, made sense. If Trump had won and Manafort didn’t get enveloped in scandal he’d be getting an avalanche of lobbying money. Still, it’s highly suspicious. There is also a good deal of evidence he was trying to get rejuiced in US politics to up his value to people in the former Soviet Union. That’s the import of that email about using his gig with Trump to make himself ‘whole’.
What stands out to me about this is that Manafort in the critical period is an almost cinematic, noir figure. He’s desperate for money. He’s desperate to keep his family from falling apart. He’s at best emotionally fragile. He’s being blackmailed by people in Ukraine threatening to expose the scandalous sides of his work for Yanukovych and Russia. He’s got an oligarch with a bad reputation after him for $20 million he owes him. We know these characters from books and movies. Almost like an expressionist painting coming to life, distorted and cut apart by fear and desperation or a febrile and over-drawn character in a Scorsese movie. That such a person could move so rapidly into such a position of power is remarkable. And his desperation only grew as the campaign wore on.
Such a man is almost comically vulnerable to blackmail, extortion, crossing any number of lines. In what would be one of the world’s greatest coincidences, just as Vladimir Putin and his cronies were mounting a campaign to influence and subvert the 2016 election, there’s Paul Manafort, appearing in charge of the Republican nominees campaign. What luck! He is certainly the man with the most experience on the planet manipulating the US political world on behalf of the same paymasters near Putin. And there he is.