This piece from Josh Kovensky about Manafort is epic. Switch over to read the whole thing. I didn’t know even half of this:
Entertain this scenario for a minute: there’s a country sitting on a geopolitical fault line between the U.S. and one of its main adversaries, Russia.
Its population is becoming increasingly pro-western; its governing and business elite largely remains beholden to Russia.
After years of fraudulent elections, a politician with a mafia past, widely seen as a stooge for Russia, comes to power in this contested country. The rise of The Stooge is seen as a breakthrough moment for Russia, a roadblock in the path of the country toward closer ties with the West.
And yet, an American political consultant and insider in the traditionally hawkish Republican Party, who has worked with anti-communist guerillas around the world, has been quietly working his way into the inner circle of The Stooge and his backers. Once The Stooge is in power, The Consultant sets to work. Once in place, he works to whitewash The Stooge’s worst abuses and corruption, but all for a greater goal: persuading both The Stooge and a neighboring multi-state western polity that now is, in fact, the perfect time for the country in question to sign treaties cementing its move not toward Russia, but westward.
By this point in the story, you may have a guess about which country we’re describing, and even, perhaps, who that consultant was. This is an unfamiliar way of telling one version of the story of Ukraine in the run-up to its 2014 revolution, and of Paul Manafort’s role in it as adviser to President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled after being deposed amid the tumult. It’s the version Manafort, convicted in a case stemming from the Mueller investigation and later pardoned by Trump, would like you to believe. And, it’s one that we may be hearing more of — and which has increased relevance given Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a last-ditch, violent effort to gather Ukraine’s lands into Russia’s immense embrace before it could slip away into the west. As Ukraine’s spirited defense begins to falter amid a GOP hold on U.S.-supplied ammunition, Manafort is making his return to the limelight. Per multiple stories this week, Manafort is expected to officially reenter Trump’s orbit this year as a campaign adviser, potentially taking on a fundraising role just as multiple court cases have left Trump strapped for cash.
I’ve covered Manafort extensively for TPM and, before that, for the Kyiv Post in Ukraine. He’s a fascinating and unique figure who’s work has done more to shape the past decade and a half of American history than is commonly understood, largely via his up-close involvement in Ukrainian politics before its 2014 revolution. It’s that revolution which set Ukraine on a course westward, prompted Russian military aggression, and fatally poisoned ties between Washington and Moscow for the past decade. And while its clear Manafort was a key character in the story, the exact nature of what, exactly, he was up to, remains shrouded in questions.
From Russia’s perspective, Manafort may not seem quite so deserving of the pro-Putin branding that he’s received in the West. The covert lobbying scheme he was eventually prosecuted for was overtly aimed not at keeping Ukraine within Russia’s orbit, but at instead pressuring western officials and Ukraine’s leadership into signing an association deal with the European Union.
At the same time, and as subsequent years showed, he brought tons of baggage along with him: he lacked liquidity, and was seeking millions of dollars he said he was owed from Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska (Deripaska says that Manafort owed him money). There was also a lot from Ukraine which could damage his reputation. In the mid-2010s, as Manafort reemerged in American politics, his name was found on a supposed bribe ledger which appeared in Kyiv; his daughter’s phone was hacked, revealing embarrassing personal details. Several of his close associates in Ukraine would later be accused by western governments of being on the payroll of Russian intelligence; Manafort himself was later found to have given a close associate, allegedly a Russian spy, internal Trump campaign polling data in August 2016 which eventually made its way to Russian intelligence services. That associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, would in 2021 be labeled a “Russian agent” and sanctioned by the Treasury Department.
During the Trump administration, as the Mueller investigation ramped up, Manafort was uniquely creative in finding ways to block law enforcement from determining what had happened. He successfully used encrypted messaging apps to delete messages, placing them beyond recovery; after being convicted on multiple fraud charges, he admitted to the unregistered lobbying campaign, before pulling a brazen move: he lied to prosecutors during the period of his supposed cooperation, preventing them from getting to the bottom of his involvement. That may have also allowed Manafort to become not a cooperator, but a kind of spy; his lawyers reportedly fed Trump’s legal team information about the Mueller investigation.
But throughout all the murkiness and knottiness in his biography, one quality stands out: Manafort is a savvy dealmaker. Everyone has a price, everything can be traded; all that matters is a link to people in influence. It’s a rough-and-tumble mixture of business and politics which flourished in the countries left behind after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Closely examining Manafort’s career unveils a byzantine story, a hall of mirrors which bears the hallmark of any good spy tale: its characters all master the interstitial space between one side and the other, where they can maintain the kind of fundamental ambiguity that allows them to project plausible allegiance to any actor. That’s the ambiguity which Manafort exploits for his central defense to the charge that he was working for a pro-Russian politician in Ukraine, or for a Russian oligarch. Rather, Manafort claims that he remained committed to American interests through that work, in spite of how unsavory his clients may have been. At one point, his zeal for allowing market forces to guide his political consulting landed him in Angola, working for anti-communist guerilla Jonas Savimbi.
“There was no way I was going to, all of a sudden, change a lifetime of work against communism, the Soviet Union, and now Putin,” Manafort wrote in a 2022 memoir.
Uh huh. Click over to read the rest of this and ask yourself how it can possibly be that this traitorous monster will be working in the US presidential election again. Oh my God.