Month: September 2018

Ten years and a lost generation ago
by Tom Sullivan

Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York City on September 15, 2008. Photo by Robert Scoble, CC by 2.0.

It could have been different. It wasn’t. Ten years ago this weekend, Lehman Brothers collapsed triggering the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Nearly 9 million lost jobs in the Great Recession. Millions lost their homes.

Wall Street got richer.

Several articles this weekend examine what happened then, what happened after, and importantly, why little has changed.

You know the basic story. Banks got greedy and careless. Regulators under Republican and Democratic administrations looked the other way. When the mortgage market Ponzi scheme came crashing down around America’s ears, as the saying goes, the banks got the elevator and the rest of us got the shaft.

Matt Taibbi debunks a couple of the myths surrounding the crisis and the bailouts for Rolling Stone. The bank bailouts were not intended to save capitalism, no. “The deal those bankers cooked up was to save the banks from capitalism.” Actions taken in Washington to save the financial sector were a “world-war-level mobilization of cash, a generation of savings used to plug a single hole.”

Now the banks have an implicit guarantee from the government to bail them out whatever happens, Taibbi writes. That contributes an incalculable amount to their soaring profits:

Out there, in foreclosure – er, flyover – country, the only way out of the crisis was a big hit. You either foreclosed and lost your credit rating forever, or you sold your home, usually the chief investment in your life, at a gigantic loss. But a major principle of the bailout is that the banks never had to take any losses at all. Not one cent.

Only after the election of Donald Trump did former Fed chief Ben Bernanke get a clue that “the rich getting richer for eight straight years did not please voters.” Taibbi continues:

Economists, he now said, may actually have a “responsibility” to address inequities in the economy, which he conceded might have been caused by a “proclivity toward top-down, rather than bottom-up, policies.”

Imagine how dense you’d have to be to need 10 years, and the election of Donald Trump, to realize this.

These are the people who got Trump elected. Popular media myths may insist otherwise, but people in charge have to be this clueless and arrogant in order for “Anyone but…” to have real ballot appeal.

David Dayen examines actions Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner took to circumvent Obama’s desire to downsize and restructure Citi. Like the resistance inside the Trump administration, Geithner stalled and saved Citi instead:

The statistics of the era speak to this inequity. In Obama’s first term, the top one percent took more than all of the gains from the economy after the crisis. Meanwhile, at least 9.3 million families lost their homes to foreclosure due to the mortgage meltdown. For many Americans, the financial and psychological damage will be lifelong. But banks weathered the storm well, and this year posted record profits.

Zach Carter presents his own take and a warning at Huffington Post:

Today, Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner insist they did what they had to under conditions of extreme duress. Mistakes were made, the government’s former top financial overseers acknowledge in a recent piece for The New York Times, but they did ultimately “prevent the collapse of the financial system and avoid another Great Depression.”

Except they didn’t really rescue the banking system. They transformed it into an unaccountable criminal syndicate. In the years since the crash, the biggest Wall Street banks have been caught laundering drug money, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and Cuba, bribing foreign government officials, making illegal campaign contributions to a state regulator and manipulating the market for U.S. government debt. Citibank, JPMorgan, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and UBS even pleaded guilty to felonies for manipulating currency markets.

Not a single human being has served a day in jail for any of it.

Average Americans got angrier.

As for lessons learned, Carter explains, Americans learned who did and didn’t count in the land of e pluribus unum. Banks continued paying bonuses after the rest of us bailed them out.

It could have been different. When Obama took office, he promised to spend up to $100 billion from the bank bailout to prevent foreclosures. He ultimately spent just $21 billion. But the dollar amount was only a fraction of the failure. The bailout gave the government unprecedented authority over the foreclosure process ― it could have required banks to adjust monthly payments or reduce debt burdens for homeowners in distress. Instead, as Geithner put it, the foreclosure relief plan was designed to “foam the runway” for banks coming in for a hard landing. It allowed banks to slow down the pace of foreclosures, but did not actually help families keep their homes.

German economists studying the effects of 20 financial crises dating back to 1870 found “they almost always result in major gains for ‘far right’ political parties after a lag of a few years.” Elsewhere, far right parties have gained ground. Here, we elected a white nationalist.

Because the half of families irreparably harmed by the financial crisis were black and Hispanic. They lost half their net worth. Black frustration with the Democratic Party results in low voter turnout. Angry white people, Carter continues, turn more Republican:

An increasingly racist GOP doesn’t offer much to black families, so they stay home on election day, while plenty of white Democrats were either willing to hold their nose and vote for Trump, or found his demagoguery more appealing once Democrats had privileged the concerns of banking elites over the middle class.

Prosecuting Paul Manafort for his white-collar crimes is too little, too late. People have lost faith in democracy itself. If there is any window for restoring that faith in the near-term, it is a small one.

But there are signs at least some Democrats in power (just not enough of it) have figured out why they got skunked in 2010, 2014, and 2016. Now they need to get serious about in FUBARing what their own actions helped FUBAR in the first place. That means more than attacking the corruption among their conservative counterparts. It will take more than attacking the systemic corruption inside the Beltway, but that on Wall Street as well.

This country was born of a revolution to overthrow domination by a foreign aristocracy. It may only be saved by attacking a homegrown one head-on.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

I don’t feel tardy: A back-to-school mixtape

By Dennis Hartley  

Another billionaire checks out

by digby

After former Democratic President Barack Obama made a quiet stop in Columbus on Thursday night, the wealthiest Republican supporter in the state told a small audience at a Downtown event that he is fed up and has quit the Republican Party.

“I just decided I’m no longer a Republican,” said L Brands CEO Leslie H. Wexner, speaking during a panel discussion about civility at Miranova’s Ivory Room billed as a “Columbus Partnership and YPO Leadership Summit.”

“I’m an independent,” he said. “I won’t support this nonsense in the Republican Party. I’ve been a Republican since college, joined the Young Republican Club at Ohio State.

“I haven’t run an ad in the newspaper that said, ‘I quit,’” he told the gathering on Thursday. Instead, he’s been writing notes to his friends in elective office who are Republicans, telling them, “I want you to know that now I’m an independent.”

The event was jointly sponsored by the Columbus Partnership, a group of central Ohio’s most influential business leaders that Wexner chairs, and YPO (formerly Young Presidents’ Organization), a group of under-45 business leaders.

Obama stopped in Columbus before a rally in Cleveland Thursday night to support Democrat Richard Cordray’s run for governor.

The former president spoke on stage in Columbus with Alex Fischer, president and CEO of the Columbus Partnership, during a portion of the event that was closed to reporters.

The panel on which Wexner later spoke was moderated by political commentator David Gergen, a former adviser to presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. Panelists also included Mayor Andrew J. Ginther and Nancy Kramer, chief evangelist at IBM iX. It was attended by approximately 140 people.

When asked for her reaction to Wexner’s statement after the event, Kramer, a member of the Partnership, referred back to Obama’s comments. The former president urged listeners, she said, to focus on what they will do rather than who they are. Wexner, she said, was “making a statement about his belief systems.”

(…)

Wexner spoke warmly about Obama and about the theme of bipartisan civility, something he has been promoting in recent months. “It’s a great moment for the community,” he said of Obama’s rather secretive visit to Columbus before his Cleveland rally for Cordray. “I know he came here because of the Partnership and the things we have done, and the knowledge that civility is a priority for our community. He wanted to touch it and feel it for himself.

“I was struck by the genuineness of the man; his candor, humility and empathy for others,” Wexner said of Obama.

Those comments presented a stark contrast to Wexner’s comments about Republican President Donald Trump. A little over a year ago, the billionaire CEO said in a speech to L Brands employees that he felt “dirty” and “ashamed” following Trump’s response to violence that erupted at the Unite the Right rally that left one dead in Charlottesville in 2017.

Trump had said there were “very fine people” among the white nationalist protesters at that rally. On Thursday, Wexner recalled that incident, which he said caused him to lose sleep. “I have to do something because the leader of our country is behaving poorly,” Wexner recalled thinking.

Yes, yes, I know the Republicans have been terrible forever and they have. I mean, think about Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay! But for some Republicans Trump is the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I guess that’s better than nothing. But it’s really too bad about the camel.

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Meanwhile in Bizarro World

by digby

This is what the Deplorables think is happening:

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): This witch-hunt may actually be coming to an end sooner than we thought and there is one other reason that Mueller made this deal with Manafort today.

Now, to be very blunt, there is now in this country a cancer it is now growing on every single intelligence agency that we once respected in this country. We are now at a tipping point. As a result of all of the corruption, it’s taken a long time that we have exposed on this show, including all week this week, at the highest levels, corruption in the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA and even corruption leading straight from Steele, Christopher Steele to Bruce Ohr, right into Robert Mueller’s office.

Every single institution, main institutions of law enforcement in this country have been so tainted by corruption, so tainted by a desire to take down the president, if Mueller cares at all about the future integrity of these institutions, this all needs to come to an end.

Because these once great institutions tonight are hanging in the balance. And we have all the evidence to prove that they’ve been corrupt. A deep state, based on a deep hatred and deep bias.

This isn’t actually new. Back in the 50s the wingnuts all believed the government was crawling with commies. I guess this strain is always there. But it is laughable when you think about all their caterwauling about law and order and patriotism.

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Dancing as fast as he can

by digby

He’s not complicated:

“Two things motivate almost 100 percent of his behavior: self-preservation or self-aggrandizement,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “There never is a strategy because he’s not a strategic thinker.”

If such a simple creature is able to survive this glaring spotlight, it says more about America than it does about him.

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The Mueller machine

by digby

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Trump hasn’t tweeted a word about the Manafort plea. He’s very worried. And according to this Politico article, he should be. It appears to have been a very important moment in the investigation:

Friday’s legal action also provided a new window into the size and scope of Mueller’s investigation, underscoring the sheer legal firepower at the former FBI director’s command.

More than 20 members of the special counsel’s investigation team appeared in the second-floor courtroom Friday morning, where lead prosecutors Andrew Weissmann, Greg Andres and Brandon Van Grack were joined by a phalanx of FBI and IRS agents who did significant grunt work preparing for Manafort’s trial on charges of failing to register as a lobbyist for the government of Ukraine several years ago, before he joined Trump’s 2016 campaign.
[…]
In court Friday, Weissmann seemed to relish summarizing the rap sheet against Manafort. The longtime federal prosecutor, who has tried mafia dons and Enron executives, spent more than 30 minutes listing for a judge all the charges that Manafort initially fought but pleaded guilty to, from tampering with witnesses to failing to register his lobbying on behalf of Ukraine’s government during the Obama administration.

After he was done, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson joked that Weissmann had just given “probably the longest and most detailed summary” of charges she had heard in a plea hearing.

But in the absence of a trial, the presentation served to create a clear if less thorough public record of the wrongdoing Mueller’s team found.

The charges to which Manafort pleaded guilty do not involve Trump or his 2016 campaign. But the agreement does require Manafort to cooperate with prosecutors as they continue probing whether the Trump campaign conspired with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.

Manafort chaired Trump’s campaign during several moments central to the special counsel’s probe, including the public release of Democratic emails that U.S. intelligence officials say were hacked by Russians, and an infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Manafort also boasts a longtime relationship to a Russian oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, Oleg Deripaska, whom he offered to give private campaign briefings during the 2016 campaign. Mueller’s office has said that Manafort’s intermediary to Deripaska, Konstantin Kilimnik, who also served as the lobbyist’s right-hand man in Ukraine, has ties to Russian intelligence.

Kilimnik, who is believed to be in Russia, was to be a co-defendant in the trial. He is not known to have spoken to Mueller’s team.

The past several weeks revealed the breadth of Mueller’s work in other ways. More than a dozen witnesses during Manafort’s trial in Virginia acknowledged receiving subpoenas from the special counsel, demanding everything from television advertisement scripts to an invoice for a Mercedes Benz.

Mueller also demonstrated that he can tap at will into other federal law enforcement branches and their deep bench of experienced investigators when he needs specific kinds of help.

One has been Michael Welch, an IRS special agent whose has spent 25 years leading investigations into tax cheats. Two others are FBI forensic accountant Morgan Magionos and Paula Liss, a Treasury Department expert in fraud and money laundering. Both testified in the Virginia trial about how the Mueller team relied on their expertise to sift through millions of dollars in payments from secret foreign bank accounts.

The FBI is anchoring Mueller’s probe in other vital ways too. About 14 agents raided Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, condominium last summer to procure the financial documents and emails so central to the government charges. Special agents also went to the homes of bank executives who did business with Manafort for interviews. One of the contractors who did millions of dollars of work on Manafort’s homes described during last month’s trial meeting “for several hours with a very pleasant young lady from the FBI who went step by step, invoice by invoice, over detail of each invoice, matching it with each payment.”

Mueller’s thoroughness has upended the defense plans for other Trump loyalists. Lawyers for Flynn had maintained regular contact with the president’s attorneys until late November 2017, just a week before the former Trump national security adviser pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s prosecutors rather than face trial for lying to the FBI.

Mueller’s investigators also sicced federal prosecutors in New York on Cohen, whose guilty plea last month – on the same day as Manafort’s conviction in Virginia — rocked the president’s inner circle. Even after the FBI raided Cohen’s home, office and hotel room in April, Trump spoke by phone with his longtime fixer, who once said he’d take a bullet for the president. Rudy Giuliani, a personal attorney to Trump, didn’t signal until mid-May that Cohen was no longer representing Trump.

Those cases and others are earning Mueller’s team new praise as the latest cooperation agreement sinks in.

“The Manafort plea confirms what many observers knew from the outset — that Mueller had assembled a superb team of professional prosecutors who could track through complex financial transactions and figure out whether federal crimes have been committed,” said Philip Lacovara, an attorney who served on the Watergate special counsel team.

“The track record of convictions demonstrates that Mueller is systematically building his cases and charging only persons who have been caught dead to rights,” he added. “Manafort’s belated capitulation should signal anyone else charged by Mueller that there is little chance to escape.”

Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who attended Manafort’s Virginia trial, credited the Mueller team with securing the guilty plea and Manafort’s cooperation by redrafting their indictment against him to encompass all his misconduct in a single conspiracy against the U.S. charge while dismissing the remaining counts.

“This accomplished two goals — requiring him to admit to all of his criminal conduct while at the same time reducing his potential sentencing exposure because of the five-year statutory maximum for that count to provide an incentive to plead guilty,” she said.

Duke University law professor Samuel Buell, another federal prosecutor, said he’s most impressed by the Mueller team’s “incredible discipline with which they have been able to tune out and seal off everything around them and just do what federal prosecutors and FBI agents do.”

“So far, it’s as if Trump and his political operation practically don’t exist for them,” added Buell, who worked with Weissmann to prosecute the Enron case. “What is happening to Mueller’s targets is the same thing that has happened to hundreds of others, for years and years, when faced with experienced, talented, determined, and patient prosecutors and agents.”

“In those circumstances, federal criminal law wins almost every time,” he added. “These prosecutors knew that going in and they’ve kept their eyes on that ball.”

I’m not usually one to praise these sorts of things. Federal prosecutions are a relentless machine with unlimited power that’s often aimed at people who can’t fight back. But this case is something else. A foreign adversary sabotaging a US presidential campaign in order to install an unqualified cretinous moron is a bridge too far. Even if it weren’t my own country I would be alarmed that someone like Trump conspired with a foreign nation to seize the American presidency. The US is just too big, too important and too powerful to just let it go because “everybody does it.” This is different. The United States of America has the biggest nuclear arsenal and military in the world, it’s the center of the international economy and the existing world order. Maybe that’s all a bad thing. But it’s insane to think it’s a good idea to put an imbecile in charge of it. If Putin is behind all this I think it calls his sanity into question too.

If there was ever a case which was so important that it requires the full power of the federal police authority to investigate, this is the one, particularly when the suspects have an entire political party apparatus acting as accomplices for their own craven reasons.

All this police power brought to bear against a political leader is very scary in itself. But with the propaganda power of the growing fascist/corporate right and the willing aiding and abetting of the Republican party establishment, the rule of law is one of the few backstops against attacks on our creaky “democratic” system which is obviously tremendously vulnerable to manipulation by nefarious actors from within and without.

Lets face it, this is a scary moment that can send the country (and the world) off the rails in a dozen different ways.

Punchdrunk Trump

by digby

Oh look. Another book. And Trump’s not happy about this one either:

NEW YORK—President Trump on Friday disputed one of his longtime lawyer’s criticisms of his behavior and questioned whether a forthcoming book by Jay Goldberg runs afoul of lawyer-client privilege.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Trump suggested that Mr. Goldberg is unhappy that he wasn’t tapped for a White House role.

Mr. Trump cited economic gains, rising consumer confidence and a strengthening military as proof of a successful tenure and said, “I’ve had nothing but victories, so it’s sad that somebody you can’t take to Washington for obvious reasons wants to write a book.”

He added: “We’re hitting new records every day.”

Mr. Goldberg represented Mr. Trump in divorce cases involving two ex-wives, Ivana Trump and Marla Maples. His memoir, “The Courtroom Is My Theater,” is due to be released in December.

Mr. Trump questioned whether it is appropriate for Mr. Goldberg to write about a client.

“There’s lawyer-client privilege here. You can’t do that,” he said.

In reply, Mr. Goldberg said through a spokeswoman that “Jay is very cognizant of that issue,” adding, “the book will definitely not reveal anything that will violate attorney-client privilege.” The spokeswoman said Mr. Goldberg “never wanted to go to Washington.”

In an interview at his Manhattan home, whose entryway is decorated with a framed collection of appreciative notes from Mr. Trump, Mr. Goldberg said the president’s private legal team has done him a disservice by alternately praising and condemning Michael Cohen, who has implicated Mr. Trump in campaign-finance violations related to hush money payments to two women.

He also said that Mr. Trump sustained attacks from political foes and the press have left the president “punch-drunk,” causing him to lash out without “appropriate restraint.”

Mr. Goldberg said he has been dismayed by some of Mr. Trump’s comments, including recent assertions about a strong administration response to Hurricane Maria, which killed 3,000 people in Puerto Rico.

“There’s so much pounding against him from all different directions, he says things that if he had chance to reflect he wouldn’t say,” Mr. Goldberg said.

Later, Mr. Goldberg said through the spokeswoman that he didn’t mean that Mr. Trump was punch-drunk. Rather, he said that he would be punch-drunk if he had to endure the attacks that Mr. Trump has seen as president.

Yeah, ok.

Florence is now south of Florence
by Tom Sullivan

Seven people are reported dead, including an infant, and more expected as tropical Storm Florence continues to dump rain on the Carolinas:

Florence’s five fatalities included a mother and her infant killed after a tree fell on their house in Wilmington, the city’s police department said. The father was hospitalized with injuries.

In Hampstead, emergency responders going to a call for cardiac arrest found their path blocked by downed trees. When they got to the home, the woman was dead, authorities said.

Two men were also killed in Lenoir County: One was electrocuted while hooking up a generator and the other while checking on his dogs outside, emergency officials said.

CNN reports about 781,000 customers without power in North Carolina and another 165,000 in South Carolina.

“The worst flooding will likely start Saturday night or Sunday morning, according to predictions from the National Weather Service, and will continue for at least several days,” reports the Raleigh, North Carolina News and Observer as the now-tropical storm Florence crawls inland at a walking pace. Wilmington, NC could see 30 to 40 inches of rain.

The Charleston Post and Courier reports that river flooding around the South Carolina beach resort of Myrtle Beach could leave the town, already depleted of food and fuel supplies, cut off by road as low-lying roadways into the area disappear under flood waters:

Officials are “looking at ways to get back into that area, either through establishing a route in by land or by water or by air. If we have to, we’ll bring supplies in by helicopters or aircraft,” said Livingston, the head of the South Carolina National Guard.

The sitting president assured residents on Tuesday, “The safety of American people is my absolute highest priority. We are sparing no expense. We are totally prepared. We’re ready. We’re as ready as anybody has ever been.” Puerto Rico may beg to differ after an independent study released this week showed the death toll from last year’s Hurricane Maria at near 3,000.

3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000…— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

Trump spent Thursday and Friday tweeting loudly about how 3,000 Americans did not die in Puerto Rico from relief failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The White House said on Friday, Trump would visit the region sometime “early to middle next week” to see the destruction from Florence firsthand (and to try unsuccessfully to mimic empathy).

Once the flooding subsides, how long the recovery might take will depend on Congress. Spending on recovery tends to get political, and the mid-term elections are just weeks away.

“The FEMA fund is pretty well stocked right now, there’s no immediate need for money,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) who sits on the Appropriations Committee:

“I’ve noticed a lot of born-again people in disaster relief since we’ve had the series of hurricanes,” said Cole, noting that fiscal conservatives tend to support such bills when “their area gets hit.”

Still, Rep. Mark Meadows, R-North Carolina, chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was already making it clear he wasn’t interested in passing a disaster relief bill without offsets, even to rebuild his home state.

We’ll see how long Meadows holds if mountainsides in his district let go as they did after Ivan in 2004, killing five and injuring more.

Flash flood warnings remain in effect for southeastern North Carolina until Saturday afternoon. Upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina are under a flash flood watch through Monday evening.

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For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.

Friday Night Soother

by digby

I just need some adorable critters right about now:

If you need some positivity in your newsfeed today, here’s Bradley the baby kangaroo practicing his first hops at a kangaroo sanctuary in Australia😊 pic.twitter.com/OQUfld9jzZ— Ian Laking (@IHLaking) September 12, 2018

Happy Friday… #nature #love #happiness h/t @MikeyKayNYC https://t.co/E5mk0d1VhX— Kim Ghattas (@BBCKimGhattas) September 14, 2018

I love the look on his face at the end.

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Mueller probably knows more about the Russian conspiracy than the American players do

by digby

We don’t know what Paul Manafort knows that will be useful to the Mueller investigation. We don’t know what Mueller knows or what Manafort may know about what Mueller knows. Judging by the indictments of the troll farmers and the GRU officers, Mueller obviously has a lot of information already about the Russian side of these operations.

Franklin Foer who has been following the Manafort story since Trump brought him on board offers up some of the more intriguing possibilities:

The Oleg Deripaska Connection

At the very beginning of his time working in Ukraine in 2003, Paul Manafort was in the employ of one Russia’s richest men, an aluminum magnate named Oleg Deripaska. We lazily describe many Russian oligarchs as residing in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. But in the case of Deripaska, that closeness is a documented fact.

From 2003 to 2008, Manafort and his firm worked for Deripaska across Europe—in Montenegro, Georgia, and Ukraine. Over that time, the consultant and the client also became business partners. Deripaska invested millions in a private-equity fund that Manafort established, with the intent of buying assets across the former Soviet Union. Based on various court filings and lawsuits, we know that the relationship went very badly. In these documents, Deripaska suggests that Manafort might have stolen his money. And based on the special counsel’s filings, we also know that Manafort owed Deripaska even more money in the form of unpaid loans. Instead of making an effort to settle these large debts, Deripaska says that Manafort simply stopped returning his messages.

Manafort finally reached out to Deripaska, just after he joined Donald Trump’s campaign. In emails obtained by The Atlantic that Paul Manafort traded with an aide, Manafort proposed giving Deripaska special access to the campaign, with the apparent hope of making his debts disappear. We don’t know what became of Manafort’s outreach to Deripaska. Perhaps it yielded nothing. Deripaska claims that he never received messages from Manafort in 2016. But it’s also worth watching hidden video footage of Deripaska sitting on his yacht with a top Putin official, procured by the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny. The video captured a meeting held in August 2016, two weeks before Manafort resigned as campaign chair. According to Navalny, the video lends credibility to the theory that Deripaska might have been a crucial intermediary between Manafort and the Kremlin.

The Curious Case of Konstantin Kilimnik

Robert Mueller has periodically suggested that Manafort’s top aide was an active agent of Russian intelligence in 2016. When I profiled Konstantin Kilimnik earlier this year, an old colleague of his quoted Manafort as describing him as “my Russian brain.” Is this connection to Russian intelligence just a meaningless coincidence? Kilimnik was Manafort’s primary interface with Deripaska.

Paul Manafort’s recent career could be read as a rolling series of nadirs. One of those low points was his departure from the Trump campaign on August 19, 2016. He left after The New York Times reported that Manafort was receiving off-the-books payments from his Ukrainian clients. The very day that Manafort resigned, he created a new LLC called Summerbreeze. In the months that followed, the LLC began receiving millions in loans from financial institutions with ties to Trump. Why would these lenders give cash to Manafort given the press attention he was receiving and his clearly troubled finances? (In the previous Manafort trial, the special counsel alleged that Manafort promised to help the head of one of these banks obtain a job in the Trump administration.)

Roger Stone

We know that the political consultant Roger Stone has proclaimed that Mueller will possibly indict him soon. (Stone apparently conversed with WikiLeaks about hacked material.) But that promise of an indictment hasn’t actually arrived. Manafort might be able to fill in whatever blanks exist in that case. Manafort’s friendship with Stone traces back to the 1970s, when Manafort managed Stone’s campaign to run the Young Republicans group. During the ’80s, they became business partners and created a legendary consulting firm together. If Mueller does intend to pursue a case against Stone, he suddenly has his oldest confidant as a cooperating witness.

The Trump Tower Meeting

I have never invested much significance in the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. It doesn’t seem to have been the prelude to anything meaningful, an apparent disappointment to all those who attended. But Manafort was a presence in the room, a careful note-taker, and a witness to whatever transpired. And until we know more about the meeting, it’s impossible to know with certainty whether it was as hapless as conventionally portrayed.

A Troubling Pattern

When reading Mueller’s technicolor account of Manafort’s tactics in Ukraine, it’s clear that Manafort had no scruples about his work. He prided himself on smearing his client’s political opponents; he created sham think tanks and generated phony pressure campaigns. He funded his work using methods designed to evade detection and to skirt legal constraints. This work merely repeats patterns that appear elsewhere in Manafort’s body of work. Why would he suddenly have broken with character in the course of the Trump campaign? Thanks to the cooperation of Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates, Mueller probably has a very keen sense of how to lead this line of questioning. For nearly two years, the public has lived with the tension that comes with an unresolved narrative, the outcome of which has potentially extraordinary implications. Today represents a looping turn in the direction of closure.

That’s just for starters. Manafort has been deeply involved in Ukraine and Russia for many years and clearly has some insight into the money trail.

Manafort’s deal isn’t really all that great which means that he wasn’t in the driver’s seat. Marcy Wheeler speculates about what may have driven him to finally accept.

There are two related possibilities: First, that Manafort came to the conclusion that he’d never get the pardon he had been working towards. That might stem from justified distrust that Trump will ever keep his word, but I doubt it. A pardon was always Manafort’s best way out, and up to a point, it made sense for him to take his chances with Trump.

Which suggests that, for some reason, Manafort came to believe Trump wouldn’t be able to pardon him, probably because he came to understand it would be politically impossible or legally improbable.

Couple that with the other thing that might convince Manafort he’d be better off taking this plea now than continuing to fight his charges: that he knew the next thing he was going to be charged with would be far worse. Just as one example, I’ve suggested that once you’re working for the government of Ukraine (as Manafort was, in the charges settled today) or the government of Russia (as might be established if you showed Konstantin Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer, as Mueller has already alleged), very little separates a FARA charge (what he pled to today) from a 18 USC 951 charge, spying. It’s a lot harder to pardon someone for spying than to pardon him for obstruction and financial crimes.

It’s also possible that Manafort came to understand the scope of the conspiracy prosecutors are now pursuing. If he knew they already had the evidence to charge Trump as a co-conspirator in that conspiracy, it would also make it a lot harder for the President to pardon his co-conspirators.

She ties this to a specific moment in Manafort’s first trial. It’s fascinating so click over if you’re interested in this sort of deep dive.

The upshot is that Manafort was a big fish for this probe to finally catch in its net. It’s long seemed to be obvious that he was either placed in the trump campaign to further the goals of the Russian government or he put himself there out of a need to please certain players in that orbit. It may be a combination of both. We’ll soon see how this all unfolds.

By the way, as of this writing Trump has not said or tweeted a word about it. That’s … unusual.