We knew it was coming. Nonetheless, the pardon of Paul Manafort is shocking. It’s shocking because it is the ultimate debasement of the pardon power. And yet, like everything else, Donald Trump will get away with doing it.
The Republicans are all shrugging their shoulders and reminding everyone of Clinton’s pardon of Mark Rich, about which they had a collective hissy fit of epic proportions. Here’s a reminder of what the Mark Rich pardon was about.
Rich had been indicted on charges of tax evasion and making oil deals with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. (I will just remind you here that on Christmas eve 1992 George Bush Sr pardoned a bunch of Reagan administration officials for their role in illegally sending arms to Iran during the Iran hostage crisis.) Rich was in Switzerland at the time of the indictment and never returned to the United States. Bill Clinton pardoned him at the behest of his wife, a big Democratic donor, and Ehud Barak, the prime minister of Israel, along with numerous other high profile Israeli political figures such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert as well as numerous leading Jewish figures in the US including Rabbi Irving Greenberg, chairman of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which oversees the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It appeared that Rich had bought his pardon by donating to the Democrats and various Jewish causes. There was also a rumor that he had been working on behalf of the Israeli government although I don’t think it was every proved.
The Republicans went wild and I mean wild. It was as if he’d pardoned Charles Manson. There were several congressional investigations and the DOJ investigated as well and no crimes was found to have been committed other than the crime of bad judgment, which goes without saying when it comes to Bill Clinton.
Fast forward to yesterday’s pardon of Paul Manafort. I’ll let Tim Miller of the Bulwark take it from here:
Amid a raft of indefensibly unscrupulous pardons issued hours after the resignation of the attorney general, that of Paul Manafort stands as the worst of the worst. It will go down in the annals of American history as among the most corrupt and self-serving actions taken by a chief executive…
The [Republicans] will pretend this is business as usual. They will compare it to corrupt pardons by Democrats past—pardons that, at the time, they rent their garments over. Now, those old Democratic pardons are just a flimsy little dish-towel Trump’s defenders are using to try to hide their indignity and abasement.
Let there be no doubt. The pardon of Paul Manafort is not business as usual. It is not standard-fare political back-scratching. It is unconscionable and enraging and perverse and abnormal and anti-American.
Paul Manafort is the will-o’-the-wisp of the Washington swamp. This was the stated reason Trump brought him onto his campaign in the first place—to help guard against Republican establishment revolts at the 2016 convention.
Prior to Trump, Manafort worked at the highest levels of the slimy Washington influence space and for the most despotic and crooked clients imaginable, both foreign and domestic. He was the fixer for a Russian revanchist tyrant in Ukraine who committed atrocities. Through this experience he became deeply indebted—to the tune of millions of dollars—to a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Putin.
According to an ex-Russian spy and arms dealer, Manafort “owed us a lot of money . . . and he was offering ways to pay it back.” The Russians weren’t the only people Manafort was in debt to. When he joined the Trump campaign he was nearly broke, having racked up bills in the millions as he lived a life of luxury with absurd rugs and ugly but expensive suits.
Then, during the campaign—while a hostile foreign government hacked the private emails of the Democratic candidate and funded a network of bots and social media accounts to push coordinated disinformation—Paul Manafort was providing private campaign briefings and access to allies of the perpetrators, in order to help pay off his debts.
He was the definition of a compromised asset.
When Special Counsel Robert Mueller tried to look into the details of the ties between Manafort’s Russian clients and the Russian hackers who were aiding the Trump campaign, they were stymied by his lies, his use of “sophisticated communications security practices,” and his foreign business partners’ lack of cooperation.
Later, when Manafort cut a plea deal with the government, he promised to testify “fully, completely, and truthfully” about his actions—but he then breached that plea, repeatedly being caught in lies including about his communications with Russian intelligence during the campaign.
During a deposition with the FBI, Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates admitted that this was of course intentional on Manafort’s part. That his plan was to block the truth from coming out, stay loyal to Trump, and wait for a pardon. “Sit tight,” Manafort apparently said. “We’ll be taken care of.”
Manafort’s bet paid off. His conspiracy against our country paid off. Because a corrupt, impeached, lame-duck president took care of him.
After this pardon no one should ever again accept the charge that the Russia investigation into the president was some sort of “hoax.”
People who are the victims of hoaxes do not obstruct justice and obstruct the truth about the most serious foreign attack on our elections in history.
Here is the truth.
Paul Manafort is the human embodiment of every negative trope about influence peddling and the Washington swamp.
The Republican-led Senate investigation concluded: “Manafort’s influence work . . . was, in effect, influence work for the Russian government and its interests.”
Part of that work was providing access to the top levels of the Trump campaign, which the Russian government was covertly assisting across many vectors.
Manafort lied and concealed this collusion with Russian operatives at every possible opportunity in order to protect his own ass and to protect Donald Trump.
These actions were nothing short of treasonous.
So is this pardon.
For me, the pardoning of war criminals ranks right up there too. But this is really bad too.
It’s clear that Trump is pardoning people who kept their mouths shut about what they knew. Paul Manafort’s job as Chairman of the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign was the most serious evidence that there was something very weird about the fact that so many people with Russian ties were in the Trump campaign. And keep in mind that Trump only added to those suspicions during the entire four years in the White House. This pardon couldn’t more clearly indicate that those suspicions were justified.
It’s obvious. And yet, nothing will happen. The pardon power is plenary and even though the dangling of pardons as he did openly on his twitter feed and in interviews should be considered obstruction of justice. But when a Republican president does it, it’s not illegal so …
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you’d like to drop a little something in the old Christmas stocking you can do so here: