To add insult to the injury of being paraded off to jail amid an avalanche of unpleasant headlines, far too few people have been giving Paul Manafort proper credit for his key role in 2016’s stunning Republican election victory. It is no exaggeration to say that Donald Trump wouldn’t be president of the United States today without the efforts of Manafort, who worked at the very top of the Trump campaign for five critical months and who is on trial now in Alexandria, Virginia, on bank fraud and tax evasion charges. He faces a second trial next month in Washington, D.C., on money laundering charges.
Manafort rescued Trump’s floundering and dysfunctional 2016 White House bid on two separate occasions: first in March of that year, when he came on board and quickly began working to cut off Trump rival Ted Cruz’s path to a convention floor fight, and then again in August, when he shielded Trump from Russia-related suspicions by absorbing the brunt of the media scrutiny on the Russia topic himself.
These days, few commentators seem to recall that Trump had opened August 2016 with his campaign on life support. He was trailing Hillary Clinton by at least 10 percentage points in national polls following his outrageous public request for Kremlin assistance in hacking Clinton’s emails, and there was even talk of Trump withdrawing from the race to save the Republican Party from any further embarrassment.
Yet by the time Manafort resigned from the campaign on Aug. 20 and the media dust had settled a few days later, the Russia stigma had made a nearly seamless transition from Trump to Manafort, and by mid-September, Clinton’s big lead had evaporated. When the Trump-Russia story exploded in the weeks after Election Day, it came too late to do any damage; Trump already had his ticket to Washington.
I have often wondered whether Manafort taking those Russia punches during that August was a brilliantly-crafted strategy designed to protect the candidate, or whether it was just a case of order emerging from chaos.
What I do know is that the New York Times’ front page article published on Aug. 15, 2016, which was billed as a bombshell expose of Manafort‘s Ukraine/Russia activities, contained surprisingly little new information for those already familiar with Ukrainian politics. A big chunk of the Times article was devoted to recycling a months-old Washington Free Beacon piece focused on a telecoms acquisition deal that Manafort had done with Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska and a lawsuit that resulted from it.
Yet it was this very same rather empty NYT article which Manafort‘s former bitter rival inside Trump Tower, Corey Lewandowski, cited in his book as being the primary reason for Manafort‘s ouster from the campaign.
National U.S .media outlets have been obsessed with linking Manafort to the Russian government for almost two years, but the only concrete exhibit they have ever had besides the Deripaska story is Manafort‘s publicly-known political work for ex-Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovich and the latter’s billionaire industrialist backer Rinat Akhmetov. That Yanukovich’s 2010 election defeat of the corrupt left-wing populist Yulia Tymoshenko was welcomed at the time by much of the US foreign policy establishment and the Western business community has either been forgotten by the press, or willfully ignored.
Manafort went on the record on many occasions stating that he was advising Yanukovich to sign Ukraine’s Association Agreement with the European Union; if that had happened as promised in November 2013, Manafort would probably have been feted by Washington and Brussels as a genius, and the war in Eastern Ukraine may well have never happened.
In short, the well-worn narrative of Manafort as a pro-Russian operative doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. His work with Yanukovych was not pro-Russian; it was the exact opposite, in near-perfect alignment with US policy goals, given the Putin regime’s all-out effort to derail the Ukraine-European Union pact during 2012-2013. Ironically, the Ukraine-Manafort story might be the only time in Manafort‘s long and rather unsavory foreign lobbying career where his activity could reasonably be described as pro-American.
So, this brings me to my main point: Why on Earth is Paul Manafort apparently so willing – at enormous personal cost – to take the Russia fall for Trump by refusing to cut a plea agreement in his upcoming trials? It is Trump himself, not Manafort, who just sold the United States’ security establishment down the river (again!) by cuddling up to U.S .arch-rival Vladimir Putin at a so-called “private summit meeting” that many fellow Republicans condemned as disgraceful. It is Trump, not Manafort, who has been openly pressuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions for more than a year to obstruct special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. And it is Trump, not Manafort, who is hiding his tax returns from the public amid widespread suspicions that they reveal sources of dirty Russian financing. Any of these three items could easily become grounds for charges of high crimes and misdemeanors against a sitting president.
From this point of view, it seems almost unfair that it is Paul Manafort – and not Donald Trump – who is about to face trial in D.C. on charges of conspiracy against the United States.
Of course, Manafort is rightly on the hook for allegedly repatriating his considerable earnings from Ukraine without paying taxes on them, and of acting as an unregistered agent of the Yanukovich government in his consulting role. But I think we can all agree that the special counsel was not appointed for the sake of charging Trump campaign officials with tax evasion or unregistered lobbying.
Let’s be crystal clear on this: Mueller was appointed to investigate the shockingly dangerous possibility that the president of the United States is susceptible to blackmail by the dictator of a nuclear-armed country that is arguably America’s most dangerous global adversary.
So if Manafort is having any inkling that maybe he made a grievous mistake in backing a man as dangerously incompetent and egregiously dishonest as Trump; if he shares at all in the sentiments of a significant faction of Republicans who, to quote Tennessee Sen. Robert Corker, believe that Donald Trump is dragging the United States down a path to debasement, humiliation, and ruin – sentiments that are shared by many Americans of all political persuasions in the wake of the national embarrassment of Trump’s press conference with Putin in Helsinki on Jul. 16; well, the moment of truth for Manafort has arrived. It’s time for him to choose a side: the side of America, or that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And it’s a choice that may well be remembered in history for centuries.
In practice, the choice boils down to doing the following: if Manafort is aware of any details about Trump liaisons (either campaign-related, family, or business/financial) with Russian state officials, oligarchs, or organized crime figures, it is his somber responsibility as a patriotic citizen to share this information in full with the special counsel as soon as possible.
I have no doubt that Trump is ready to continue disavowing Manafort‘s role in his 2016 electoral victory, to use Manafort‘s legal troubles to deflect from his own misdeeds, and even to watch him go to prison for the rest of his life, if he thinks that this would satisfy the US establishment‘s still-unsated thirst for a scapegoat for the humiliation that Trump and Putin have brought upon the world’s greatest democracy.
Manafort has gotten a brutal rap from the American press as a man with no principles or patriotism that is perhaps less than fully deserved, but he still has a chance to change this narrative; personally, I’d like to believe that he’s a hustler and a tax cheat, but not a traitor.
So Paul: I implore you to to do the right thing – for yourself, and for the United States of America. Don’t play a game of legal stonewalling in hopes of a presidential pardon; that’s not your road to redemption. Just tell Mueller’s investigators everything you know. We’ll all be better off for it.
