If Manafort was vulnerable to Kremlin, so was Trump

PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s defenders responded to the news of Paul Manafort’s plea deal with the usual refrain: his case has nothing to do with the Trump campaign or allegations that it colluded with Russia in 2016. They’re wrong. Why? Because they’re overlooking the blackmail factor.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has painstakingly documented evidence of Manafort’s role in a 10-year scheme involving money-laundering, tax evasion and illicit lobbying – crimes that could lead to decades in a prison cell.

Given Manafort’s extensive ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, Russian President Vladimir Putin would almost certainly have had detailed knowledge of Manafort’s transgressions. And that means that, when Manafort was promoted to chairman of Trump’s campaign in May 2016, the Kremlin probably had vast amounts of material it could use to blackmail him.

When it was revealed in August 2016 that Manafort had received at least $12.7m in secret payments from the pro-Kremlin party of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s ousted president, that alone was enough to end his nascent return to US politics.

The use of blackmail, or ‘kompromat’, in the former Soviet Union is as common as beet dishes. Indeed, Putin has cultivated his system of power around selective use of compromising information, especially evidence of financial malfeasance. And its use is reserved not only for his opponents. As the Russian journalist Yulia Latynina once wrote: “To keep kompromat on enemies is a pleasure. To keep kompromat on friends is a must.”

The gathering of kompromat is an organic process. Rarely is there a longterm strategy behind it – it often functions as a kind of insurance in business or political dealings. Accordingly, to say the Russian government would have access to kompromat on Manafort is not necessarily to argue its procurement was part of a sustained, centrally orchestrated campaign. Instead, it could have been casually generated through Manafort’s dealings with Kremlin-connected oligarchs and politicians, as well as Konstantin Kilimnik, his right-hand man, who Mueller has alleged had active “ties to Russian intelligence” throughout 2016.

Kilimnik was integral to Manafort’s decade-long scheme to defraud the United States. He was a close confidant, business associate, interpreter and someone Manafort often described as his “Russian brain”. In Kiev, Kilimnik was known as “Manafort’s Manafort” and he probably helped the American lobbyist use stolen or false Ukrainian identities to set up offshore shell companies used to launder some $30m. Kilimnik ran Manafort’s office in Ukraine. He was also Manafort’s main conduit to Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch in Putin’s inner circle.

Kilimnik facilitated Manafort’s failed investments of Deripaska’s money and communicated with Deripaska on Manafort’s behalf when the American wanted to use his new role as Trump’s campaign chairman to “get whole”. When Manafort agreed to work for Trump for no salary, he reportedly owed Deripaska almost $30m.

If Kilimnik and Deripaska knew of Manafort’s crimes and crippling financial distress, so did the Kremlin. We can safely assume Manafort was compromised when, on June 9, 2016, he met a Russian government attorney to, in an ironic twist, receive illicit “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

But Manafort was not the only person on the Trump campaign vulnerable to potential kompromat possessed by the Kremlin. Like his campaign chairman, Trump has been plagued by self-engineered financial distress. He has grown reliant on money from the former Soviet Union, including Russia. Manafort’s co-operation with Mueller could soon reveal how the Kremlin employed kompromat to attack US democracy, because if Putin had compromising information on the campaign chairman of a major party candidate in a US general election, he would probably put it to use. The same applies to the candidate himself.

The use of blackmail, or ‘kompromat’, in the former Soviet Union is as common as beet dishes