Swamp Thing
Manafort case shows DC sleaze, not collusion
THE trial of onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has ignited a new series of tweets from the president about ending special counsel Robert Mueller’s “witch hunt.” But this trial and other actions by Mueller this week will be instrumental in bringing about one of Trump’s key campaign promises: the one to “drain the swamp.”
As was the case with the indictments of Manafort, one key word was missing from the opening arguments at the trial on Tuesday: “Trump.” Everything discussed in the courtroom precedes Manafort’s three months on the 2016 Trump campaign by two years.
In this sense, Manafort’s trial has to be judged a failure for the Mueller team. Oh, Mueller may get a scalp here in the form of a conviction, but I think everybody assumed he indicted Manafort and pushed hard on him because he wanted Manafort to change his plea to guilty and cooperate by providing goods on Trump.
If that common assumption was correct, Mueller didn’t end up getting what he really wanted or needed. (The same thing happened repeatedly with the Whitewater prosecutors during their pursuit of the Clintons in the 1990s.)
Instead of a story about Trump and the Russians, what the jury heard both from the prosecution and the defense on Tuesday was a narrative about the corrupting power of political influence-peddling on the part of Washington consultants.
The Mueller team’s brief is that Manafort took his lobbying and campaign skills abroad to Ukraine, helped a monstrous politician get elected and reelected and made colossal sums of money for doing so, which he then tried to hide from the Internal Revenue Service.
The defense’s case is that Manafort was himself the victim of a fraudulent scheme on the part of his underling Rick Gates — who just so happens to be co- operating with Mueller. Gates, the defense alleges, is a criminal mastermind who did all these terrible things behind Manafort’s back.
To be clear, Manafort isn’t just any consultant. He and his partners in the 1980s — Charles Black and the notorious Roger Stone — invented a new way to monetize working on campaigns by then taking corporate money to lobby the very politicians they helped get elected.
In 2005, one of their students, the ineffably crooked Jack Abramoff, was convicted of defrauding clients in a particularly brazen double-dealing scam. Abramoff represented both sides in a dispute involving Indian casinos — in other words, he was lobbying for them and lobbying against them at the same time and making money from both.
This was so brazen that a lot of the money formerly showered on the heads of the “K Street Gang” (Matthew Continetti’s term) dried up and shnorring sleazes like Manafort began to focus their attention on off-shore clients.
Manafort found himself a special buddy in Ukranian slimeball Viktor Yanukovich, whose successful 2010 campaign for president he managed. Yanukovich paid Manafort around $60 mil- lion for his efforts from 2010 to 2014 before he was removed from the presidency — after which he fled to the comforting arms of Vladimir Putin rather than face trial for outrageous corruption and the targeting of political protestors.
Mueller’s team alleges that the loss of Yanukovich’s largesse sent Manafort into a debt spiral that led him into money laundering and IRS fraud. He also apparently followed Abramoff ’s lead in trying to get business from Yanukovich’s successor, a political and ideological rival.
This is why it’s actually insulting to swamp creatures to liken them to Manafort. They do what they do because it’s what they are. Manafort did nothing but look for the main chance and dance with whomever would pay him.
Interestingly, the first two days of the Manafort trial have featured the judge repeatedly upbraiding Mueller’s prosecutors for trying to make it seem as though Manafort’s spending practices prove he’s a crook. “All this document shows is that Mr. Manafort had a lavish lifestyle, he had a nice home with a pool and a gazebo — it’s not relevant,” Judge T.S. Ellis said in a characteristically acerbic remark.
Thus, Mueller’s case against Manafort isn’t that he was engaged in a conspiracy with Trump and the Russians but that two years before he went to work for Trump he engaged in practices Trump has repeatedly said he wants to end somehow.
Trump himself is still professing sympathy for Manafort in tweets because he wants to continue to make the case that Mueller is some kind of Inspector Javert monstrously pursuing people who don’t deserve such treatment.
Those tweets provide some reason to believe that Trump is making nice with Manafort even now to make him think Trump might pardon him and he should continue to keep his mouth shut. But so far, that’s the only detail during this trial’s early days that isn’t working to Trump’s ultimate advantage as the anti-Washington populist par excellence.