Paul Manafort: the Influence Peddler
This article is partially excerpted from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine provides dramatic evidence that the Kremlin recognizes its attempt to control the government in Kyiv has failed.
Ever since Ukraine became independent in 1991, Russia has used targeted corruption, often involving the lucrative trade in Russian natural gas, which passes through Ukraine via pipelines before reaching Central Europe, to empower its preferred political leadership.
Kremlin-backed Ukrainian oligarchs were enriched through contracts with Russian state-owned companies such as Gazprom, often concealed through shadowy intermediary companies with ties to Eurasian organized crime. In return, these oligarchs funded pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians and political parties. While this system operated for the better part of three decades, mass Ukrainian protests and the new, if imperfect, democratic state that they inspired eventually made it unworkable.
Beginning in the early 2000s, American lobbyists, lawyers and political consultants became intimately involved in Ukraine’s domestic politics and its relationship with Russia. These Washington politicos were paid handsomely to bring sophisticated American campaigning, lobbying, communications and public relations methodologies to Ukraine.
In the process they themselves were transformed, and returned to Washington carrying the contagion of corruption that the Kremlin had injected into Ukrainian politics. Shortly thereafter, Ukraine, which had barely registered in the American consciousness, surfaced again and again at the heart of the most controversial scandals in the history of American politics. This was no accident.
A pivotal figure in this process was the Republican lobbyist and political operative Paul Manafort.
Manafort is infamous for his role as the Chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign, and his involvement in the investigations that followed. His story, however, begins earlier than 2016. Understanding how and why Manafort became involved Ukrainian politics is essential if one wishes to understand Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and much else that followed.
This series of articles will explore how institutionalized corruption in Washington, D.C. led Manafort to work for pro-Kremlin, organized crime-linked Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, and how he became involved in the highest levels of Ukrainian electoral politics and lobbying on behalf of corrupt foreign leaders.
Long before he became a master of political dark arts in Ukraine, Manafort emerged at a critical moment in the development of the modern Republican Party and the American conservative movement. He then pioneered the practices of foreign lobbying and political consulting that have subsequently become mainstream.
PAUL MANAFORT: THE EARLY YEARS
Born in New Britain, Connecticut on April 1st, 1949, Paul John Manafort Jr. was introduced to politics early in life. He was a founding member of the “Kiddie Corps,” a group of young party activists who worked to get former New Britain mayor Thomas Meskill elected Governor in 1970. While Manafort was in high school, his father, Paul Manafort Sr., was elected mayor of New Britain in the first of three terms in the office.
His father’s experience as mayor gave Manafort a front row seat to local politics in America. It also introduced him to its dark underbelly. In 1981, Manafort Sr. was charged with perjury. Prosecutors alleged that the then retired mayor had lied during testimony given in a municipal corruption investigation.
The New Britain police department was being investigated for tolerating a Mafia-linked gambling racket and tampering with evidence to protect the man behind it, Joseph “Pippi” Guerriero. Known as a “ruthless mob figure,” Guerriero ran gambling operations out of New Britain on behalf of the DeCavalcante crime family and was involved in the bribery of a local police chief.
Over the course of several investigations looking into the local corruption, Manafort Sr. was excoriated as the person “most at fault” by a local attorney charged with looking into New Britain’s government. Whistle-blower testimony established that the elder Manafort hired someone “flexible” to manage his personnel office, which did not operate “100 percent by the rules.”
The whistle-blower further revealed that Manafort Sr. was provided with an envelope that contained the answers to an exam aspiring local police officers had to take and gave the answers to two of his preferred candidates. As the statute of limitations had passed, he was never charged with the crime of test fixing, nor was Manafort Sr. ever convicted of perjury.
It is impossible to imagine that these scandals, in addition to others ranging from steering public contracts to family-linked businesses and inflating fees to provide kickbacks to the local teamsters union, failed to leave an impression on his son and namesake.
Despite the scandals, many looked back upon the elder Manafort, who died in 2013, fondly and today there is even a local street named after him.
Manafort Jr. graduated from St. Thomas Aquinas High School and then struck out for DC, receiving his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University in 1971 and staying on for an additional three years and graduating from its law school.
One of his earliest forays into the wider world of national politics took place in Kansas City during the Republican National Convention in 1976. At the time, the great maven of Republican Party political insiders was the Princetonian and Marine Corps veteran James A. Baker III. Baker later served as Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff and Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush.
In 1976, Baker supported the incumbent candidate Gerald Ford. Unlike his friends Roger Stone and Charles Black, Manafort followed Baker’s lead and supported Ford against the hard right insurgency led by California Governor Ronald Reagan. During the convention, Manafort huddled with Baker in a trailer outside of Kemper Arena and learned how to whip delegates, a skill that he would use in the years ahead.
After Ford was defeated by Democrat Jimmy Carter, Manafort switched gears and joined the Reagan faction of the Republican Party.
In 1977, Manafort helped his friend Roger Stone, a political dirty trickster since the Nixon days, become the president of the Young Republicans, an organization consisting of Republican Party members between the ages of 18 and 40.
Manafort convinced Stone’s rival to run for Treasurer instead of President. He then convinced Alabama lawyer Neal Acker to organize the Southern delegates on Stone’s behalf and in return promised Acker that he would manage his campaign to take Stone’s place as President in 1979. However, when the time came, Manafort, conditioned his support for Acker on him supporting Reagan. After Acker made it clear that he wished to remain neutral, Manafort led the campaign of his opponent and crushed his candidacy.
“It was one of the great fuck jobs,” a Manafort whip later told The Atlantic.
While Manafort’s hard-edged tactics alienated him from Acker, the Reagan campaign took notice. Roger Stone subsequently became Reagan’s 1980 campaign director for the North East, a position that introduced him to the notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who subsequently introduced him to an up-and-coming New York real estate developer named Donald Trump.
Read my comprehensive article series on Roger Stone here.
Paul Manafort became Reagan’s campaign director for the South. He supervised the “Southern Strategy,” a Republican campaigning strategy that dates back to Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon that exploited racial and cultural grievances to get white, conservative, but traditionally Democratic voters across the South to switch their votes to the Republican Party.
THE TORTURER’S LOBBY: BLACK, MANAFORT AND STONE
Following Reagan’s election, Manafort, along with Charles Black and Roger Stone, founded Washington’s most infamous political consulting and lobbying firm: Black, Manafort and Stone.
Black, a master political tactician, had served as political director of the Reagan for President Committee. After Reagan swept to power in 1980, all three occupied influential positions in the transition. Manafort was hired as the personnel director of the Reagan transition, Stone acted as deputy political director of the personnel office and Black served as a political advisor during the staffing of the administration.
These positions provided the three partners with access to the highest levels of the Reagan administration, an advantage they didn’t hesitate to exploit for their own financial benefit.
Black, Manafort and Stone offered a one-stop-shop for campaign consulting, public relations and political lobbying. The firm pioneered what came to be known on K Street as a “double-breasted operation,” in which one part of the business oversaw political consulting work while the other worked in lobbying.
The business-friendly Reagan came into office wanting to reverse decades of government regulation, thus creating a situation that was ideal for corporate lobbyists. Black, Manafort and Stone took immediate advantage, signing up Bethlehem Steele, the Tobacco Institute and Herbalife among others as clients.
In addition to his pro-business/anti-regulation mantra, Reagan came into office determined to prosecute the Cold War with increased ferocity. Throughout the 1980s, the United States increased its support and funding for anti-communist “Freedom Fighters,” often consisting of dictators and right-wing paramilitary groups across the world. With billions of dollars at stake, these interests desired representation in Washington, and Black, Manafort and Stone was only too happy to fill the role.
With the 1984 hire of the Democratic National Committee finance chair Peter G. Kelly to round out their lobbying operation, the newly renamed Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly (BMSK) was poised to become a foreign lobbying powerhouse, or what detractors such as the Center for Public Integrity would label as a key member of “The Torturer’s Lobby.”
Manafort was aggressively expanding his foreign contacts and using his connection to Reagan to do so. He used his position as the political director of the 1984 Republican National Convention to provide his new friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud with royal treatment at Reagan’s second coronation, seeing to it that the Saudi Ambassador entered through the Presidential entrance and was seated in the Vice Presidential box.
That same year, 1984, Manafort was paid $200,000 by Saudi interests to lobby against a bill moving through Congress that would have moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. A year later, Manafort was paid an additional $300,000 by Saudi Arabia to advise the Kingdom on U.S. arms sales and energy policy. He made an additional $250,000 from Saudi Arabia in 1986 lobbying the Reagan White House, the State Department and Congressional staff to approve an arms sales deal.
While working in Beirut on behalf of a Saudi construction company, Manafort was introduced to a future hedge-fund billionaire named Thomas Barrack. Barrack had been closely connected to the Saudi royal family since the early ’70s and later enjoyed close ties to the Reagan administration. Years later, Barrack was a key figure in getting Manafort hired onto the Trump Campaign. At this writing, Barrack is under indictment for being a foreign agent of the United Arab Emirates.
In 1985, BMSK took on Jonas Savimbi, leader of the Angolan guerrilla rebel group UNITA, as a client and was paid $600,000 that year alone. Savimbi was the leader of the allegedly anti-Communist UNITA rebel group, a key player in the Angolan Civil War, a conflict that lasted intermittently for over 27 years following the country’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule that led to 500,000 dead and one million internally displaced.
Savimbi and UNITA were supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.
BMKS developed what became known in Washington as “Savimbi Chic,” shuttling around the Nehru-suit clad rebel leader in a stretch limousine from one DC power center to the next.
BMSK convinced the Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Bob Dole, to introduce a congressional resolution in support of the UNITA insurgency and to send a letter to the State Department urging the US to provide them with heavy arms. The BMKS relationship with Savimbi lasted for years, even after the end of the Cold War, with the firm being paid $1 million by the rebel leader in 1991.
Savimbi was not the only CIA-backed African warlord client of Manafort’s, BMSK also represented to Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.
“I thought we were making a colossal blunder in Angola,” Senator Bill Bradley wrote in his memoir regarding Washington’s support for Savimbi. “I had no sense that Jonas Savimbi, our client guerrilla warrior, was any more committed to democracy than was the country’s dictatorial leftist leadership. When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm, which successfully obtained further funding.”
Paul Manafort oversaw foreign accounts at BMSK, and exhibited few scruples when it came to vetting the human rights records of new clients.
In 1988, BMSK began to represent the Prime Minister of The Bahamas, Lynden Pindling. The Bahamas was a well known center for international money laundering, and Pindling had alleged ties with drug traffickers.
A year later, Manafort dispatched a young BMSK international field operative named Riva Levinson to Somalia to attempt to gain the business of Mohamed Siad Barre, who had become the country’s leader after a coup d’état and the assassination of his predecessor.
“Are we sure we want this guy as a client?” Riva asked.
“We all know Barre is a bad guy, Riva,” Manafort said as he showed her the door. “We just have to make sure that he’s our bad guy. Have a great trip!”
One of the more lucrative and mysterious relationships Manafort developed with was Ferdinand Marcos, who by the time they met in the 1980s had been the dictator of the Philippines for nearly three decades.
Manafort later claimed that he worked with Marcos at the behest of William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager who was appointed to serve as the Director of the CIA. Manafort further described Casey as his friend.
In 1985 a story broke that a $950,000 a year BMSK client, the Chamber of Philippines Manufacturers, Exporters and Tourist Associations, was in fact a front for Marcos.
This proved to be a significant embarrassment for BMSK partner Peter Kelly, who was then the chairman of the Center for Democracy, which was then involved in promoting the nascent democracy movement in the Philippines. Marcos at the time stood accused of rampant corruption, looting of public resources and human rights violations including the torture and murder of political dissidents. In 1983, the Philippine opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, Jr. was assassinated.
Manafort became close with both Marcos and his wife Imelda. After receiving approval from the Reagan White House to lobby for Marcos, Manafort leapt into the effort headlong. He organized a trip to Washington for the Philippine foreign minister and arranged for conservative journalists to tour the Philippines.
Manafort spent weeks in Manila, preparing for the upcoming elections. Despite this, he never had any illusions as to the corrupt nature of the endeavor, telling Time magazine in the lead up to the 1986 elections, “What we’ve tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico’s.”
The Philippine election was marred by violence and intimidation, which international observers blamed on Marcos supporters. Despite BMSK’s effort to lobby the White House into issuing a statement decrying election fraud on both sides but ultimately listing Marcos as the winner, a line which it initially adopted, international outrage proved too much and Marcos fled to the United States. Manafort had left Manila the day before.
Upon his arrival in Hawaii, U.S. customs officials seized sizable droves of financial documents showing how Marcos had fleeced the Philippines.
In a 2016 investigation by POLITICO, Kenneth Vogel unearthed several documents that reveal donations of $50,000 that had been intended to be made by Marcos to both the 1980 Reagan and Carter presidential campaigns. Another document shows that funds had been earmarked in 1980 for Reagan and his campaign manager, William J. Casey, who as mentioned later became the Director of the CIA.
Also among the documents unearthed was a whistle-blower letter from several anonymous bankers alleging that Marcos planned to donate $7 million to the 1980 Reagan campaign and $50 million to his 1984 re-election bid. There is no evidence that any of these payments went through, nor that U.S. authorities seriously looked into the allegations.
After a short stint in exile, Marcos died in 1989.
Several years later Ed Rollins, a seasoned GOP political strategist, was working on a Philippine election during the course of which he attended a dinner alongside Robby Zamora, a former attorney for Marcos who signed the contract with BMSK years earlier and was involved with moving and investing much of the money Marcos had pilfered from the country.
In his memoir Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics, Rollins writes that “a prominent member of the Philippine congress” told him that he had delivered a suitcase with $10 million meant for the Reagan campaign to a “well-known Washington power lobbyist who was involved in the campaign.”
While on one hand Rollins claimed to be “stunned” by the revelation, one the other, he wrote that he was, “[n]ot in a total state of disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank.”
For years there was speculation among reporters that the “well-known Washington power lobbyist” was Paul Manafort, but Rollins refused to explicitly confirm this to be the case. However, in a 2018 interview with The Washington Post, Rollins finally admitted he was referring to Manafort.
“By that point in time,” Rollins told the Post, “everybody pretty much knew that Manafort was pretty sleazy.”
Manafort, via a spokesperson, described the story as a “total fiction.” When questioned by Vogel, Zamorra denied the story as well.
MANAFORT’S MYSTERIOUS FRIEND: ABDUL RAHMAN AL ASSIR
By the late 80s and early 90s, Manafort had begun to get a taste for the highlife. He drove an expensive Mercedes and began buying and renting expensive properties in Virginia, Florida and the Hamptons.
The man who introduced Manafort to an entirely different level of wealth and luxury lifestyle was a Lebanese international arms merchant named Abdul Rahman Al Assir.
Al Assir was for a period of time the brother-in-law of Adnan Khashoggi, a multi-billionaire Saudi arms dealer and international playboy who became known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Al Assir served as Khashoggi’s representative in Spain and facilitated arms sales to armies and militant groups in Africa. Khashoggi’s sister and Al Assir’s first wife, Samira Khashoggi, was the daughter of the king of Saudi Arabia’s personal doctor.
In January of 2022, INTERPOL issued a “Red Notice” on behalf of Spain’s National Police for Assir and asked authorities in Abu Dhabi, his last known whereabouts, to detain him related to allegations of tax fraud and other financial crimes.
Manafort told his partners at BMSK that Al Assir would introduce them to new clients and the two became close friends. He took Al Assir along as his special guest to George H.W. Bush’s inauguration and their two families vacationed together outside of Cannes in France.
“There’s money, and there’s really big money,” a friend of Manafort’s told journalist Franklin Foer. “Paul became aware of the difference between making $300,000 and $5 million. He discovered the south of France. Al Assir would show him how to live that life.”
Manafort and Al Assir became embroiled in a complex international scandal involving France and Pakistan known as the Karachi Affair.
In 1993, Manafort hosted Al Assir and Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto at a dinner in his Virginia home. Shortly thereafter, Al Assir served as an intermediary in the sale of French Agosta 90B-class submarines to Pakistan and it has been alleged that kickbacks related to the deal may have been routed into the unsuccessful French presidential campaign of Édouard Balladur.
Manafort was provided with two payments of $52,000 and $34,975 for devising a campaign strategy for Balladur and conducting an opinion poll. However, instead of being paid directly by Balladur, the payments went through Al Assir.
A further $200,000 made its way to Manafort, some of which was directed via accounts in Madrid, for serving as an interlocutor for the deal. Legal proceedings related to the Karachi Affair are still working their way through French courts.
Manafort’s mysterious and lucrative relationship with Pakistan extended to its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) service.
From 1990 to 1995, BMSK was paid $700,000 to lobby for the Kashmiri American Council (KAC), an account that was handled by Manafort. While ostensibly a Washington, DC-based nonprofit dedicated to highlighting the plight of Kashmiri’s, the FBI determined that the KAC was in fact an ISI front designed to deflect American attention away from the fact that Pakistan was funding militant terrorism in the region.
KAC’s director Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai was arrested by the FBI in 2011. Michael Isikoff, the reporter who broke the story, was told by a former senior Pakistani official who held a strategy session with Manafort and Fai in Islamabad in 1994 that “there was never any doubt on Pakistan’s part that Manafort knew of his government’s role in backing the Kashmiri council.”
While each of these episodes are remarkable in themselves, and are deserving of further research, they serve as prelude to even more extraordinary activities.
The next installment of this series will explore how Paul Manafort became involved in Ukrainian politics at the behest of the infamous Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Part 2 explains how Manafort met the organized crime-linked Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and how Deripaska introduced Manafort to Ukraine.
Part 3 explains how corruption and organized crime seized control of post-Soviet independent Ukraine, and led to the Orange Revolution.
Part 4 shows how Paul Manafort helped get Viktor Yanukovych, the Kremlin’s preferred Ukrainian candidate, elected as President.
Part 5 describes Paul Manafort’s activities on behalf of Oleg Deripaska outside of Ukraine, and how Deripaska uses his wealth to spread influence abroad.
Part 6 explains Paul Manafort’s money laundering and corrupt business activities with Oleg Deripaska and the Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash.
Part 7 shows how Paul Manafort and the law firm Skadden Arps laundered Viktor Yanukovych’s reputation.
Part 8 reveals how Manafort assembled a public relations team to smear Viktor Yanukovych’s political opponents.
Part 9 explains how Manafort lobbied on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych in the halls of the Capitol in Washington, DC.