Paul Manafort, Ukraine’s Kleptocracy, and the Art of Public Relations (aka Disinformation and Propaganda)
This article reveals the methods and individuals Paul Manafort deployed to create a highly misleading public relations campaign on behalf of the Ukrainian kleptocrat Viktor Yanukovych. It is the eighth article in a series examining Manafort’s work in Ukraine. While it is not necessary to read the earlier entries, it is recommended. There is a brief summary of the previous articles below.
Part 1 covers Paul Manafort’s early career as a Republican political consultant and lobbyist.
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.
Summary of Past Articles: Paul Manafort is a Republican political consultant who has provided services to foreign dictators. After working on Bob Dole’s presidential campaign with Republican Rick Davis, they formed the consulting firm Davis Manafort Partners. DMP was hired by the Russian oligarch and Putin ally, Oleg Deripaska, to represent his interests abroad. Manafort was sent to Ukraine to advise the Kremlin’s preferred presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych after his fraudulent election victory had been overturned by the Orange Revolution. In a stunning turn around, Manafort succeeded in helping get Yanukovych elected as the Ukrainian President. In addition to Ukraine, Manafort represented pro-Kremlin interests in other post-Soviet states on behalf of Deripaska. After Yanukovych was elected, Manafort began lobbying for him in Western capitals, including justifying his selective prosecution of his chief domestic political opponent Yulia Tymoshenko.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
PAUL MANAFORT, ALAN FRIEDMAN AND THE PR CAMPAIGN AGAINST YULIA TYMOSHENKO AND HILLARY CLINTON
After reshaping Ukraine’s courts and modifying its constitution to consolidate power, Paul Manafort’s client President Viktor Yanukovych went after his political enemies. As we have seen in a previous entry, Manafort enlisted the support of the powerful American law firm Skadden Arps to lend the patina of legitimacy to the selective prosecution of Yanukovych’s top political opponent Yulia Tymoshenko, which took place soon after he assumed the presidency.
Manafort’s attempts to discredit Tymoshenko began months before her conviction. In this effort he was aided by Alan Friedman, a former reporter for The Financial Times, The International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal.
Friedman had gained notoriety in Italy after writing a book about the Italian mogul Giovanni Agnelli. In 2003, Friedman was fired from The International Herald Tribune by an editor who didn’t care for the fact that, in addition to being a journalist, Friedman operated a side consulting firm.
In the Spring of 2011, mere months before his association with Manafort, Friedman became involved in a minor scandal involving the sale of his villa in Tuscany that would oddly foreshadow his activities in Ukraine. According to Italian real estate agent and convicted fraudster Alessandro Proto, Friedman had paid him €40,000 to plant stories in Italian news outlets that the villa was to be used as a honeymoon getaway by Prince William and Kate Middleton.
According to Proto, Friedman referred to the effort as “Operation Royal Misdirection.” Stories to that effect ran in a variety of Italian publications, including the country’s most read paper Corriere della Serra. Proto provided emails to The New York Times that established Friedman took an active role in the effort.
On June 25th, 2011, Friedman wrote a memo to Manafort in which he proposed a strategy to support Yanukovych by going on a clandestine media offensive against Tymoshenko.
By July, Manafort arranged a €1.4 million contract for Friedman to engage in an international lobbying campaign “aimed at media, decision makers, think tanks and business and political leaders in Europe and the United States.”
The source of the money, which was paid into a British Virgin Island account linked to a bank in Zurich, was a close ally of the organized crime-linked oligarch Dymtro Firtash and the head of Yanukovych’s Presidential Administration, Serhiy Lyovochkin.
Lyovochkin was later among the Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs Manafort sent internal Trump campaign polling data to during the 2016 election.
Friedman got to work immediately in an effort that also involved Gates and Kilimnik. In a confidential six-page memo labeled “Ukraine — A Digital Roadmap,” Friedman proposed a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko utilizing online videos, social media and tailored propaganda articles.
“The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote. Friedman went on to suggest that they find unflattering videos of Tymoshenko, going on to say, “The video can be floated into the social media space to reinforce the impression that she is at best reckless and unstatesmanlike and at worst malicious, defamatory and ant-Semitic.”
Friedman was the son of Jews who had escaped Germany after Kristallnacht.
Friedman went on to suggest that they could use Twitter users “known” to them to retweet hostile content.
Other plans included developing a website, generating blog posts and sending blast emails to a “targeted audience in Europe and the US.” Friedman also described what he called “black ops,” which included “Wikipedia page modification to highlight [Tymoshenko] corruption and trial and modify the tone of the language being used.”
Assisted by a former CNN producer named Eckart Sager, Friedman moved forward with the plan, chronicling his progress to Manafort who kept Lyovochkin abreast of events via email. A central plank to the propaganda effort was the establishment of a think tank called the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Socialist Republics (CXSSR), which was created with Manafort’s support.
CXSSR was used as a front to publish pro-Yanukovych articles, many authored by “Matthew Lina.” Reporters investigating the think tank were unable to find anyone by that name. Articles listed as authored by “Lina” criticizing Tymoshenko and the Obama State Department were featured on the popular conservative website RedState.
Another CXSSR writer who apparently doesn’t exist is “Erika Chen,” who was listed as a freelance graduate student.
FALSE ACCUSATIONS OF NEO-NAZISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM: THE ISRAELI CONNECTION
The joint Manafort/Friedman effort not only attacked Yulia Tymoshenko but also Hillary Clinton. In October 2012, Rick Gates emailed them both highlighting an article written by popular conservative columnist Ben Shapiro for Breitbart entitled “Jewish Leaders Blame Hillary Clinton For ‘Legitimizing’ Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Party.”
In it, Shapiro quoted the far right Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman accusing certain parties that joined Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party in a political coalition of anti-semitism. Shapiro then quotes an anonymous “Jewish leader” of accusing Hillary Clinton of creating “a Neo-Nazi Frankenstein by issuing a de-facto endorsement of Ms. Tymoshenko and her choices.”
“Gentleman — Here is the first part of a series of articles that will be coming as we continue to build this effort,” Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates wrote to Manafort and Friedman, linking to the article. “Alan, you get full credit for the Frankenstein comment.”
Later court documents revealed that, “in October 2012, MANAFORT orchestrated a scheme to have, as he wrote in a contemporaneous communication, “[O]bama jews” put pressure on the administration to disavow Tymoshenko and support Yanukovych. MANAFORT sought to undermine United States support for Tymoshenko by spreading stories in the United States that a senior cabinet official (who had been a prominent critic of Yanukovych’s treatment of Tymoshenko) was supporting anti-Semitism because the official supported Tymoshenko, who in turn had formed a political alliance with a Ukraine party that espoused anti-Semitic views. MANAFORT coordinated privately with a senior Israeli government official to issue a written statement publicizing the story. MANAFORT then, with secret advance knowledge of that Israeli statement, worked to disseminate this story in the United States…”
“I have someone putting it in the New York Post. Bada bing bada boom,” Manafort wrote to Friedman. He continued, “the Jewish community will take this out on Obama on Election Day if he does nothing.”
When the news of Manafort’s interaction with a “senior Israeli Government official” broke, both Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post speculated that the official was Avigdor Lieberman, as he had issued a statement during that time frame that had been picked up by Ben Shapiro in Breitbart.
Lieberman, who was born in the former-Soviet Union before moving to Israel, denied any involvement with Manafort, issuing a statement claiming that the accusations that he had collaborated with Manafort were due to “racism” and “prejudice” related to his origins.
Lieberman is the founder of the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose membership was initially dominated by Russian speaking Israelis.
He is known for his warm relations with Vladimir Putin, with whom he speaks Russian with comfortably.
In 2010, the head of the economic crimes department of the Israeli state prosecutor’s office, Avia Alef, was investigating Lieberman for alleged financial improprieties.
Over the course of her investigation, Israeli prosecutors came to believe that accounts linked to Lieberman had received millions of dollars from five international businessmen: Mikhail Chernoy (AKA Michael Cherney), Martin Schlaff, Robert Novikowksy, Daniel Gitenstein and Ben Gertler.
In April of 2001, $500,000 was transferred from a company owned by Cherney to a British Virgin Islands registered company that belonged to Lieberman’s driver Igor Shneider.
Part 2 of this series already covered the biography of the Uzbek-Israeli billionaire Mikhail Chernoy.
Chernoy is alleged to be a senior member of the Moscow-based Izmailovskaya criminal syndicate.
He made a fortune during the privatization of the post-Soviet Russian aluminum market, was an instrumental figure in the rise of the oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
Deripaska later sent Paul Manafort to Ukraine to work on behalf of the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, Viktor Yanukovych.
Martin Schlaff is an Austrian-born billionaire. His initial fortune was made through his connections to the East German Government and its secret police force, the STASI.
In 1986, Schlaff met with three STASI officials at the Croatia, where it was agreed that he would build a computer hard disk plant in East Germany. At the time East Germany was under a Western trade embargo. The STASI officers were reportedly impressed with Schlaff and provided him with the codename Landgraf.
In 1998, a German Bundestag committee of inquiry looking into the disappearance of funds from East Germany. Over the course of the investigation, the committee confirmed that Schlaff had received tens of millions of marks from the East German Government in return for embargoed goods.
The committee found that the safe house in which Markus Wolf, the head of the STASI’s forieign intelligence service, had stayed in after the fall of the wall had been paid for by Schalff. The safehouse was located in Dresden.
Robert Novikowsky, also Austrian, is a co-founder of Centrex Europe Energy and Gas AG (CEEGAG), one of three partners with Gazprom on developing the Vienna-based Central European Gas Hub (CEGH).
One of Novikowsky’s founding partners at CEEGAG is a Swiss-lawyer named Hans Baumgartner, who is also a member of the board of directors at RosUkrEnergo (RUE), the company Yulia Tymoshenko had accused of being connected to Semyon Mogilevich.
Schlaff and Novikowksy, share the same press officer in Vienna and through a blinding array of shell companies are linked to Gazprom.
Both were also implicated in a bribery case involving former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s sons.
“Martin Schlaff and Robert Novikowsky are figures that are connected to Putin. They work on behalf of a Russian company, Gazprom,” said former Israeli deputy state prosecutor Yehuda Sheffer. “This case involves connections that go far beyond the focus of the criminal allegations that were investigated. These are people and processes and phenomena that it’s not always easy to discover the full truth about.”
Over the course of their investigation, Avia Alef and her colleagues faced an unprecedented pattern of harassment, including being followed, surveilled by private investigators, attacked in the press and witness intimidation.
In a variety of instances key witnesses changed their testimony and in some cases mysteriously died. In December of 2012, Israeli Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein closed the Lieberman against the wishes of his own prosecutors.
On May 30th, 2019, Benjamin Netanyahu’s own son Yair tweeted that his father had appointed Weinstein in 2009 at Lieberman’s request on the understanding that he would shut the case against Lieberman.
In Weinstein’s private practice he represented both Netanyahu and Oleg Deripaska.
“[T]here are crossroads in the history of a state where a person doesn’t necessarily have to be corrupt in order to make a decisive contribution to the entrenchment of political corruption,” Alef wrote in a Hebrew language book about her experience. “In my personal assessment, in 2012, it was my lot to stand dumbstruck at such a crossroads.”
The next article in this series will explore how Paul Manafort assembled a team to lobby on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych in both Washington, D.C. and Brussels.
Part 9 explains how Manafort lobbied on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych in the halls of the Capitol in Washington, DC.
You can find my collected writings here.