Paul Manafort/ A career of reinventing the world's nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/04/paul_manafort_isn_t_a_gop_retread_he_s_made_a_career_of_reinventing_tyrants.html
A revealing and necessary read. The ties to Paul Manafort are stunning.
APRIL 28 2016 5:30 AM
The Quiet American
Paul Manafort made a career out of stealthily reinventing the world’s nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom. Getting Donald Trump elected will be a cinch.
Some saw the hiring of Manafort as desperate, as Trump reaching for a relic from the distant past in the belated hope of compensating for a haphazard campaign infrastructure.
In fact, securing Manafort was a coup. He is among the most significant political operatives of the past 40 years, and one of the most effective.
He has revolutionized lobbying several times over, though he self-consciously refrains from broadcasting his influence.
Unlike his old business partners, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, you would never describe Manafort as flamboyant
SNIP
“Real estate was the ostensible reason for sending money to New York. But they never wanted to close on the project, they wanted to keep the cash liquid, so it could keep going back to Ukraine.”
The suit never had much of a chance, because it didn’t offer enough supporting evidence to justify its grandiose claim: that Manafort and Firtash were laundering money to finance human rights abuses on a grand scale.
But her case raised all manner of troubling questions, and reinforced an old one:
Why would Paul Manafort so consistently do the bidding of oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin?
SNIP
Manafort has consistently given his clients a patina of respectability that has allowed them to migrate into the mainstream of opinion, or close enough to the mainstream.
He has a particular knack for taking autocrats and presenting them as defenders of democracy.
If he could convince the respectable world that thugs like Savimbi and Marcos are friends of America, then why not do the same for Trump?
One of his friends told me, “He wanted to do his thing on home turf. He wanted one last shot at the big prize.”
**Explains why Mueller will never let Manafort step outside his prison cell.
Why Manafort was the target & certainly justifies the raid on his home.
