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Paul Manafort is going to prison for his work on behalf of the Ukrainian government, but his time as a member of “the torturer’s lobby” also helped pave his path to federal penitentiary. That’s according to a new sentencing memo from Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In addition to laying out Manafort’s cover lobbying and obstruction of justice crimes, prosecutors reached back into his ignoble Reagan-era lobbying work to show just how shady Trump’s former campaign chairman really is.
Haunted by history: In addition to a white collar crime spree that spanned the past decade, Manafort has a history of less than ethical but still legal dealings dating back to his lobbying business in the 1980s. At his old firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, Manafort represented a rogue’s gallery of vicious, brutal dictators and strongmen like Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos. Now, that work has come back to haunt him in a different way.
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In its sentencing memo, the special counsel’s office delved back into Manafort’s lobbying history in the 1980s to show that he was intimately familiar with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requirements. In the mid 80s, Manafort’s connections with the Reagan administration landed him a job at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation while he had registered under FARA for his work on behalf of Saudi Arabia. Since federal law prohibits federal employees from working for the government while doing FARA work, Manafort had to resign the job. A subsequent investigation by the Justice Department showed his firm had failed to report a range of other lobbying work he’d done on behalf of foreign governments.
Mens rea: Why does Manafort’s battles with the Justice Department in the 1980s matter for his current lobbying charges? They show that his crimes were deliberate and witting. In his Virginia tax and bank fraud case, Manafort managed to skate on a number of pretty complex and abstract tax charges. The fact that he’d battled with the Justice Department over these issues in the 1980s shows that he was well aware of what the law required of him. The fact that he’d been caught at least once before failing to report some foreign lobbying work also showed that a pattern of disregard for the law that might not bode too well for him when Judge Amy Berman Jackson starts doing sentencing math.
Business and pleasure: Manafort’s trial in Virginia, where he was convicted of tax and bank fraud, was mostly about his personal life and how he spent the proceeds of his consulting business (and didn’t pay taxes on them). The charges against him in D.C. were mostly about the crimes he committed in order to make that money. But look through the accounts listed in the special counsel’s sentencing memo attachments and you’ll see that, at least as far as the criminal infrastructure used to commit his crimes, there wasn’t much of a wall between business and personal.
If you cross reference the offshore shell companies Manafort used to pay people working on his lobbying project, you see a number of names that surfaced in the trial. Manafort used a Cypriot shell company, Black Sea View Limited, to pay Skadden for its lobbying work and to pay a contractor working on his home in Florida. Global Endeavour, a shell company set up in the Grenadines, paid for both Manafort’s lobbying subcontractors as well as high end home entertainment gear, a landscaper at his Hamptons estate, and the tab at his fancy New York tailor. For Manafort, his offshore cash was a piggy bank for illicit activity and it didn’t much matter whether it was for business or pleasure.
What’s missing: The sentencing memo is most notable for what it’s missing. The sentencing memo references the most intriguing aspects of the Manafort case thus far: Manafort’s interactions with alleged Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik, and the mysterious “investigation in another district.”
That runs up against expectations for today’s sentencing memo. New outlets spent the week promising that a final Mueller report was just around the corner and could reveal all as soon as Friday (it didn’t)—speculation fueled by reports that the Justice Department’s Mueller point man, Rod Rosenstein, would soon step down. Others thought that the sentencing memo would be Mueller’s opportunity to tip his hand about the less well known parts of the investigation.
The hype and letdown should be instructive. It’s clear that there’s still a lot about this investigation that hasn’t become public yet. What isn’t clear at all is when it will end.
