Manafort And Trump

Over the weekend, Robert Mueller's suggestions for Paul Manafort's sentence were made public. The document was, in fact, a tome. Heather Digby Parton writes:

As it turned out, the memorandum wasn’t filed until Saturday afternoon and it turned out to be a richly detailed 800-page document about Paul Manafort’s sordid history of criminality. There is little doubt that this man has spent a lifetime consorting with terrible people doing terrible things and making a lot of money at it. You’d think Donald Trump would have done a little bit of research before he tapped such a person to run his campaign, particularly since one of his major campaign promises was that he would only hire the very best people. Considering how many other corrupt, criminal, incompetent hires there have been to his campaign and administration, that clearly cannot be among those “promises kept” he likes to brag about. There has never been a more motley group of misfits populating one presidency in American history.

Some believe that, because there were no hints at further indictments, the investigation is coming to a close. Parton doesn't buy that argument:

The fact that Mueller didn’t include any details about a larger conspiracy argues for the idea that there’s more to come, either in new indictments or that big report. For this week, we’ll have to content ourselves with the first major public hearing since James Comey testified in June of 2017. Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen makes his appearance on Wednesday before the House Oversight Committee — on a split screen, while Trump meets with Kim Jong-un in Hanoi. The Trump presidency gets more surreal by the day.

Certainly, when Cohen testifies, he will also offer a hard look into Trump World. And I'm betting that Trump's son and son-in-law will not escape Mueller's net.

Stay tuned.

Image: New York Magazine

Manafort Mysteries

Ruth Marcus writes that Paul Manafort is, indeed, a man of mystery:

The mystery — a mystery to me at least — is comprehending the magnitude of Manafort’s greed. Assuming the allegations are true — and even if Manafort’s former partner, Rick Gates, is an admitted liar, bank accounts don’t lie — why would someone who vacuumed up so many millions of dollars take the risk of not paying the taxes due on that income?

The Manafort indictments detail a gusher of cash flowing to the lobbyist, $60 million from the Russian-backed political party in the Ukraine alone, according to a filing by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Even if you paid half of that in tax, which would mean you had a pretty bad set of tax accountants, you would have enough left for all the ostrich jackets a man might want. In this case, greed isn’t good — it’s stupid. The temptation to do the dirty work of autocrats and oligarchs and rake in millions in return is understandable, if not laudable; it is a bipartisan failing of human nature.

 With all that cash flowing in, why risk tax fraud? And why the desperation to keep himself financially afloat?

My colleague Catherine Rampell has noted the dwindling number of prosecutions for white-collar crime, and maybe, absent Manafort’s seemingly reckless decision to go to work for the Trump campaign, he might have gotten away with it. Criminal prosecutions referred by the IRS to the Justice Department have fallen by half since 2013. Still, Manafort should not have been sleeping soundly, in any of his many multimillion-dollar homes — he was being interviewed by FBI agents about his “offshore consulting activities” even as he was allegedly failing to report his income.

The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson summarized Manafort’s precarious situation and frantic behavior: “By early 2016, the man who previously had been sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to the U.S. each month seemed to be in a self-destructive frenzy, making the desperate moves of a man who needed some cash, right away, and had run out of options.”

 This man was Donald Trump's campaign manager? The stink is becoming overpowering.

Image: Pinterest