US v Manafort

[Seabass]

This Is So Much Bigger Than Paul Manafort
With Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman on trial, America is reckoning with its very serious kleptocracy problem.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... rt/566501/

On the eve of the Paul Manafort trial, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin casually announced that the Trump administration was considering a fresh $100 billion tax cut for the wealthy. The two events—the trial and the tax cut—should be considered plot points in the very same narrative. Manafort had grown very rich by looting public monies, and Mnuchin was proposing an arguably legal version of the same.

Unlike past Trump tax cuts, this proposed cut would be implemented by executive fiat, without a congressional vote—a highly unusual and highly undemocratic act of plunder that would redirect money from the state to further enrich the American elite, not to mention Mnuchin himself.

The trial of Paul Manafort is not merely an episode in a larger scandal that will unfold over many chapters. It is a warning not to be ignored. It’s an occasion for the United States to awaken from its collective slumber about the creeping dangers of kleptocracy.

So much about the American view of itself resists accepting a disturbing reality. Conventional wisdom long held that America’s free market would never tolerate the sort of clientelism, nepotism, and outright theft that prevailed in places like Brazil and Italy. Americans thought that globalization would export the hygienic habits of this nation’s financial system and its values of good government to the rest of the world. But over the past three decades, the opposite transpired: America has become the sanctuary of choice for laundered money, a bastion of shell companies and anonymously purchased real estate. American elites have learned to plant money offshore with acumen that comes close to matching their crooked counterparts abroad.

Manafort is one of the architects of this new world order. During the 1980s and 1990s, he provided strategic advice to the thuggish dictators who served as proxies for the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist foreign policy. With his mastery of American media, he helped sanitize crooks like the former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda—the symbol of their rule, the 3,000 pairs of shoes she owned, was still fewer than the number of people by killed by the regime. These dictators (also Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi) should never have been respectable figures in Washington. But Manafort reinvented them as latter-day Thomas Jeffersons, allies in the cause of democracy, and successfully lobbied for them to receive arms and aid from the U.S. government.

As Communism fell, the former Soviet Union became the scene of one of the biggest heists in history, and the opportunity of a lifetime for Paul Manafort. In Russia, the KGB steered billions into offshore accounts during the dying days of the regime, the beginning of a pattern of plunder best described by the late Karen Dawisha in her instant classic, Putin’s Kleptocracy. These funds became the basis for some of the fortunes of those who now appear as characters in the Russiagate scandal. Vladimir Putin himself amassed wealth that totaled more than $40 billion, when Dawisha calculated his haul several years ago. Russians who invested in Trump real estate over the years had many motives. But everything we know about kleptocracy suggests that they were likely attempting to relocate their money to a place where it would both disappear from public view and have the protections that come with the American rule of law.

An important part of this story is Ukraine. Paul Manafort went to work there in 2004—and the country’s ruling party remained his primary client until 2014. During those years, the country hemorrhaged more than $118 billion in illicit financial flows, according to the Kleptocracy Initiative, a think tank that has published invaluable reports about the scourge of corruption. (To set that number in relief, the country’s entire gross domestic product in 2013 was $181 billion.) Stealing this money wasn’t a victimless crime: It came at the expense of Ukraine’s development as a market economy; it sucked funds away from public investment; it eroded faith in democracy and Western institutions. The West hypocritically lectured Ukraine about good government while it profited from Ukrainian oligarchs parking cash in Vienna, London, and New York.

Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs stole these vast fortunes, but they couldn’t accomplish the feat on their own. They needed enablers, and in the course of Mueller’s prosecution of Manafort, we’ve come to see how pillars of the American establishment filled this role.


full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... rt/566501/

[Scot Dutchy]

There is a whole parallel world out there that we know very little about.

[Forty Two]

Prosecution is apparently leading with their best foot: Manafort is a rich guy, who wore expensive suits and renovated his house. Rich Ukrainians are called "oligarchs." https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/ ... 2MCC9VKjIU Sounds like they have a slam dunk case, if they're spending days on that.

[Tero]

Manafort!

[Forty Two]

Judge just told prosecutors that they cannot prove conspiracy unless they have Rick Gates testify. Manafort's defense appears to be the Gates did whatever financial improprieties, because he was the one in charge of that, and that Rick Gates lied to the FBI, so he's not to be trusted.

Also, this case is about Manafort's financial activities as a consultant in Ukraine in 2014 and such, and his failure to pay taxes and money laundering (alleged) at that time. It really has nothing to do with Trump, other than Trump hiring Manafort later, which is unfortunate, but really nothing to do with Russian interference with an election, posting crazy facebook ads for and against trump, trying to organize rallies for and against trump, or any attempt to hack anybody.

Big yawn. If he laundered money, jail the fucker. Big deal. But if a prosecutor leads with "the guy wears fancy suits, is wealthy, and deals with 'oligarchs' in the Ukraine', I would think they'd need to have some big gun evidence coming. Can they prove the meat and potatoes, or are they hoping the jury convicts because they conclude Manafort must have evaded taxes since he had so much money? If it's the latter, the prosecution will lose. Juries are pretty good at parsing this kind of thing. There will be at least 1 or 2 folks on the jury that will say you can't convict a guy because he's rich and works in the Ukraine for rich Ukrainians.

[Tero]

I've seen this show. Two guys covered in blood kill third guy. In separate rooms in interrogation they say they just helped cover up and the other guy did all the killing.

[Forty Two]

LOL, or there was no money laundering. Or there was no tax evasion. The government bears the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And if it was Gates' job and he did all the financial management, managed the taxes for the business, and such, then they're going to have a hard time convicting Manafort.

The way he was treated smacks of desperation by a prosecutor. Jailed and in solitary confinement? Absurd. That's a way to pressure him to "flip" or to take a plea deal. Common practice of prosecutors, overcharge, put somebody at massive risk, make them exceedingly uncomfortable, cost them $100,000+ in legal fees (in this case, probably $1,000,000 plus) and get them to cave in.

[Brian Peacock]

[Tero]

Very few international money launderers are caught. Trump is such a big fish it would take a decade to sort theu all his shady deals. And who knows what he verbally agreed to do in exchange for his chunk of the money?

[Forty Two]

Very few international money launderers are caught. Trump is such a big fish it would take a decade to sort theu all his shady deals. And who knows what he verbally agreed to do in exchange for his chunk of the money?

The Manafort thing is in 2014 and prior. There isn't even an allegation that Trump was involved, much less any suggestion that he got a chunk of money. Trump Derangement Syndrome = all things anyone who ever said hello to Trump does which are bad and which don't benefit the Democrats are Trump crimes.

[Forty Two]

Rachel's gaining some weight, from the looks of that interview.

But, if the Rick Gates testimony is deemed persuasive of anything to anybody, I'd be surpised. He admitted not only to various crimes, but he admitted to embezzling money from Manafort himself, and from the Trump campaign in 2016 before he was fired. He admitted to lying so many times to the authorities that he cannot remember them all. Then he "flipped" and wants the jury to believe him that it's all Manafort. I lied to the cops, and I stole from my boss repeatedly, but believe me, he's ordered me to all sorts of bad stuff.

So the prosecution took the first three days of the trial trying to sour the jury against Manafort by showing that he's a rich guy with fancy suits, while the judge repeated chastized them for doing so.

Reasonable doubt is the standard.

[Tero]

Very few international money launderers are caught. Trump is such a big fish it would take a decade to sort theu all his shady deals. And who knows what he verbally agreed to do in exchange for his chunk of the money?

The Manafort thing is in 2014 and prior. There isn't even an allegation that Trump was involved, much less any suggestion that he got a chunk of money. Trump Derangement Syndrome = all things anyone who ever said hello to Trump does which are bad and which don't benefit the Democrats are Trump crimes.

Oh Trump is involved, with Russia. Not in the Manafort case. Take Manafort x 100 and that is the scale of Trump dirty deals. It may never come out. But if he resigns, then we know there was dirt. His best chance: lame duck November to end.

[Forty Two]

What deals? Which ones?

It may never come out? So, it hasn't come out. If it hasn't come out, how do you know about it?

Trump Derangement Syndrome. We just KNOW he did something.

[Tero]

He says fuck you Democrats with every tweet. Very presidential.

[Forty Two]

Literally? Or, are you inferring?