Over a decade, Manafort and his subordinates hid vast sums from U.S. authorities through a dizzying array of front companies, avoiding taxes by routing payments from secret accounts in Cyprus—essentially wiring money to pay bills in the United States without ever reporting the income. From 2008 to 2014, according to a Justice Department indictment, Manafort channeled $12 million from overseas accounts into the United States through a titanic shopping spree: $520,440 to a Beverly Hills clothing store, $163,705 for Range Rovers, $623,910 for antiques, $934,350 for rugs. And those were just the incidentals: Manafort shifted millions more from Cyprus to assorted trusts and limited liability corporations to buy homes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
Manafort used his Ukraine connections to pursue lucrative deals with oligarchs. Among them was the $18 million sale of Ukraine’s cable television assets to a partnership assembled by Manafort and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, around 2008. Manafort denied taking illicit payments and depicted his consulting work in Ukraine as part of an honest effort to democratize the country and elevate its prospects of joining the European Union. Yet after Yanukovych prevailed in his 2010 bid to be Ukraine’s new president, the evidence of his brutal rule and lavish lifestyle at the expense of ordinary Ukrainians was hard to conceal. If Manafort was uncomfortable working for a leader who had little love for democracy or human rights and a visible affection for Putin, it did not show.
Three years after taking office, Yanukovych—under intense pressure from the Kremlin—rejected an agreement that would have moved Ukraine closer to membership in the EU, which many in the country wanted. Instead, he agreed to take a cash infusion from Russia and edge away from Europe in favor of lashing Ukraine’s political and economic fortunes to Moscow. The nation erupted in a new wave of unrest: protests in the capital city of Kiev spread across other parts of the country and degenerated into riots, clashes with police left dozens of people dead, and government authority teetered on collapse. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych fled the country in February 2014 for the safety he could find only in his true base of support: Russia.
The crisis in Ukraine, such a distant consideration for most Americans, was in hindsight intricately connected to what happened in 2016 in the United States.
For all his projections of strength and security, Putin is deeply insecure about his hold on power, and particularly anxious that a revolt like that in Ukraine could bring his own end. A senior U.S. official who served in Moscow during the Obama and Trump administrations and had contacts in the Kremlin said that Putin’s anxiety is profound and macabre. After the deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was dragged from a culvert in 2011 by an angry mob, sodomized with a bayonet, and shot, Putin watched footage of the gruesome incident repeatedly. It was a graphic demonstration of the outcome he most feared, and one that he was convinced had been set in motion by the U.S. intervention in Libya and could occur, if he were not vigilant, in Moscow.
The 2014 unrest in Ukraine intensified Putin’s paranoia, and he again suspected manipulation by Washington, particularly after seeing the State Department’s top official on Russia, Victoria Nuland, handing out sandwiches to protesters.
Russia retaliated by releasing an intercepted phone call between Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in which she expressed irritation with Europe’s slow response to the unfolding crisis. “Fuck the EU!” she said. The release caused minor diplomatic embarrassment but had a greater significance. Spy agencies steal such signals routinely but usually guard them jealously to ensure that the victim doesn’t discover the breach. In this case, the Kremlin had taken a piece of intelligence and “weaponized” it—something it would undertake on a far grander scale two years later.
The ignominious departure of Yanukovych and the collapse of his political party cut off a massive flow of cash to Manafort. That was only the beginning of his problems. The FBI had begun probing payments surrounding his work in Ukraine, and agents interviewed him twice, first in 2013 and again a year later. The scrutiny made it risky for Manafort, his revenue plummeting, to reach for the money he’d stashed overseas.
Manafort’s dealings with Russians also began to catch up to him. Deripaska, the oligarch he’d worked with on the $18 million cable television transaction, became convinced that he’d been cheated by Manafort and began a years-long campaign in courts to get his investment back. Deripaska sought entry into the United States but, fortunately for Manafort, was denied a visa because of his alleged links to organized crime.
Despite hemorrhaging funds, Manafort was unable or unwilling to stanch spending on a lifestyle that by now included homes from the Hamptons to Palm Beach, vacations in the South of France, a horse farm in Florida, and projects for his filmmaker daughter. Instead, he turned to even more legally dubious financial maneuvers, taking out multimillion-dollar loans on properties he’d acquired with money he’d never reported as income. A later criminal indictment accused him of submitting doctored financial statements, diverting loan proceeds, and lying about credit card bills as part of a sprawling scheme to dupe banks.
His personal life was also spiraling out of control. In late 2014, he was caught cheating on his wife of thirty-six years, according to a trove of text messages exchanged by his daughters that was stolen by hackers (possibly Ukrainians seeking revenge on Manafort) and posted online. In the messages his daughters—Andrea, who was then twenty-nine, and Jessica, then thirty-three—spoke of their father with a mix of sympathy and revulsion. Andrea hinted at the financial crunch her father was facing, complaining that he was “suddenly extremely cheap” in conversations about her wedding budget and strapped by a “tight cash flow.” They expressed admiration for his accomplishments but described him as manipulative and cravenly dishonest. In the most damning passage, Andrea bluntly acknowledged the moral stain of the Manafort fortune. “Don’t fool yourself,” she wrote to her sister. “The money we have is blood money.”
The affair appeared to add to the financial strain. According to the texts, he had rented a $9,000-a-month apartment as well as a home on Long Island for his new girlfriend, a woman thirty years younger than him. When the affair was exposed, Manafort agreed to couples counseling. After that failed, he checked into a therapy facility in Arizona, where he often sobbed during daily ten-minute phone calls home.
These were the circumstances of the man Trump would turn to in 2016 to lead his campaign.
EARLY THAT YEAR, MANAFORT SAT DOWN AT A COMPUTER AND began typing a memo to pitch his services. “I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote, aware of Trump’s miserly impulses and volatile tendencies toward paid subordinates. The two-page missive, which he delivered through a mutual acquaintance, recited his experience running conventions and wrangling GOP delegates presenting himself as someone who could head off the threat of a convention coup. He also cast himself, remarkably, as a Washington outsider, an exile of the swamp Trump had vowed to drain. Finally he noted that he lived in Trump Tower—unit 43G—and claimed that he had once helped Trump quiet the skies over his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida by lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration.
Former colleagues, mindful of the problematic sources of Manafort’s riches, warned him of the scrutiny that would accompany a return to the political spotlight. But Manafort was unswayed—Trump was his kind of guy. On March 29, eight days after Trump’s meeting with the Post editorial board, Manafort was brought on board.
MANAFORT JOINED AN OPERATION SO BEREFT OF FOREIGN POLICY expertise that one campaign official summarized the search criteria in stark terms: “Anyone who came to us with a pulse, a résumé, and seemed legit would be welcomed.”
Only one early