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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsSlate: Paul Manafort made a career out of stealthily reinventing the worlds nastiest tyrants
This is an older article from 2016, from when he joined the Trump campaign. It is a well documented history of Manaforts career, the fullest one I have seen. I hadnt seen it until today, when I was googling Manafort, Trump, and Roger Stone. Fascinating stuff.
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
The Quiet American
Paul Manafort made a career out of stealthily reinventing the worlds nastiest tyrants as noble defenders of freedom. Getting Donald Trump elected will be a cinch.
APRIL 28 2016 5:30 AM
By Franklin Foer
<snip>
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. He stays in luxury hotels, but orders room service and churns out memos. When he does venture from his suite for dinner with a group, hell sit at the end of the table and say next to nothing, giving the impression that he reserves his expensive opinions for private conversations with his clients. Manafort is a person who doesnt necessarily show himself. Theres nothing egotistical about him, says the economist Anders Aslund, who advised the Ukrainian government. The late Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory described him as having a smooth, noncommittal manner, though she also noted his aggrieved brown eyes. Despite his decades of amassing influence in Washington and other global capitals, hes never been the subject of a full magazine profile. He distributes quotes to the press at the time and place of his choosing, which prior to his arrival on the Trump campaign, was almost never. (Indeed, he did not respond to requests to comment for this story.)
His work necessarily entails secrecy. Although his client list has included chunks of the Fortune 500, he has also built a booming business working with dictators. As Roger Stone has boasted about their now-disbanded firm: Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, lined up most of the dictators of the world we could find.
Dictators are in the eye of the beholder. Manafort had a special gift for changing how dictators are beheld by American eyes. He would recast them as noble heroesvenerated by Washington think tanks, deluged with money from Congress.
<snip>
The genesis of Donald Trumps relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. That Roy Cohn: Joe McCarthys heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the 70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit. (Cohn accused the Feds of using Gestapo-like tactics.) But Cohn and Trump became genuine pals, lunching at the Four Seasons and clubbing together at Studio 54. It was Roy Cohn who introduced Stone and Manafort to Trump.
<snip>
Manafort has spent a career working on behalf of clients that the rest of his fellow lobbyists and strategists have deemed just below their not-so-high moral threshold. 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.
Much much more at link
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Roy Cohn as well as Joe McCarthy returned in 2016 . Perfect host for their hatred and demagoguery was found in Trump.
Think about it.
emulatorloo
(44,133 posts)Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)only this time,we have a willing Media amplifying the message of hatred form the Perpetrator,namly Trump and his Political Party.
Know one has said to Trump ,you are lying. Donald Trump has never been called to task for his lying.
BoneyardDem
(1,202 posts)to sell a person to the voting public, that was not normally sellable....to create an image that didn't really exist.
emulatorloo
(44,133 posts)Viktor Yanukovych fled the country in 2014, but Manafort did not close up his shop in the Ukraine until April 2016. The month after he joined the Trump campaign.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/10/30/who-did-manafort-and-gates-work-for-in-ukraine-and-russia/?utm_term=.0619034711f2
In Washington, Manafort worked to promote Yanukovych as a pro-Western democrat. But in 2014, Yanukovych was deposed by a popular uprising fueled by anger at his alleged corruption, authoritarianism and preference for Putin over the European Union. Yanukovych fled to Russia and is wanted in Ukraine on charges of high treason.
The Post has reported that Ukrainian business records show that Manafort's firm did not close his business operations in the country until April 2016, the month after he joined the Trump campaign (though two months before he become its chairman).
BoneyardDem
(1,202 posts)his hand in putting an unelelctable person into Bolivia's Presidency http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/movies/the-american-selling-of-the-bolivian-president-2002.html
then there were others: https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=10279509
not to mention syphoning off at least $10M of those $27 donations supposedly used for advertising, from Old Towne Media kickbacks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sanders-is-biggest-spender-of-2016-so-far--generating-millions-for-consultants/2016/04/28/600170ce-0cf2-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html?utm_term=.afe86250ea39
Lucinda
(31,170 posts)Dread Pirate Roberts
(1,896 posts)Marcos, Viktor Yanukovych, Jonas Savimbi and you know who. Quite the crowd Mr. Manafort likes to hang with.