of foreign policy were at best a work in progress, but on one subject he spoke with a clarity that Page found intoxicating: Trump was more overtly enamored of Russia than any candidate to compete for one of the major American political party nominations in a century.
“I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin,” Trump said in July 2015, shortly after announcing his run. He was speaking at a forum in Las Vegas when a Russian graduate student in the audience—a woman named Maria Butina, who would be charged two years later as an unregistered Russian agent who had infiltrated conservative circles—asked how he would alter the U.S. relationship with Moscow. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions,” Trump said. “I think we would get along very, very well.”
AS THE ELECTION APPROACHED, THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN ATTRACTED figures who were more recognizable to party veterans, though regarded as damaged or discarded by the establishment. Veteran campaign strategist Paul J. Manafort and retired three-star U.S. Army general Michael Flynn were both from middle-class New England backgrounds—Manafort’s family had started a construction company in Connecticut and Flynn was one of nine children, the son of a retired Army sergeant and a schoolteacher, on the shore of Rhode Island. Each had ascended the ranks of core American institutions, Manafort the Republican Party and Flynn the U.S. military. But neither had ended those associations entirely on his terms. Manafort had drifted to the margins of Republican politics after the 1990s and focused on chasing riches overseas. Flynn had been forced to resign the last position of his military career, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, over concerns with his leadership failings. The Trump campaign offered an unexpected shot at redemption, a chance to restore their reputations and position themselves either for a return to power or profit in the private sector.
Manafort and Flynn had one other thing in common: a charitable view of Russia’s role in the world and a willingness to take money from sources close to the Kremlin.
This approach had already made Manafort rich. After decades at the center of American politics—serving as a senior adviser to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Robert Dole—he had turned his attentions to a surging demand for lobbying firepower among despotic regimes overseas. His qualms were minimal and his qualifications substantial: his decades in Republican back rooms had given him a deeply embedded network of government contacts. His experience running campaigns and his intricate knowledge of modern polling and messaging positioned him as the go-to consultant for autocrats willing to pay huge sums for skills that would help them fend off any rivals but also apply a veneer of American-style democracy in otherwise rigged contests.
The foreign clients Manafort represented had risen or clung to power through corruption and bloodshed. Among them were Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos and Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi. Manafort’s firm took so much money from sources in those countries and others, including Nigeria and Kenya, that he was referenced repeatedly in a scathing 1992 report called “The Torturer’s Lobby” by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative organization.
Manafort moved into an even more lucrative echelon through his work in Ukraine on behalf of a candidate and party with extensive ties to Putin. After the revote that put Yushchenko into office, his Moscow-backed opponent, Yanukovych, spent the next six years plotting to claim the presidency he’d narrowly lost with the help of a new ally: Manafort. The price tag was staggering and largely hidden from public view. For his services recasting Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (deceivingly) as pro-Europe reformers, Manafort and his company collected millions, much of it laundered through a web of overseas accounts. Manafort would later disclose in one filing that his firm had pocketed more than $17 million in a single two-year stretch, but that was only a part of the payout—The New York Times in 2017 obtained secret ledgers kept by the Party of Regions showing an additional $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments to Manafort’s company from 2007 to 2012, meaning that from this one client Manafort had brought in nearly $30 million.
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
