Entertain this scenario for a minute: there’s a country sitting on a geopolitical fault line between the U.S. and one of its main adversaries, Russia.
Manafort represents himself, first, last and always. I don’t know what honey he’s dripping into TFG’s ears, but I’m sure he is firmly in the hands of Putin. It’s the continuing shame of his campaign that he associates with people like Ostrich Suits. He can not be re-elected next November; it is truly inconceivable.
Manafort exudes sleaze, and there is no separating him from Roger Stone. They both belong in lock-up.
Lots of very good questions, and excellent context.
Thanks, TPM.
I believe characterizing Manafort with a question mark as to his allegiance is way too generous.
He and his old pal Stone are both straight-up psychopaths. Period. (Not that psychopaths have “pals” in the sense you or I would use the term).
That is precisely what has made them malignant wildfire tumors on the body politic since they were working for Nixon.
I think that the last part may be most interesting going forward. Is manafort effectively fighting the last war, in which case many of his effort will backfire?
"Manafort himself was later found to have given a close associate, allegedly a Russian spy, internal Trump campaign polling data in August 2016 which eventually made its way to Russian intelligence services. "
The route of the polling data is obvious. Of course it eventually made its way to Russian intelligence services. Unfortunately, That was not the conclusion of the Mueller report, that claimed that the trail ran cold and that they were not definitively able to establish where it went.
Could the FBI and various intelligence services not figure it out? My question has been, did Mueller base the trail-gone-cold conclusion on input from Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI Counterintelligence Division in New York, Charles McGonigal? McGonigal is now serving a prison sentence for taking bribes from… Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.
2017 NBC news:
A leaked U.S. State Department cable from 2006 said that Manafort’s job was to give the Party of Regions an [“extreme makeover”] and “change its image from … a haven for mobsters into that of a legitimate political party.”
My impressions have been that he wasn’t for an association with the EU or devotion to the Krimlin, just grifting whomever offered the most reward…
Did he see himself as a double agent, setting an example for McGonigal?
This covers the later part of Manafort’s career. Here is a nice writeup of Manafort & Stone’s unsavory consulting activities:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/paul-manafort-roger-stone/
What a strange world Manafort inhabits, deal-making at the matrix of power and money in Ukraine
Josh Kovensky sketches out the history of Manafort machinations that we know about. It’s bad bad stuff. I shudder to think what blood and betrayals remain unseen.
It’s utterly gob-smacking to see Trump, at this hour of the campaign, raise up Manafort’s name, never mind his desired employment.
Trump is sowing the wind.
Exquisite analysis. In the absence of concrete evidence, one can read into the character of Manafort whatever one most wants to see there – as Josh K’s write-up makes clear. For such a disreputable character to be so clouded in ambiguities is chilling in and of itself
It’s troubling that Manafort popped back onto the scene just after the announcement that, as a party nominee, Donald Trump would start getting intelligence briefings. 
Never trust anyone who wears an ostrich skin jacket.
Where has NSA, CIA, etc been for the last 8 years?
It is the quietest I’ve ever heard from them.
Bye the bye, Josh Kovensky is great on TV but I caution him regarding one key detail: Josh’s face is very expressive, so much so you can see flashes of reaction to an interviewer’s unnuanced questions. I think it’s great to see a smart guy patiently deepen his interlocutors’ understanding!
Well done.
I have hanging as a question mark over my own head the questions that have been raised about Manafort’s role in advising Yanukovych at the time of the sniping attack on protestors in Maidan Square.
A sample, drawn from a quick Google search, is here:
A skittish dictatorpuppet doesn’t need a sketchy American cutout to advise him to stage a massacre, but Manafort’s proximity to those events tells its own kind of story. He’ll be in close proximity to more and far worse, if he is advising Trump & Trump gets elected, again. He’ll have the same sketchy, cannily ambiguated or shrouded Russian spy connections, he again won’t need to overtly advise a dictatorpuppet what he should do when his illegitimacy manifests as chaos, because the dictatorpuppet will be steeped in his own propensity for evil acts.
I don’t even have to write these things. It’s the kind of story that writes itself. Which is what it’s doing right now.
Disagree.
Perhaps Russia (Putin) were OK with Ukraine joining the EU , as long as their mob (President Viktor Yanukovych , Manafort ) were running the show . It would give them an “in” to the EU .What pissed of Putin was Ukraine electing an “anti-corrupt” government and president . The real enemy for the mob is an honest democracy .