Better call Paul

Better Call Paul
1 Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 2 hours ago

Yesterday, as the big news was breaking, I was mainly reading the headlines, reported updates and TV interviews. It was only last night when I read through the 40 or more pages of court documents. In order, they are 1) superseding indictment, 2) plea agreement, and 3) statement of offenses. So a few thoughts on those.

Most of the information is just what you’ve seen reported, the maximal agreement of cooperation, the details and nature of agreements about possible length of imprisonment, some of the details of the financial crimes. You’ve heard most of this.

One small and humorous thing was the almost juvenile ways Manafort tried to cover up his crimes. One particularly humorous example comes in the late ’16 and early ’17 period. Manafort is already under active and investigation and he and his firm get subpoenaed for certain emails and records. His firm responds that they have no such emails and lamely sends along an undated ’email retention policy’ which dictated that all emails must be deleted after 30 days. Obviously that was nonsense. Mueller’s investigators found everything they were looking for when they raided Manafort’s Virginia home last summer.

DMI is Manafort’s firm.

There was, however, one big thing that jumped out at me.

When I was just starting out as a journalist in DC I used to troll through the filings at the FARA office looking for cool, or rather sleazy, stories to write about. FARA is frequently flouted by various means. I always saw it as a law as often honored in the breach as otherwise. I distinctly remember one time maybe twenty years ago when I’d found a case where I thought someone clearly had failed to file when the law clearly required that they do so. I talked to one of the FARA staffers, who I think was a staff lawyer. He was basically bending over backwards to make the non-filer’s case for him! It was like an agency bent on non-enforcement.

So when the FARA law became so central to Trump campaign corruption cases I thought it was sort of like getting Al Capone on taxes, zealous enforcement in one area to get at more amorphous wrongdoing that was harder to address in an indictment in another.

I got a very different impression from these documents. Manafort should have been indicted for this failure to register even if none of the other crimes or anything to do with Trump had ever happened. This was no case of some spill over into the United States of PR Manafort was doing in either Ukraine or Europe. The depth of the information operations – working the US Senate, working the administration and executive departments, involving himself in political campaigns and through furtive press work – was really staggering. This read less like conventional foreign lobbying and more like an influence operation.

Obviously, there’s no bright line separating those two things. Effective foreign lobbying is an influence operation. But there are matters of degree. There are also matters of secrecy. Lobbyists generally don’t want to file under FARA because there’s a taint involved. FARA is part of the Justice Department. You’re registering with the law enforcement authorities that you’re working for a foreign government. There is a certain implication of guilt or at least the implication that your activities should be surveilled. But the indictment makes pretty clear that Manafort didn’t file specifically because he needed his activities to remain secret, which to a great degree they did.

One thing this told me was that the FARA indictments were very legitimate. The prosecutors weren’t bootstrapping the law to get him on other things or pressure him to cooperate. Or if they were, they had him dead to rights.

The other implication is less concrete but still notable. Reading through the narrative of Manafort’s work on behalf of Ukraine in the United States, it was impossible not to see how valuable he would be to those same clients either within the US government or within a US political campaign. We still have no clear or complete explanation of how or why Paul Manafort ended up as the guy in charge of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The notional explanations have never added up. Reading this part left me even more curious to finally get an answer to that question. It seems we may.

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