The Plot to Hack America

Manafort’s shadowy dealmaking could best be described in a bribery caper in France known as “The Karachi Affair.” Manafort was hired to advise Edouard Balladur, a mentor to former French Prime Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, with payments from a Lebanese arms dealer, Abdul Rahman al-Assir, chairman of Interstate Engineering.²⁶

The case was part of the failed 1995 French presidential campaign.²⁷ Al-Assir paid Manafort to advise Balladur in the campaign. At the core of the controversy was the sale of three French Agosta 90 class submarines, which Al-Assir helped to sell to Pakistan for $950 million. A French probe speculated that Balladur’s campaign was being funded in part by bribes from those weapon sales. He also received a $250,000 loan from a Middle East arms dealer.²⁸ This was a pretty typical deal for Manafort; seemingly unscrupulous but legal.

Manafort took on the unenviable task of replacing Corey Lewandowsky. Initially it was smooth sailing for Manafort before he was removed as the chief advisor. Then the revelations about the Ukraine deals surfaced. Manafort was coming under fire for his work with past clients in Ukraine, including work for Viktor Yanukovych in a 2010 campaign.²⁹ Manafort’s efforts with Yanukovych included getting him to stop speaking Russian in public statements. Manafort worked for Serhiy Lyovochkin, former chief of staff to Yanukovych. Also part of the focus on Manafort relates to his involvement with shell companies that he has profited from.

In 2005, Manafort was working for mining tycoon Rinat Akhemetov along with Manafort partner Rick Gates, Konstantin Kilimnik, and the “International Republican Institute” of Moscow.³⁰ Manafort represented Dmytro Firtash, a gas “tycoon” who is wanted by the U.S. Manafort was also named as a defendant in a civil racketeering case with Firtash filed by Yulia Tymoschenko, the golden-haired leader of the Orange Revolution. According to U.S. Ambassador William Taylor, in cables released by Wikileaks, Firtash admitted having ties to Seymon Mogilevich, an organized crime boss in Russia.^{31, 32}

Manafort was sued in a Cayman Island court over abusing his investment money. The plaintiff was the president of the largest aluminum company in the world, Oleg Deripaska, who said Manafort has not accounted for the use of the funds or returned them.³³ Russian investors filed a petition that claimed they invested $26 million into buying a Ukrainian cable company. Surf Horizons was trying to reclaim its investment from Pericles. Manafort was ordered to be deposed in that case in 2015.³⁴ The U.S. government revoked Deripaska’s U.S. visa in July 2006, and he sought to have it restored. In 2007, Manafort and Deripaska sought to establish “Pericles Emerging Market Investors,” investing in Russia and Ukraine. Manafort helped to arrange meetings between Senator John McCain and Deripaska.

Manafort was a close paid advisor to Trump. On August 14, 2016, The New York Times published a story “Secret Ledger in Ukraine lists cash for Donald Trump’s campaign chief,” which detailed Manafort’s relationships with Viktor Yanukovych, the deposed president of the Ukraine and close Putin loyalist. Before his abrupt departure and exile in Russia, Yanukovych was a master manipulator of Ukrainian politics. He hired Manafort to help with some of that manipulation. When he escaped a popular uprising against him it was a severe blow to Russia, as the people had been agitating to get closer to the Europe and NATO.

Manafort’s dilemma following the disclosure of the ledgers, numbering around four hundred pages, was that he claimed to have never worked for either the Russian or Ukrainian governments. The handwritten ledgers reflect large projects including sales of a Ukrainian cable company under the Pericles banner.³⁵ They show cash payments for Manafort over a period ranging from 2007 to 2012. The article also claims that Manafort never registered his work as a “foreign agent” as required with the U.S. Department of Justice.

According to investigators, Manafort’s name appears twenty-two times. He was allegedly paid $12.7 million in cash or untraceable instruments over a span of five years. The investigator did note that there is nothing in the ledger that indicates Manafort ever received payments, just that they were issued.³⁶

All of these were drops in the bucket that could easily have been overlooked, but on August 17, 2016 the London Times released a bombshell report from Ukrainian prosecutors that Manafort had been paid by pro-Russian parties in the Ukraine to organize anti-NATO protests in Crimea, leading to the withdrawal of forces for a planned NATO exercise. The prosecutors wrote,