Trump Decries Washington Insiders, But He Hired One to Save His Campaign

Paul Manafort is a veteran GOP lobbyist who’s represented dictators and corporations.

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Throughout his presidential campaign, Republican front-runner Donald Trump has played the angry populist, railing against fat-cat donors, influence peddlers, and Washington establishment insiders who rig the system to the detriment of the American people. “These people have hundreds of millions of dollars that they’ve given to these politicians, and these politicians are puppets for them,” he exclaimed recently. “With me, I’m going to do what’s right for the country.”

Yet when Trump needed a political operative to oversee his campaign’s crucial delegate strategy—which could determine whether he wins the nomination at the Republican convention in July—he hired one of the most prominent Washington insiders: Paul Manafort, a veteran Republican lobbyist and consultant who has made millions of dollars working the system on behalf of corporations seeking government favors as well as Third World strongmen and kleptocrats.

Manafort has been honing his skills as a delegate wrangler for four decades, starting with Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign, when the sitting but unelected president faced a stiff challenge in the Republican primary from Ronald Reagan. Manafort subsequently handled this function for other GOP presidential candidates, from Reagan in 1980 to John McCain in 2008. The Chamber of Commerce’s Scott Reed, who worked with Manafort during Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign, described him as “a proven vote counter [who] knows how to strategically move a campaign.” Manafort, who was the Dole campaign’s convention manager, led the effort to minimize the role at the convention of Patrick Buchanan, the right-wing commentator who placed second in the GOP nominating contest, so that Dole would not be burdened in the general election with Buchanan’s controversial conservative positions.

Hunting delegates was a side job for Manafort, who focused on lucrative work as a lobbyist for under-fire corporations and reviled political figures. In 1985, for example, Manafort and an aide flew to Angola, which was then in the middle of a bloody civil war, to woo Jonas Savimbi, a onetime Maoist and brutal warlord who allegedly relied on blood diamonds to fuel his army. According to the Washington Post, Manafort’s pitch to Savimbi was almost derailed by a furious outbreak in fighting, but he managed to land a $600,000-a-year contract to represent Savimbi and his UNITA party in Washington, DC, and to try to help Savimbi win US funding. Spy magazine noted that Manafort’s firm at the time—Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly—did well by Savimbi:

For $600,000 a year since 1985, the firm has represented Angola’s thuggish Jonas Savimbi, an alleged witch burner, and his guerilla group UNITA, helping promulgate his “freedom fighter” image and persuading Congress to approve more than $230 million in covert aid to Savimbi’s rebel forces.

Savimbi was merely one of a rogue’s gallery of strongmen and despots Manafort’s firm represented. The company also worked for Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator who looted billions of dollars from his country, and Somali dictator Said Barre, whose violent autocratic rule left the African nation in ruins. The firm helped both leaders collect hundreds of millions of dollars in US funding.

Though Trump has talked tough about confronting Russian leader Vladimir Putin, Manafort has links to the darkest corners of Putin’s foreign policy world. In the mid-2000s, Manafort went to work for former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, a Putin ally who was deposed in 2014 following mass protests over his administration’s corruption and vote-rigging. A 2011 lawsuit against Manafort and other Yanukovych aides, filed in New York by former Ukranian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, accused the lobbyist of assisting in a complicated scheme to launder money for a Yanukovych ally, a Ukrainian oligarch named Dmitry Firtash who was accused of having ties to organized crime. Manafort fought the claims, and the lawsuit was later dismissed when the New York judge hearing the case ruled that his court didn’t have jurisdiction and that Tymoshenko couldn’t prove “that Manafort’s business dealings with Firtash constituted a conscious effort to abet intimidation and harassment against his political critics in Ukraine.” Emails revealed in the case showed Manafort trying to help arrange investments in the United States for Firtash. The US government is currently seeking Firtash’s extradition on bribery charges.

In another chapter of Manafort’s long career, he pulled off a feat that epitomizes the kind of inside-the-Beltway cronyism that Trump rails against. In 1986, Manafort was paid more than $326,000 by a developer to lobby a Reagan administration official to approve a $43 million taxpayer-funded grant for a housing project in New Jersey that local officials didn’t even want. His role in the deal became the subject of a congressional hearing, where Manfort told members of Congress that he shouldn’t be faulted for knowing how to game Washington. In one telling exchange, Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) challenged Manafort’s involvement, calling it a “very smelly, sleazy business…I feel it wasn’t a meritorious project. People who knew how the system worked were able to get their project approved, even if it wasn’t meritorious.”

Manafort shrugged the complaint off. “We worked the system as it existed,” he said. “I don’t think we did anything illegal or improper.”

When asked about his purported $1,000-an-hour fee to pull strings inside Washington, Manafort dismissed the question, responding, “By Washington standards, that is not very high.”

How serious is Trump about his crusade to rid Washington of high-paid, system-rigging influence peddlers? By putting Manafort on his campaign payroll, the tycoon has demonstrated he certainly isn’t against using these insiders if it benefits his own special interest. 

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate