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On July 31, in the Eastern District of Virginia, Robert Mueller brought Paul Manafort—the former international lobbyist and political adviser, and, more recently, chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—to trial. He faced eighteen counts of tax evasion and other financial frauds.
Mueller would soon be trying Manafort on other charges—conspiracy, money laundering, witness tampering—in U.S. district court in Washington. The prosecutors had sought to consolidate all the charges in D.C., but the Manafort legal team, believing it had leverage where in fact it had none, refused to agree to the consolidation. The government therefore proceeded with a plan to conduct back-to-back trials, doubling its chances for convictions and, as it attempted to squeeze Manafort to testify against Trump, virtually guaranteeing his personal bankruptcy.
For Bannon, Manafort had long been an incomprehensible and comic presence, and the opening of the trial prompted something of a reverie from him. It was an absurdist tale, with Manafort a quintessential Trump sort of character, useful and amusing to Trump, and, as well, a potential mortal threat to him.
“Here,” said Bannon, reminiscing one summer day at his dining table in the Embassy, “is how I met Paul Manafort …
“I was in New York, sitting in Bryant Park and reading the paper. This was the eleventh or twelfth of August [2016], and I saw Maggie Haberman’s ohmygod story in the Times about the total, unremitting collapse of the Trump campaign. I called Rebekah Mercer. ‘Did you know,’ I say, ‘that this thing was that fucked up?’ She says, ‘Let me make some calls.’ Five minutes later she calls me back and says, ‘It’s even worse. It’s a death spiral. McConnell and Ryan are already saying that by Tuesday or Wednesday they are going to cut Trump loose from the RNC and focus all the money on the House and Senate. They’re telling donors this Trump thing is over.’ Then Bob [Bob Mercer, Rebekah’s father] gets on the phone and I say, ‘You know, we’re going to get blamed for this. It’s going to be Breitbart, Bannon, and the Mercers who foisted this guy on the Republicans. That’s why they don’t have Rubio or Jeb Bush or even Ted Cruz.’ So Bob says, ‘Steve, you can’t do worse than this. You could run this thing and tighten it up to losing by only five or six—not twenty!’ I say, ‘Hey, you know, I still think this thing is winnable—really.’
“So that’s when they call Woody Johnson. Bob and Rebekah fly out to this fundraising thing he’s got scheduled in the Hamptons for Saturday where they know Trump is going to be. They set things up to see Trump beforehand and they pitch him on me and Kellyanne taking over the campaign. Mnuchin was there but they threw him out. Rebekah has no bedside manner, so it was like, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m Steve Mnuchin, I’m doing high-net-worth contributions.’ Rebekah says, ‘Well, you’re doing a terrible job because no big donors are giving.’ In fact, Woody has a tent for a thousand. Of course, everybody in the Hamptons reads the New York Times and knows you’d be a total loser to show up—and only fifty guys show up, thirty already tapped out. Trump walks out there and sees nothing but a handful of schmendricks and loses it. Doesn’t shake any hands, just glares and leaves.
“It’s set up for me to talk to Trump [from New York] later that evening. We’re on the phone for like three hours. I’m father-confessor. He’s saying, ‘The campaign is fucked. Manafort is to blame. Manafort—fucking Manafort.’ He’s saying, ‘Fucking Manafort. Fucking Manafort. Fucking Manafort.’ And I’m saying, ‘Listen to me, we’ve got this. Really. Really.’ So we set up to have breakfast next morning. He says, ‘I’m playing golf at eight so let’s have breakfast at seven.’ Fine. Done. Six forty-five I traipse into Trump Tower. There’s a black dude at that little guard stand. Place is totally empty. He says, ‘We’re not open to the public right now.’ I say, ‘I know, but I’m here to have breakfast with Mr. Trump.’ He says, ‘You came to the wrong place. This is Trump Tower. The residence is around the corner. But,’ he says, ‘not sure you’ll find Mr. Trump there, just saying.’ I say, ‘Why not?’ He says, ‘Well, if you’re supposed to have breakfast with him, you should know where he is.’ Eyeing me like a kook. He’s about to throw me out.
“So I go and call Trump and he says, ‘Where are you?’ I say, ‘I’m sitting in the lobby of Trump Tower.’ He says, ‘What the fuck are you doing there? You’re supposed to be here for breakfast!’ ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I thought that meant Trump Tower.’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m here in Bedminster.’ Well, I’d never heard of Bedminster in my life. So I say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘My golf course. A great golf course. The greatest. So be out here at noon.’ Then he starts to explain in great detail how to get there because, honestly, he has no earthly idea what a phone can do. He is literally like my dad, who is ninety-six. For ten minutes—‘You go over the bridge, exit, remember road splits, veer this way…’ I’m saying, ‘Just give me an address.’ ‘… Get off Rattlesnake Road, come down by the church, but don’t take that right … keep going … hard right…’ On and on, he’s from the land that time’s forgotten. I swear he doesn’t know how to use a phone.
“I get a driver to take me out, pull up, say, ‘Mr. Bannon for Mr. Trump.’ ‘Oh yeah, you’re going to the lunch. Go to the clubhouse.’ I’m sitting there thinking, ‘The lunch. The lunch.’ I thought I was there to have lunch, not for the lunch. Then we pull up at this colonial thing, guy walks out and says, ‘Mr. Bannon, you’re early. Mr. Ailes and the mayor aren’t here yet.’ I go, ‘Fuck me. I’m out here to audition.’ I go into this gazebo thing and they’re setting up and it’s a table like for six. So I’m really pissed. They’re putting hot dogs on the grill. It’s like a Jersey shore cookout. Hot dogs—and not good hot dogs. I later realize that’s what he eats. Nathan’s franks, burgers. I am so ripshit. He’s got me out there to audition. I’m not auditioning; I don’t need this. I’m not going to be some fucking monkey. In front of Ailes, how embarrassing is this?
“Then Ailes shows up and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing here? Don’t fuckin’ tell me he brought you out here for debate prep!’ [The debate was scheduled for September 26.] Then I realize, ‘Nobody has any idea why I’m here.’ So I say, ‘Hey, he’s tired of hearing your war stories. He wants to get some fucking work done.’ I’m giving Ailes shit. Then Rudy piles in. Then fat-boy Christie shows up. It’s like the Three Stooges. And Trump comes in, he’s got the full Cleveland—white golf shoes, white pants, white belt. And red ball cap. It’s gotta be ninety-five degrees, ninety-five humidity, and he’s just played eighteen. He’s sweating like something you’ve never seen. But he maxes down two hot dogs right off the bat. He’s still the guy from Queens. Just played eighteen and needs his dogs. He goes, ‘Look, I gotta go shower, guys. And hey, by the way, Steve’s part of the team.’ Thirty minutes later, he comes back, and we’re all sitting there.
“And a few minutes later, in walks Paul Manafort. Holy Christ. He has on those sort of see-through white culottes, see your skivvies underneath, he’s wearing those with the blazer with the kerchief and the crest. He’s Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. The only time before I had seen Manafort was on Sunday morning TV, live from Southampton. This whole populist thing was broadcasting live from Southampton. Anyway, we’re sitting there, and Trump comes back and immediately goes after Manafort.
“I have never seen a guy mauled in front of people like Trump mauled Paul Manafort. ‘You’re terrible, you can’t defend me, you’re a lazy fuck.’ It was brutal. I was the peacemaker. The other guys just sat there wide-eyed. ‘Am I a fucking baby? Am I a fucking baby? You think you have to talk to me through TV? Am I a fucking baby? I see you on there saying what you think I should do? Hey, you know what, you suck on TV.’ Then he rips into Manafort about the Times story. And I say, ‘Hey, you know they make this shit up.’ And he says, ‘Really?’ ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘It’s true,’ he says, and then goes on a rant about the polling guys. ‘They take your money and just make these numbers up. It’s all made up.’ He’s screaming.
“Manafort creeps out early. There’s no debate prep. Rudy, Ailes, and Christie are having a fine time. But no debate prep. A clusterfuck. Oh, and Trump hasn’t told them I’ve come to run the campaign. I’m just part of the team. I hang back as the thing breaks up and tell him we’ve got to announce this, and that I’m not going to fire Manafort. He stays as chairman. We don’t need more stories about how fucked we are.
“So I go immediately back into the city and go up to the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower. This time the guard lets me up. I walk into the place. It’s Sunday afternoon now, about five or six. First of all, I’ve never been in a campaign headquarters in my life. I think I’ll be walking into a scene out of The Candidate. Or The West Wing. I think I’m going to see incredibly smart young people. People walking around with data printouts. Packed with people. Activity everywhere. Electric. But it’s empty. When I say empty, I mean nobody. Closed. Shut.
“I walk around the fourteenth floor. Every office is empty and dark. I finally wander around this rabbit warren and get to the rapid response war room and there’s one guy. Little Andy Surabian. One guy. I go, ‘Where is everybody?’ He says, ‘What do you mean?’ I say, ‘Is this headquarters? Or maybe the actual headquarters is in Washington?’ He says, ‘No, no, it’s here.’ I say, ‘You sure?’ So I say, ‘Then where is everybody?’ and he says, ‘The Trump campaign doesn’t work weekends. They’ll all be getting in around ten tomorrow.’ I say, ‘But there’s like eighty-eight days to go!’ I say, ‘I don’t know much, but I know that campaigns work seven days a week. There’s no days off.’ He looks at me, and says, ‘This is not exactly a campaign. This is what it is.’
“So I realize the New York Times didn’t even scratch the surface. There’s nothing going on here. It’s not a disorganized campaign. It’s not a campaign. But I’m thinking, ‘Well, this is a shit show.’ But because of that, there’s no downside for me. I’ll cover myself on the downside and let people know what kind of joke this is. And I’m thinking I don’t even know if there’s a chance to close this up to within five or six points. I’m thinking, ‘Trump says he’s on board.’ But you don’t know what he hears because he just talks.
“Then my phone goes off and it’s Manafort and he says, ‘Where are you?’ I say, ‘I’m in the campaign headquarters,’ and then I go, ‘So nobody works weekends?’ And he goes, ‘What are you talking about?’ I say, ‘There’s nobody here.’ He says, ‘Really?’ I say, ‘It’s dark.’ He says, ‘I don’t know. I go out to the Hamptons on Thursday nights. I thought everybody was there.’ Then he says, ‘Can you come up and see me?’ I say, ‘What do you mean, come up and see you? I’m in Trump Tower.’ He says, ‘Yeah, come up and see me. I’m on the forty-third floor.’ Then he starts to describe this long, convoluted way to get up to the residence side from the business side, just like Trump telling me how to get to Bedminster. I say, ‘Can’t I just walk around to the other side of the building?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says, ‘you can do that.’
“I go up and walk in and he’s got a beautiful apartment and there’s a lady of a certain age in a white caftan spread on the sofa. When Manafort’s daughter’s phone got hacked in 2017, we learned that Paul likes to see multiple guys fuck his wife—his daughter asks her sister in one of the emails, ‘Has Mom been tested for STDs?’ Well, that’s Mom lying on the sofa.
“Anyway, he goes, ‘They say you’re a good media guy, maybe you’ve got a good idea of what to do here—take a look at this.’ Headline on this thing he hands me, which is going to break in the Times, is MANAFORT TAKES $14 MILLION FOR FOREIGN CAMPAIGN WORK. I say, ‘Fourteen million dollars! What? Fourteen million dollars from where? How? For what?’ He says, ‘From Ukraine.’ I say, ‘What the fuck? The Ukraine?’ He says, ‘Hey, hey, hey. Hold on. I had a lot of expenses.’ I say, ‘Paul, how long have you known about this?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, a couple of months.’ ‘A couple of months?’ Then I say, ‘When do they say it’s coming out?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. Maybe it goes online tonight, they say.’ ‘Tonight!’ Then I say, ‘Does Trump know about this?’ He says, ‘Maybe a little. Maybe not the details.’ I say, ‘Dude, you got to go see him right now. I told you, you’re the chairman, I’m the CEO, you got no authority, but I’m not going to embarrass you. You seem like an okay guy. But this is … He’s going to go fucking nuts. You’ve known about this for two months? Why didn’t you tell anybody?’ ‘Well, my attorney said I shouldn’t.’ I said, ‘You need new attorneys, that’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.’ He says, ‘Yeah, I’m getting new representation.’ I said, ‘Brother, there’s no way you survive this.’
“He went up and saw him, and fucking Trump calls me and says, ‘Fourteen million dollars! Fourteen million dollars! For his expenses!’
“And that was how I met Paul Manafort.”
Bannon told this story not as a broadside against Trump and Manafort, but as an excuse for them. Here, he meant to say, were the kinds of people Mueller had caught in his net, people who did not know which end was up. Trump surrounded himself with the dysfunctional and the inept; in truth, Trump needed to surround himself with the dysfunctional and the inept, because he was dysfunctional and inept. Only in the land of the blind could he be king. And if you thought Paul Manafort was any sort of linchpin, you had bought into the same sort of fantasies that Paul Manafort seemed to buy into about himself.
But prosecutors don’t care about the class and intellectual bona fides of the people they prosecute. Prosecutors do care—and here Manafort could hardly provide a better demonstration—when your fantasies of who you are, or who you think you should be, cross over into deed.
Manafort was hired to run the Trump campaign at the suggestion of Tom Barrack, Trump’s longtime friend and sometime business partner. Barrack specialized in distressed real estate debt investments. With considerable business interests in single-leader states trying to influence Washington, he was not typically the sort of person you would want to serve as a senior adviser in a presidential campaign. After the election, when Trump asked him to become White House chief of staff, Barrack, recognizing his own conflicts and exposure, declined. But he did agree to manage the 2017 Trump inaugural, raising more money—much of it, Bannon suspected, from conduits of those single-leader states where he did business—than an inaugural had ever raised in the past.
Barrack had suggested Manafort because the Trump campaign, by the spring of 2016, was in hopeless disarray, not least because it was operating without anyone who had presidential campaign experience. Barrack knew Manafort partly because Manafort had built a consulting company that operated in some of the countries where Barrack also did business. Though Manafort’s political experience was a generation out of date, he was eager and available, and—an exceptional recommendation to Trump—willing to work for free. Another plus was the fact that he had an apartment in Trump Tower.
Manafort’s connections and business arrangements all seemed so suspicious and dubious that it was difficult to see how they could be legitimate. As Mueller would allege, of the tens of millions of dollars that had passed through Manafort’s hands in the past decade, nearly all were pilfered, or laundered, or fraudulently gotten. And that was not the worst of it: many of his associates, almost all of his associates, operated in a lawless zone of international corruption, plunder, and despotism—not to mention mayhem and murder.
To boot, Manafort was lazy, as in no-show lazy. And yet here he had been given a 24/7 job, a high-pressure, low-support position that meant he would be working at the center of the storm and making critical decisions almost on a constant basis.
In the Trump team’s view, nobody with any dark intent or design (or, for that matter, nobody with any other options) would have hired this man. But in the prosecutor’s view, nobody would have hired this man other than in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy.
On top of all this, Manafort, in quite the movie plot, was being pursued by one of the world’s most cutthroat oligarchs, a Russian from whom he had pilfered millions.
Providing expertise to corrupt, unstable, one-man governments is a highly profitable niche for American consultants—blue chip as well as shadowy ones. If you help keep a corrupt man in power, the amounts you can make have few limits. Manafort’s high-margin, easy-money opportunity was Ukraine. Every new introduction to top government officials and their industry counterparts—or to the apparatchiks, agents, bankers, and out-and-out criminals who shuttled between them—became a revenue opportunity.
Such was the context in which Paul Manafort met Oleg Deripaska, a.k.a. “Mr. D.” Deripaska sat atop the hierarchy of Russian oligarchs because of his wealth, his ruthlessness—or at least the legend of his ruthlessness—and his closeness to Putin. Even other oligarchs and international men of dubious reputations raised their eyes at the mention of Mr. D. His own associates tended not so much to deny the rumors about him, but to excuse his actions and behavior as situational. Murder? Perhaps, they would say, but that was during the “aluminum wars” of the 1990s.
In the mid-2000s, Mr. D. hired Manafort, one of the significant figures on the Russia-backed side of Ukrainian politics, who then became one more player in Deripaska’s own effort to leverage political power in Ukraine. This relationship lasted for six or seven years, until Manafort, in Ocean’s Eleven fashion, seemed to have conned Deripaska into an investment ruse that enabled Manafort to abscond with at least $19 million, incurring in Mr. D.’s mind something of a blood debt. Deripaska and his people had been relentlessly pursuing Manafort and Mr. D.’s $19 million through the courts, in the Cayman Islands and in New York State, and through a forensic accounting of the long paper trail of Manafort’s treacheries—an accounting that Mr. D.’s people may or may not have shared with U.S. officials. (Mr. D., denied a visa by the United States because of his suspected criminal activities, had been trying to curry favor with U.S. law enforcement.)
Manafort, meanwhile, was trying to somehow make good on his debt. In March 2016, an all-but-broke Manafort agreed to become a senior operative in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign pro bono. In Trump’s view, this was a fair price for helping to run a race that he was wholly convinced he would not win no matter who ran it. But in Manafort’s view, joining Trump’s campaign provided him with a golden opportunity to get Mr. D. off his back. And indeed, almost immediately after Manafort took the job, he offered Mr. D. access to the Trump campaign and intelligence from inside it in satisfaction of his debt.
It was either a bizarre but random coincidence that there was a direct line that ran from Donald Trump to Paul Manafort to Oleg Deripaska to Vladimir Putin—or not a coincidence at all. Either Manafort and Deripaska were the middlemen connecting Trump and Putin, or Manafort and Deripaska, in some cosmic joke of proximity, just happened to find themselves in their own crazy shit inside some other, larger crazy shit.
In the liberal imagination, unsurprisingly, the dots connected so clearly that a conspiracy was certain.
Jared Kushner, for one, pushed back on this idea. Ever since he took over active management of his father-in-law’s presidential campaign, he had been telling people, Don’t take things too literally with Trump. A lot of the time, nothing is at it seems. Conspiracy? Are you kidding?
Manafort, Kushner said, was a douche but not a plotter. And although Oleg Deripaska might seem to be a James Bond villain, with real estate on every sumptuous block of every glittering city, with lavish yachts always outfitted with willing beauties, and throwing the best party every year at Davos, he was really just a careful businessman. Punctilious in his habits, inverted in his person, averse to risk, he was quite the last person to step outside the most carefully proscribed lanes of power politics in Russia and the needs of RUSAL, variously the world’s largest or second-largest aluminum company.
One evening in 2017, while having dinner with acquaintances in New York during UN week—the one time of the year, trailed by FBI agents, that he was allowed to come to New York—Deripaska was asked point-blank about whether Trump had a backdoor relationship with Putin. “No, this is not the way it is done in Mother Russia,” he declared, suggesting that the nuances of power in the Putin circle were well beyond the understanding of U.S. politicians, prosecutors, and journalists.
“Was the Trump campaign provided any aid by the Russian government or people or entities connected to it?” he was asked.
“No. But I would not know about that.”
“And Manafort?”
“He is not a good man.”
“Did he try to use his position in the campaign to work out his issues with you?”
“He has not worked out his issues with me.”
“But he tried?”
“He did not succeed.”
In the spring of 2018, after Manafort’s indictment, the Trump administration added new, harsh sanctions on Deripaska and his company. This was regarded by some as a warning from the White House to Deripaska to keep his distance from the Manafort trial, or perhaps an effort by the Justice Department to bargain for Deripaska’s assistance in its pursuit of Manafort, or perhaps merely a random way to look tough on Russia. Whatever the motive, it was a move that, likely, no one had thought through, since it immediately created a worldwide spike in aluminum prices.
Deripaska told a friend he had become “a burden to the state” and was fearful for his life. This was taken to mean either that he was indeed a key connector between Trump and Putin and needed to be removed, or that he wanted to show that he really was not a Putin crony at all—quite the opposite. Or perhaps it was mere Russian melodrama and a precursor to a negotiation that he hoped would lift the sanctions from him. (Indeed, they were ultimately lifted.)
In any case, the essential question remained. Were these random associations among some of the world’s most corrupt and dangerous men? Or was this conspiracy of an extraordinarily brazen kind?
As the Manafort trial proceeded, Trump—in the White House and then on summer holiday at Bedminster, often a place of increased fury on Trump’s part—seemed to struggle with a sense that his adversaries were closing in on him. On August 1, he lashed out at his attorney general, demanding once again that Jeff Sessions put a stop to the Mueller investigation. On August 12, Trump’s old Apprentice and White House sidekick Omarosa Manigault Newman accused him of having used the N-word on the set of The Apprentice, provoking a national discussion about whether the president was a racist. For his part, Trump took the bait and branded Manigault Newman a “dog” and “a crazed, crying lowlife.” On August 13, under pressure from Trump, the FBI fired Peter Strzok, the agent whose texts, during the Russia investigation, showed him to be personally horrified at the prospect of a Trump victory. (Trump had repeatedly accused Strzok of being a deep state conspirator.) On August 15, Trump revoked the security clearance of Obama’s CIA director John Brennan, who had become one of Trump’s most acerbic and appalled critics. And on August 16, hundreds of newspapers joined together to condemn Trump’s continuing attacks on the press as the “enemy of the people.”
Then a bad month for Trump got worse. On August 21, Manafort was convicted of eight counts of various fraudulent financial activities in federal court in Virginia. (The jury was unable to reach a verdict on ten other counts.) No grand crimes were addressed in the trial; instead, it was the sheer ordinariness and cravenness of Manafort’s greed and financial scams that caught him up. These were not political crimes. This was cheating on your taxes in order to buy an ostrich-leather bomber jacket. Trump people might scoff at the lowliness of Manafort’s criminal endeavors, but prosecutors, their eyes aglint, knew that the more basic the crime, the more inevitable the punishment.
But for Trump, there was a silver lining here: Manafort had not cut a deal with Mueller’s prosecutors.
Many Trumpers found it easy to dismiss Manafort’s contributions to the campaign, and they seemed genuinely to believe he had nothing to tell. By now, Manafort had been branded as just one more in a long line of Trump campaign and Trump presidency jokes. When you fell out of the Trump circle, you became irrelevant to it—history was immediately revised such that you were never really part of the circle. (Among some in the White House, this was equated with Stalin’s predilection for removing faces of certain inner-circle cronies from photographs.) Indeed, in some reasonable sense, everybody involved with Trump was inclined to believe that everybody else involved with Trump was a joke.
Mueller’s prosecutors had a different point of view about Manafort: they believed he was waiting for a pardon from the president. Considering the prison sentence Manafort likely faced in the wake of his Virginia conviction—as well as the prospect of more jail time if his second trial also did not go well—a pardon seemed the only likely explanation for his silence. But prosecutors also believed that a pardon, if it came, would not be granted until after the midterms. If the Republicans were somehow able to hold their majority in the House, the political price of a pardon would almost certainly be more tolerable for Trump.
As the special counsel’s team prepared for Manafort’s second trial, Andrew Weissmann tightened the screws on Trump’s former campaign manager even further. With only mild worries about the double jeopardy implications, Weissmann reached out to Cyrus Vance Jr., the district attorney in Manhattan, and suggested that in the event of a presidential pardon he might want to indict Manafort on the ten counts upon which the federal jury in Virginia had deadlocked. If Manafort was tried in state court, the president could not pardon a conviction.
On the eve of Manafort’s second trial, he caved and agreed to take a deal—he would cooperate for a combined sentence in both cases of no more than ten years. But Manafort continued to play the game in Manafort fashion. He could rely on Mueller’s goodwill for a reduced sentence, or he could rely on Trump’s goodwill for a pardon, but he could hardly do both. Yet Manafort now proceeded to do precisely this. Courting disaster—which would shortly come when prosecutors again accused him of lying and then vacated their deal—he tried to minimally satisfy the prosecutor in case no pardon was forthcoming from the president, even as he tried to avoid antagonizing Trump in case a pardon might yet come.