No Matter How Much You Hate Paul Manafort, You Should Hate Him More (And Here’s Why)

Paul Manafort invented some of the very worst parts of our modern world. In a real way, he is one of the architects of our current national nightmare. In Episode 15, Robert is joined by  comedian, Dave Ross (Suicide Buddies Podcast) to discuss Paul Manafort aka The Man Who Donkey-Punched Democracy. Paul Manafort’s work with the Trump Campaign is actually just about the LEAST objectionable thing this man has done in his entire life. Manafort is a MAJOR bad guy!

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello friends, I am Robert Evans and this is
again Behind the Bastards to show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Today with me is my guest who
I will be reading a story about a terrible person
to My guest is coming in cold. His name is

(00:21):
Dave Ross. He is the host of the Suicide Buddies
podcast and a comedian. Dave, Welcome to the show. Thanks
for having me man. Thank you. Um, I'd already thank
you before, but you deserve to thank you? Isn't at
least one more? But that one's going to be a
secret thank you? Man, thank you? You know what I mean? No, no,
because now I have to give you my third thank
you now, but that thank you was planning for later.

(00:43):
You can also say you're welcome if you want to
save your thank you. I've never heard those words before. Right, Well,
no one really is, all right, So today we're gonna
be talking about a guy, Paul Manafort. What do you
What do you know about Paul Manafort? I know very
little about Paul and Afford he was, wasn't he Trump's
campaign manager for a half a minute? Yeah? Yeah, A

(01:05):
couple of months. He was one of the guys that
got fired, and UM, yeah, I really don't know any
more than that, you know, alone, he's in jail. I
did not know. Wow, Okay, yeah he's he's fucking in jail.
Mueller caught him on a bunch of getting into that.
I am viciously not plugged in to current events or
pop culture always my entire life. That's the sane thing

(01:27):
to be. Yeah, it's more so now because I'm forced
to be. But yeah, well all right, yeah, I'm gonna
guess what most people listening know about Paul Manifford's Yeah,
he was Donald Trump's campaign manager for a while. Uh,
Mueller caught him doing some shady stuff and he's in
jail now. And uh maybe he did something shady in
the Ukraine, but they probably don't have fun the details,

(01:48):
good stuff. We're gonna be getting into all that today.
But um, you know, Maniford is definitely most well known
and most hated for the role he played in getting
Donald Trump elected president. Um, and I the big point
of this podcast to day is to let people know
that Paul Manifford's work with the Trump campaign is probably
the least objectionable thing he did in his entire life.
Um yeah, he is a major bad guy and so far,

(02:11):
I would I would venture to say he's done more
damage to the world than Donald Trump so far. I
mean we're only two years into this presidency, so Trump
can grow. But Paul Manaford is a world class historical
great asshole. And that's what today's story is about. Oh
my god, um wait yeah, yeah, So join me, won't

(02:32):
you on a journey that I like to call Paul
Manafort is just as bad, if worse than Donald Trump.
And I hope a hype a fire ants sets up
shop in his colon. That's a working title. Is that
the whole story? Because we can't talk about that for
a while. I mean, how would you get fire ants
inside of a man's colon? Horn surgery is involved horn surgery,

(02:53):
so either at knife or either a knife or a horn, yeah,
or I don't know, somehow some sort of funnel co
were simm into sitting on a pile of fire ants
for long enough, and you have to course the ants
up into his rectum like it's a two part until
they get up there, or he has to be held down.
Either way, it's workable. I think we can there's a

(03:14):
there's a road to this destination? Um okay anyway. Paul
Manafort Jr. Was born on April one, nineteen forty nine,
making his entire life and career essentially one very dark
April fool's joke on all of us. Uh. He was
raised in New Britain, Connecticut. His grandfather immigrated there from
Italy in nineteen oh seven and started a construction company.
But Paul's father, Paul Manafort Senor, wanted more than just

(03:36):
the lucrative corpse burying mafia contracts an Italian contractor could
expect to earn in the nineteen sixties. He wanted political power,
so in nineteen sixty five, Manafort Senior ran for and
one election to become the mayor of New Britain. He
was a Republican and his easy charm made him popular
with voters. Manafort Jr. Worked on his dad's campaigns as
a teenager. He has happy memories of going to bars

(03:58):
with his dad, who buy rounds and drinks for and
schmooze with potential voters. Manaport Senior was mayor until nineteen
seventy one, and, as you might expect from the Manafort name,
he was outrageously corrupt. Uh In nineteen eighty one, he
was charged with perjury for lying in court about a
municipal corruption investigation. A major source for this episode is
the Atlantic article Paul Manafort American Hustler, and it brings

(04:20):
up a report from a lawyer, Palmer McGhee, which is
a fun name for a lawyer cute, who was hired
by New Britain to report on the hilarious corruption in
their town. Quote in his findings, he pointed a finger
straight at Manafort senor, calling him the person most at fault.
According to the testimony of a whistleblower, Manafort had flatly
announced that he wanted to hire someone flexible to manage

(04:41):
his personal office, a place that would quote not be
by the rules, which is a very nice way of
saying he was going to commit major crimes while the
mayor of a town. Years later, in an interview, Paul
Manafort Jr. Would say, some of the skills I learned
there I still used today. That's where I cut my teeth.
What criminal mayor dad wow man. And so this isn't

(05:06):
even his career yet, he hasn't even this is not
even his final form. He was just starting on the
road to being shitty and looking at his dad and going,
but what if I was worse? Yeah, and I imagine
his dad as the mayor from Jaws. I know that's
I cannot recall Jaws well enough. Oh well, it's got
a great shitty mayor, one of the great shitty mayor's

(05:27):
and shitty mayor movies. Great. Yeah, yeah, I love a
shitty mayor. Oh man, it's one of my favorite. I
love it when he become a shitty governor, you know
what I mean? Yes, several y Rob Ford, that's what
I'm talking about. Wow, I guess he's not a You know,
I expected a Reagan reference there, and we didn't. You
didn't give me one. That's nice. Yeah, I mean we
could do that. We could do Chris Christie if you

(05:50):
want um more. George Bush. George Bush for a while. Yeah,
he was a shitty baseball team owner for a while.
A lot of shittiness out there. Yeah, the artist. Now,
it's amazing the news today. James Gunn just just lost
a movie for things a decade ago. But if you're

(06:10):
a terrible governor, you can do anything. It doesn't matter
how corrupt you've been. Oh. Absolutely, Yeah, it's amazing. You
can become fucking president like several times. Yeah, what a
great what a great system we've developed. Alright. Uh so
Paul Manafort Jr. Hereafter the only Paul Manafort will be

(06:31):
talking about. So just forget, forget to set that, senior dude,
got it. Uh he first, Paul Manafort first got into
national politics in nineteen seventy six. That was the year
President Gerald Ford ran for reelection. Manafort was his delegate
coordinator and basically helped him fight off a primary challenge
from Ronald Reagan. So always a Reagan connection. Lost that Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(06:53):
yeah against Gerald Ford was the president at the time.
You know, it's pretty hard to unseat. Yeah, I didn't
realized we were talking about president for Yeah. No, I
don't know why I would have thought that Gerald Ford
would have beat Ronald Reagan in like a comptroller seat
when they were one or whatever. He definitely would have
beat Reagan in a fist fight, because if oh, man,

(07:13):
if I think you're put I think of our modern presidents,
Gerald Ford is probably close to the top of half presidence.
I think could win in a fist fight. He's built
like a boxer. Yeah, yeah, face, white face. He could
definitely take a punch. Yeah, yeah, for sure, Gerald Ford
could take a punch. But in he did not succeed
in winning the presidential election that year, which is won

(07:35):
by Carter, which led to four years of Carter is
um um in. Manafort took a job as the Southern
coordinator for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign because Reagan decided he
was going to try and unseat Carter, gave it another shot.
Uh Manaford held this position for two years and used
it to begin his first experiment with dirty tricks. There

(07:55):
was this guy, Neil Acker, who had helped Manafort and
his partner Roger Stone a couple of years earlier, during
the mid terms. Manafort, Yeah, that's the only proper reaction
to Roger Stone's name. He's he's he's history. He's a monster.
He is a monster, admittedly a monster. He says. Yeah,
I like to piss people off. I like it when
people hate me. Yeah. Well, uh so, Manafort and Stone

(08:21):
had worked at this guy, Neil Acker during the mid terms,
and he'd been a big help to them. So manaforted
Stone had promised to support Acker as a replacement for
Roger Stone at the head of the influential Young Republicans group.
But in nineteen seventy nine, when it kind of came
time to put up her shut up, Manafort backed out
of the deal and told Acker that now he wouldn't
help unless Ackers swore loyalty to Ronald Reagan. Acker wanted

(08:41):
to stay neutral, and so Paul Manafort burned him to
the ground. One week before the Young Republican convention, Manafort
went to the delegates who had already promised to support
Acker and told them to leave. Then he took over
managing Acker's opponents campaign. Acker lost the election and what
one of Manafort's whips called one of the great funk
jobs and party politics. Yeah, politics, people always have fun

(09:03):
ways of talking about how they funk with the government
and the planet. Man. This is why I love VEEP
so much. It's the only show that's really accurately portrayed
how much they say fucking funk job and make fun
of each other in our assholes, you know. In my
private career as a journalist, I interviewed a number of
congressional aids and like gubernatorial assistants and stuff like that,

(09:23):
people who had worked in like national and high level
state politics, and every single one of them said VEEP
was the only TV show about politics that was accurate
to how people talk in politics. Yeah, yeah, none of them.
None of them chose the West Wing. Well, of course,
not west wing is liberal porn, which makes it the
greatest TV show of all time in my opinion. But wow,

(09:45):
it's soothing to watch the totally it's like a backrupt
Nobody with that much like backbone and moral certainty has
ever been presidents. There are no people that are that altruistic.
They're just are not. And we all wish there were.
We all flip out like they could be, but they're not. No, No,
they just they just don't get that far in politics.

(10:06):
So President Reagan won the election nineteen eighty with Paul
Manafort's help. It was the name of the guy that
they buried, Neil Acker. Neil Acker. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Neil Acker. Um.
So in nineteen eighty Reagan wins with Paul Maniffort's help. Uh.
And this gives Manafort the access and cloud he'd always needed. Uh.
He was appointed Associate director of the Presidential Personnel Office.

(10:27):
This meant he got to help pick the people who
would work in Reagan's White House, which would be a
huge benefit to someone who happened to also own a
lobbying firm. And on an unrelated note, in nineteen eighty,
Paul Manafort started his very own lobbying firm with his
good buddy Roger Stone and a man named Charles Black.
Their company, Black, Manafort and Stone would soon become a
DC legend. Now when you hear the phrase DC lobbyist today,

(10:49):
it probably has a pretty strong negative connotation because now
we just assumed that corrupt asked lobbyists from the n
r A and the tobacco company is in the oil
and gas industry or constantly deep dicking our democracy. But
it didn't always used to be this way. In nineteen
sixty seven, there were just sixty four registered lobbyists in
the entire United States. WHOA, yeah, this has not been
a thing we've always done. In nineteen sixty three, several

(11:11):
political scientists studied the few lobbyists in d C and concluded,
and I found this quote in that Atlantic article, when
we look at the typical lobby we find its opportunities
to maneuver are sharply limited. It's staff mediocre, it's typical
problem not the influencing of congressional votes, but finding the
clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all.
So lobbying is like not a thing for a long time. Yeah,

(11:32):
and in nineteen eighty lobbying was still a very small field.
Foreign lobbying, like lobbying on behalf of a foreign country,
was even rarer, thanks in part to our special bonus
bastard of the week, Ivy Lee. I should have called
for an air horn there. I don't know, we can
do it. Nailed it. Who is Ivy Lee? I've never
heard this name. Most people have not. Ivy Lee was

(11:54):
a PR man and one of the trailblazers of that profession.
He is sometimes called the father of public relation. So
he's like the George Washington of PR. Yeah. He worked
for John D. Rockefeller. In the early nineteen hundreds. Mr.
Rockefeller owned a number of coal mines in Colorado. His
company came into conflict with the United Mine Workers of America,
a union who wanted better pay and conditions in exchange

(12:16):
for dying and mining disasters. The union went on strike
and set up a gigantic tent colony outside of the
town of Ludlow, Colorado for themselves and their families. Things
got heated and the National Guard was brought in to
break up the strike. This quickly turned into a battle,
and twelve children were burnt to death inside a tent.
A total of nineteen strikers and their family members, mostly
their family members, and one National guardsman died. This became

(12:37):
known as the Ludlow massacre, and it was very bad
pr for Rockefeller and his company. Ivy Lee jumped to
his aid and wrote a publicity leaflet blaming the child
deaths on quote agitators paid for by the union. He
didn't quite call the dead kids crisis actors, but the
implication was there. This inflamed tensions between the strikers and
the National Guard that led to ten more days of violence.
Another fifty people were killed in The actual Army had

(13:00):
to be called in to calm things down via bullets.
Ivy Lee was called in before a US Commission on
Industrial Relations and asked, in essence what the fuck? He
explained that he and Rockefeller had been lied to by
mine managers. They hadn't meant to massacre anyone, They just
trusted those conniving managers who told them the strikers were
super dangerous. So it wasn't Rockefeller's fault or his fault
that all those kids got burned to death. Right. It's

(13:23):
also such a funny argument, like, yeah, no, we killed
them because we thought that they were mad, and when
we found out that they weren't mad or whatever, not
that they weren't mad, but weren't they weren't monsters. Yeah, totally,
And then we felt bad after we murdered them. Our
first hour go to is murdering, but in this case

(13:45):
it was the wrong thing. We apologize. Yeah, in the
future we might murder people, but so you know, every
time we murder people from now on, it's gonna be
because someone told us that they're mean. Yeah. So the
miners started calling ivy Lee poison ivy Lee, which is
you know, it's the ninth early nine hundreds. Nicknames are
a new science. They were doing their best, I don't know, bad, Yeah,

(14:07):
poison ivy you know you get it's itches, it itches, Yeah,
it's it's causes good, real real problems. Uh So, ivy
Lee Poison Ivy Lee spent the next twenty years representing
a variety of corporations. He eventually landed a contract with
the I g Farban Chemical Company and traveled to Berlin
in nineteen thirty four to give them advice. During this trip,

(14:28):
he also had a meeting with a guy named Adolf
Hitler and another guy named Joseph Gebbels. He did free
work on their behalf, speaking to a number of American
journalists in Berlin to try and put a positive spin
on their coverage of the Nazis. So I started my
research on Mr Lee on a website called pr Place,
which describes itself as quote where public relations and communications
practice meets scholarship, where insight is derived from evidence, and

(14:50):
where questions of career development and professionalism are explored. Since
this guy is the founder of PR in a lot
of ways, PR Place at a largely positive description of it. Really,
they talk about the controversy and he did some bad
things with the Nazis, but he was just giving them advice.
He was an unpaid consultant. You know. It was it
was and it was a real you know, it was

(15:11):
a bad error of judgment. But you know, he has
a mixed legacy and we have to consider all the
parts of it. So that's their take on this guy.
I am. We are fifteen minutes in I and I
am tired. I am fucking tired. We are four out
of twenty four pages in. This was a long week
of research, my friend. Yeah, okay, so I might get coffee,

(15:35):
you know, And I feel like I could leave, go
get coffee and come back and not miss anything. Miss
a lot of things, but not miss anything. Because the
general theme here is all these people are huge pieces
of ship, and you should probably you should feel validated
in being a nihilist. H I think it's fascinating that

(15:56):
they're all pieces of ship in the same way the
pieces of ship that still are dealing with their piece, right, Well,
that's exactly what I mean. Yeah, And it's also even
the term piece of ship is reductive. It's like evil
if you believe that evil exists in a lot of ways.
Drunk with power, these guys and Paul Manifort are kind
of the truest form of evil, because it's like, it's
one thing to believe a crazy thing about the world,

(16:18):
like that this race is superior, and to do terrible
things based on that. It's another thing to support that
guy just for cash. Absolutely. Yeah. It's also I mean,
I think a lot of our conception of evil comes
from people getting like I just said, drunk with power.
You get power and you end up doing awful things.
You mad, right, exactly. But these people aren't even really

(16:40):
that powerful before. They just want power, and so they're like, Oh,
if I help this person by doing this manipulative thing,
because I'm super good at manipulating people. I've learned over
who knows where he learned how to be manipulative, you
know what I mean. Like in comedy, you have to
go to open mics to get good. Oh, but mikes

(17:00):
for these assholes are just like the people they date. Well,
that and mining disaster and then yeah, and then the
next level of mining disasters. Then eventually you get to
destroy an entire country. Yeah. Uh. So here's how that
wonderful website pr Place summarized the meeting between Hitler and
Ivy League, The founder of pr I Can't Even Lee,
reportedly advised Girbels to see propaganda efforts in the United

(17:21):
States and urged him to meet personally with foreign diplomats
and press in an effort to establish better relations with them.
So that doesn't sound too bad. He was asking them
to stop propagandizing two Americans. Maybe this guy is a hero.
Only I dug a little bit deeper. It's a little
bit deeper, and I found a Time article about Mr Lee.
Now Time is much harser on his work with the Nazis.
It also mentioned some facts pr Place decided not to

(17:43):
include for some inexplicable reason, like the fact that Lee's
salary with I. G. Farman went from three thousand a
year to twenty five thousand a year as soon as
Hitler came to power, which is probably just a coincidence.
It also fails to mention that IG Farban was nationalized,
so his paid work for that company was also paid
work for the German government a k a. The Nazis.
Now Time includes a quote from Jonathan Arbach, author of
Weapons of Democracy, Propaganda Progressivism in American public Opinion. Our

(18:07):
box suspects the main purpose of the meeting was to
provide the Nazi high command with quote some insight into
how Americans think about Nazis. It was also to advise
them on how to make us quote, think more positively
about Nazis now. Mr Lee was called to later testify
in front of a Congressional committee for all of this
Nazi stuff. Time reported on that testimony back in nineteen
thirty four. So in the article they site themselves from

(18:28):
the past writing about Mr. Lee. I have told them, repeatedly,
testified Mr Lee that the dissemination of the organization of
German propaganda in the US was just a mistake and feudal,
that it was bad business, that complete reliance should be
placed upon getting news to the American people through normal
channels of publicity. I told them that there were certain
policies which Germany had on Jews which were bound to
antagonize American public opinion. So basically he advised Hitler and

(18:52):
Gebels to x nay on the u J while they
were trying to court public opinion in the US. This
is exactly what happened in the early thirties. The first
couple of years after power or there was a distinct
drop in the anti Semitic mentions and Hitler's speeches and
in like their communications to foreign powers, which sort of
culminated in the Olympics where they removed all signs of
anti Semitism just long enough for the world to visit

(19:13):
for the Olympics, and then when you know, put it
in the high gear after that. So they took this
guy's advice. In other words, Now, Lee died almost immediately
after testifying in front of Congress. Pr Place says that
the stress of his testimony is what killed him. So
hopefully right, like fuck the guy, but his mild hitler
NG went on. They have ramifications that are still with

(19:33):
us today. Good ramifications. In nineteen thirty eight, the US
pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act or FARA, which requires
Americans to register with the government before working on behalf
of a foreign government to say, influence public opinion towards
an authoritarian regime in another country. Now we're gonna hear
more about Farah later. For right now, it's important to
understand that another aspect of Ivy Lee's little freelance Nazi

(19:56):
career was a decade's long depression in the lobbying for
sketchy foreign governments industry. It just wasn't done for a while. Again,
there weren't very many lobbyists anyway, and sort of the
stigma attached to Lee had kind of stopped it from
happening for quite a while. Black Manifort, so Paul Manafort
is the one that brought him back here. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I wish I were dead. This is fucking crazy. That

(20:21):
might might as well be the tagline for this pot.
I wish I were dead, so I feel every time
I watched the news. Now, yeah, oh sho, you got
a tide pod sitting here. Yeah, we always have a
tide pot in the ok. I'm we're millennials. Half an
hour more, I'm gonna eat that ship. Um, you will die, right, probably? Yeah,
has anyone ever done it? I think you'll die. It's

(20:41):
it's hard to say. It might be one of those
things that's either way. We always have a tide pot around.
I appreciate it. So yeah, Black, Manafort and Stone were
the lobbing firm that brought this back with a vengeance. Um. Now,
they started by working with standard, respectable American corporations like
Bethlehem Steele, Johnson and Johnson, trans World Airlines, Tobacco Institute. Um,

(21:03):
it's fine. Probably they probably weren't hiding anything. Tell me
that was a university. Tell me that was a real
college that people went to. It's where you learned how
to grow the best at back. Yeah. They were innovators
in the lobbying field, and we're the first company to
combine lobbying consulting and pr into the same business. Time
magazine called them a supermarket of influence peddling. In other words,

(21:25):
they were the Walmart of propaganda. Black Manifort and Stone
was the first lobbying firm to also include political consultants,
which meant they could run campaigns and then lobby the
politicians they put in power simultaneously. What a value. And
like all true innovators, Paul Manafort wasn't willing to sit
on his laurels. He and his partners introduced another lobbying
innovation in working for both sides at once. In Louisiana, Vermont,

(21:48):
and Florida, the firm represented both Republican and Democratic candidates
in that year's elections, guaranteeing they'd have a lobbying in
no matter who won. Oh yeah, see, we're we're well
into it now. Yeah. Uh, and we will. We will
get back into it, but first we have to have

(22:11):
some ads. And and before we get into the official ads,
I'd like to talk a little about our unofficial sponsor, Derritos,
who have not yet given us any money, but who
I think. I'm a big advocate of Dorritos. After and
after a long day of reading about terrible things. At
least you're gonna have some dirits. You can have some derritos,
which should be their new tagline. At least you can

(22:32):
have some derritos. I remember when Taco Bell first came
out with the Doritos Locos tacos. Everyone in my world
was making fun of them, but my immediate reaction was like, man,
that sounds great, and then I went and had one,
and you know what, it was great. And to this
day I still eat them and it it hurts me,
you know, it hurts my butt, but it's all right, yeah,

(22:54):
and it's sometimes works. Just need that dorrito's flavor, and
you also need the other products and services that are
advertised on our podcast and helped to support the show,
which are coming up now. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
We're eating fruit, leather and our mouth. It's all good.

(23:18):
Whatever kind of leather you have to put in your
mouth to hear the rest of the story is fine.
It's a rough one. So Paul Manafort, God, that would
be the right drink, because gin is terrible and this
is a terrible story as Yeah, he nailed. It's like
a woodpeg to chew on and gin to drink. Yeah,
I want to feel like a junifer berries fucking me
in the mouth. It's time for gin. I always want

(23:38):
to feel like that. Yeah, okay, So we just talked
about how Black Manifort and Stone, Paul Maniforts lobbying firm,
had sort of invented the idea of just funding both
sides of an election and not really caring who wins
because you can sell you know, corporate access to them
either way. So The Atlantic around this time in the
early eighties quoted a congressional staffer who joked, why have

(23:58):
primaries for the nomination? Why not just have the candidates
go over to Black Manafort in Stone and argue it out.
So that's sort of the attitude in the belt Way
about these people, and Manafort was very much into that attitude.
He filled out a questionnaire for the Washington Time somewhere
around this this period, and he stated that Machiavelli was
the person he most wanted to meet, which is like, okay, dude, Okay.

(24:22):
So things started getting very busy for Paul Manafort in
the mid nineteen eighties. He's revolutionizing the way Washington works.
His first daughter, Andrea, was conceived in between conference calls.
She later wrote that he quote, how much do you
know that this is what his daughter said? How does
she know that that's I don't know how I'm just
I'm guessing that's what Paul Manafort told her. Yeah, right exactly.

(24:43):
I mean, I don't know. It's pretty ridiculous for me
to call bullshit on any of these facts at this point,
but that one's just like, it doesn't painting have a
good light, she said. He quote hung up the phone,
looked at his watch, and said, Okay, we have twenty
minutes until the next one, meaning the next conference call.
So she's not painting a good pick, sure of her
dad here, but we'll We'll hear more from Andrea later,

(25:03):
especially knowing that he told her that, whether it's true
or not, he was like, how old was she when
he told her? This is clearly the story he wanted
her to know. Yes, yeah, and it's wanted her to
be us and evil when she grew up to yeah,
and it worked out. Um, So Paul and his fellow
partners started taking home big fat four hundred and fifty
thousand a year on paychecks, which back then was like

(25:24):
a million dollars a year. The company was also full
of money, so they started throwing massive yearly parties, golf parties,
which got rowdy enough that they were apparently kicked out
of every venue they booked. They never got to use
the same venue two years in a row. Yeah. One
former employee and good friend of Paul Manafort is quoted
in the Atlantic as saying this. A couple of women
in the firm complained that they weren't ever invited. I

(25:44):
told them they didn't want to be. So that's what
that gross at all. Yeah, So damn it, these people,
it's just garbage. Paul Manafort ran the company's social committee.
It was his job to arrange these fuc duranch golf
parties and also to pick themes for their yearly gathering.
During one three year period, the themes were excess, exceed
excess and excess as best. These are lovely people may

(26:10):
super creative, No, and you can just couldn't just say caligula.
That would be more creative creative. You could be fucking
pouring wine down your faces and having slaves peel you grapes.
But now we just go with fucking Gordon Gecko bullshit, straightforward.
So manaforts demanded a loyalty test for employees hoping to

(26:32):
make partner, but they were lame loyalty tests. Like you
hear loyalty tests and you expect him to be like
cutting people and stuff and planning them. But no, he
would just like he had one guy entertained his friends
from law school for several hours when he didn't want
to deal with him. He gave two guys a day
to find a Billy Barty impersonator for St. Patrick's day,
so it would be like dumb ship like that. Well,
it's a little better than what you would think. You know.

(26:55):
At this point, I just I take points away from
him for not leaning into being aman. Yeah, if you're
already ruining thousands of people's lives, yeah, you might as
well demand a kidney from someone who wants to make
partners so you have an extra kid what he's just
lame over On the global stage. During the Carter administration,
the US has started supporting some nice boys in Afghanistan

(27:16):
called the Mujahadeen. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank,
liked this Carter era gun running operation and suggested it
be expanded into at least nine other countries. So when
President Reagan was elected. The Reagan doctrine wound up being
exactly what the Heritage Foundation had suggested, sending arms and
advisors to aid anti communist forces around the world. The
goal essentially was to bleed the U s s R.

(27:37):
White by engaging them in a bunch of Vietnam style conflicts,
and we would just give guns to whoever was against
the communists, and if they were, you know, dictators or
murder squads or whatever, we supported people like the Nicaraguan
Contras and the camer People's National Liberation Front and Cambodia.
So strong men, rebel leaders, and dictators the world over
suddenly realized that if they could charm the Reagan administration,

(27:59):
they could win a shipload of guns and money. But
to get those guns and money, they'd need lawyers. Enter Manifort,
Black and Stone or Black, Manifort and Stone as the
actual name. But you know who cares fuck him. Yeah,
So Paul Manafort particularly developed an expertise for helping these people.
His first big fish was the President of the Philippines,
Ferdinand Marcos. Now I say a president, but I mean dictator.

(28:22):
Amnesty International estimates Marcos tortured more than thirty four thousand
people and had three thousand, two d forty political opponents killed,
which was bad in the eighties and now sounds like
like almost a nice guy just by the our standards
of tyrants at the moment. Yeah, yeah, well, what did
he do anything good? No? I mean he embezzled ten

(28:47):
billion dollars of the country's wealth to his own pockets.
It is also funny that we're hearing you're telling me
a story of one man, and that story just lightly
involves other sort of I don't even know the word
for its tail is a gentle caressing hand on the
faces of like half a dozen different terrible people, are right, Yeah,

(29:07):
a lot more because we could do a whole episode
on Roger Stone because he's a real piece of ship.
I feel like you can do and there's there's an episode.
There's you could do an episode on fucking Ferdinand Marcos
because he's a real all of these he exclusively works
with pieces of ship. That's that's the Paul Manafort brand. Um,
he's single, he's about to be because he's in fucking

(29:28):
jail and we'll hopefully die there. Yeah. He starts working
for Ferdinand Marcos, who had again tortured thirty four thousand
people by this point, and all of that murdering and
torture was bad. Pr Ferdinand set aside something like fifty
seven million dollars for Ronald Reagan's nineteen eighty and nineteen
eighty four campaigns. He didn't actually pay all that money
to Reagan, because it's illegal for foreign powers to directly
donate to US political candidates. But Marcos did give Paul

(29:51):
Manafort's company a whole lot of money, at least nine
hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, and possibly much
much more. Manafort's job was to improve the image of
the Marcos regime, especially among the Reagan administration. That shouldn't
have been a hard job. The first couple, the Reagans,
had met the marcos Is in the late sixties and
become good friends. Ronald Reagan had danced with Emelda Marcos.

(30:11):
Nancy Reagan may have received in the legal emerald necklace
as a gift from him, But by the midnineteen eighties,
Marcos was just killing way too many people to receive
open support from his old friends, the President and the
first Lady. Now we don't actually know how or if
that earmarked fifty seven million dollars was spent. There are
rumors that Paul Manafort himself was handed at least ten
million dollars of it, some of it in cash in

(30:32):
a briefcase like given to him million dollars he so
Marcos had set aside. We know that he set aside
fifty seven million dollars to help the Reagans, and hopefully
he didn't give that directly to them, And we don't
know how much of that money was actually spent. There
is a rumor that at least ten million of it
wound up in Paul Manafort's hands, that Emilga Marcos just

(30:52):
walked it over to him in briefcases filled with cash. Um.
But we don't know because none of it was reported.
Um An effort denies that he spent any of this money,
that he received it, that he was that he spent.
Manafort denies that he received any money that he didn't
report to the government. But as we'll see in the
rest of the story, he has a history of not
reporting all the money he gets from dictators to the government.

(31:14):
So the rumor is that he was given at least
ten million dollars by the Marcos regime personally as a bribe.
And we know that one of the guys Reagan sent
over to tell Marcos when he finally had to leave
because the rebels were at the gates. One of the
guys the US sent over to like give him this information.
Marcos kept saying to him, but I you know, I
paid ten million dollars to Ronald Reagan's campaign. How am

(31:35):
I not getting help right now? And he didn't know.
This guy didn't know what he was talking about, because
there was no record of that. Right. What it is
is he he gave ten million dollars to Paul Manafort,
who just wanted away with it, which is a thing
that Yeah, Manafort says that's totally fiction and that he
did everything by the book. But we'll read the rest
of the story and you can tell me how much
you believe that Paul Manafort didn't just steal ten million

(31:55):
dollars from a dictator. Right. Well, that's the thing with
these people, right Eventually, I'm sorry, I don't mean to
derail you entirely. When you really think about people like
Roger Stone and Paul Manaford and Donald Trump, people who
just funk with the world, they yeah, right, that's what
they do. I think they come from such a unique

(32:16):
perspective on life, whereas I feel like, even though people
do awful things all the time, are rude to each other,
disrespectful to each other, we've all messed up, and we've
all bullied and been bullied and all that stuff. I
think a great many people are trying to do the
right thing. But I think these in order to be
like that, you literally have to think, like man, life

(32:38):
would be fun if I didn't care about anyone else's
pain at all, it would be super fun. And I
really think that's what it is. And I know that
shouldn't be shocking to me. It shouldn't be that weird
to me that people think that way, but I can't
accept it. But I really think that they look at
the world as an amusement park in which they get

(32:58):
to do whatever they want, and they don't care about
their legacy at all. They just think, like, man, if
I could have the most sex and a bunch of money,
and my whole life could be an adventure, even if
millions of people die, then that would be pretty fun.
You only live once, right, And I think your big part, right.
I think Roger Stone is that kind of guy, which
is why he's very carefully picked the jobs he's picked.

(33:20):
Paul Manafort wanted a legacy and wanted power, and that
will wind up being his downfall later in this story. Interesting,
it wasn't happy, just enjoying life, Okay, So, but I'm
getting ahead of myself here. So Politico looked deeper into
the story of Marcos or of a Manafort receiving ten
million dollars from Marcos after Manafort started working for Trump,

(33:41):
and they found a lot of information that had never
been made public because nobody back then had cared what
some shady guy with connections to Reagan did in the Philippines.
I'm gonna quote Polico here. Manafort and his associates advised
the couple on electoral strategy, the marcos Is on electoral strategy,
and in Washington, where they worked to retain goodwill by
tamping down concerns about the Marcos regimesman rights record, theft
of public resources, and ultimately their perpetration of a massive

(34:04):
vote rigging effort to try and stay in power in
the Philippines nineteen eight six presidential election. So Manafort became
so well known in the Philippines as the guy who
was essentially lying to the rest of the world about
what was going on in their country. Corazon Aquino, the
woman who ran against Marcos in that election, actually brought
up Paul Manafort a lot during her campaign. Um Teddy

(34:26):
looks In, a Filipino journalist, said, quote, Manafort's name was
like Voldemort today. So he made the Harry Potter And
I'm not a guy for making Harry Potter connections to politics,
but he fucked did so. That nineteen six election was
a snap election, and I think it was Manafort's advice
to Marcos that he holds a snap election. And the
goal was people say, I'm not a Democratic leader. So

(34:46):
if I hold an immediate election right now, you know,
it happens out of nowhere. And it's just so he
can prove that he's the man that people want to charge.
And they were hoping to just rig the election and
coast on it. Manafort said at the time about this
snap election, what we've tried to do is make it
more of a Chicago style election and not in Mexico's.

(35:08):
And back then, saying something was a Chicago style election
meant that it involved blatant voter fraud, which it did. Um. Yeah,
so after the snap election, the Marcos regime claims victory
that they solidly won the election. International observers say no,
like this is clearly fraudulent and here is a shipload
of evidence, and it leads to like a gigantic a

(35:29):
three week standoff between Marcos his opponent, and the whole
country standoff, like an armed standoff, like rebels taking to
the round his palace or whatever, like the like the
stereotypical the rebels are at the gates of the palace,
shaking on the gigs and guns point like that happens,
and Marcos has to like depart the country with his wife.

(35:50):
They wind up in Hawaii with one of Paul Manafort's employees,
like flies out with them, and yeah, still just helping
them get set up in their new line. Remind me
real quick, what the investment for Paul Manafort in the
Philippines and the Marcos government. Shipload of money, that's the
that's a percent of it. They're giving him a shipload
of money. He's received on paper at least a million

(36:13):
dollars a year from them, which is more like two
million a year in our modern and he has almost
certainly received at least ten million dollars in straight up
cash for him, not for his company. Yeah, so this
is a good business for him. So yeah, six was
a busy year for Paul Manafort. In addition to everything
he was doing with the marcos Is, he also did

(36:34):
a lot of work for a client named Jonah Savimbi,
a former Maoist war lord who had become an anti
communist war lord. His army kind of sword absolutely turned
women into sex slaves and murdered children. So you can
see why he needed the pr genius of Paul Manafort
to refurbish his image. He's working with this guy the
same year he's working with fucking Ferdinand Marcos. Yeah. So

(36:54):
Manafort had Sevembi make a pilgrimage to New York and
d C to charm journalists and politicians with the hope
of getting aid from the US government and former shipload
of weapons to continue perpetrating his war. He had Savimbi
were an expensive suit and right around in a stretched
limo from fancy hotel to fancy hotel. Here's how A
Time magazine article from nineteen eighties six the slickst shop
in Town, which is what they called. Manafort's firm described

(37:17):
the charm tour. When Savimbi came to Washington last month
to seek support for his guerrilla organization and its struggle
against the Marxist regime in Angola, he hired Black Manifort.
When the what the firm achieved was quickly dubbed Savimbi chic.
Doors swung open all over town for the guerrilla leader,
who was depardly attired in a Nehru suit and ferried
about in a stretched limousine. Dole had shown. Bob Dole

(37:40):
had shown only general interest in Savimbi's cause until Black,
the majority leader's former aid, approached him on his client's behalf.
Doll promptly introduced a congressional resolution backing Unita that was
his his organization's insurgency, and sent a letter to the
State Department urging that the US supply it with heavy arms.
The firm's fee for such services was report at least
six dred thousand dollars. It's a bargain, so yeah, that

(38:05):
comes from where terrorist warlord give him grand and they
get him in touch with the halls of power, who
then send him missile launchers and ship and Bob Dole
at the time was a senim majority leader. And then
how did so All that happened was that Black was
his aid and he walked in him was like, hey,
would you do this? And he just did it. That's
that's what you're paying for when you pay for Manafort,

(38:27):
Black and Stone. They have connections in Congress, and so
if you're a warlord, you give them a shipload of money,
they will make you look good. They'll advise you how
to talk in order to be acceptable to d C.
And then they'll go to their friends who were in
Congress who they helped get elected and be like, this
guy needs a shipload of guns, and we got plenty
of guns. Why don't we give him some. Man, I'm
realizing I'm super naive. I'm just like, why would they

(38:49):
do that? Meaning because they don't get because they don't care. Yeah,
just and you're like money man, and I'm like what, Um,
if you're disturbed. All of this was disturbing to people
at the time because it was goody new at this time.
UM Paul Manafort assured everyone who was disturbed that his
firm was quote loyal to the president and added, we

(39:09):
would never lobby against Star Wars for example. Ah, it's
such a piece of ship um. Paul Manafort also assured
everyone that Black Manafort and Stone did turn down some jobs,
like a possibly lucrative account with Momar Kadafi, So they
won't work with everybody. Everybody now the lobby they worked

(39:32):
with Hitler, No, that was Ivy. That was Ivy that
was far too young to work with Hitler. Either way,
they worked in thirty four percent. Paul Manafort would have
been loving Hitler. They worked with Ivy Lee pretty rough. Yeah.
So the lobbying work with Savimbi, a warlord, also meant
that Manafort and his company now had a vested interest

(39:53):
in keeping the war in Angola going because they keep
getting money as long as they keep and by the
into the nineteen eighties, the country seemed close to peace,
especially since the Soviets had stopped giving aid to angle
Is communist government. So the side should have been able
to work something out. USSR stopped aiding the communists and
Angle if you stopped aiding the insurgents, then they had
to workout we want to keep the war going. Well,

(40:15):
Paul Manafort wanted to keep the war going, and he
was able to guarantee additional shipments of weaponry, which allowed
the war to continue into the late nineteen nineties. By
the late nineties, more than two hundred people per day,
we're dying in the fighting, and it's possible that the
extension of the war that he's partly responsible for killed
hundreds of thousands. Holy shit, he's a real piece of shit.

(40:36):
And you know, I have to think that a man
like Paul Manafort has never enjoyed the cheesy crunch of
a nacho derrito, because I think that a guy like
Paul Manafort probably subsists entirely on fancy caviars and in
four hundred dollar cheeses. He doesn't enjoy common pleasures like
the doritos. True, there's no caviar flavored dorrito. There's not.

(40:59):
Because they're an honest working man snap and for some
other honest products that may or may not be angled
towards working men. But definitely support this podcast. Here are
some ads and we're back. Goodness, those were some good
products and or services. All right, let's get back into

(41:21):
the maniforting. So we we just talked about sort of
the lobbying work that Manafort did for Ferdinand Marcos of
the Philippines up until he got ousted by rebels, and
the work he did supporting rebels and helping to extend
a civil warrning Gola. Uh. And now we're getting into
the rest of his career. Um. Yeah. I think the
best summary of what his firm was doing at this

(41:43):
time was actually by his business partner, Roger Stone. He
gave it last year or h and Kin Ruden's political
Junkie podcast, so which I don't think is a gigantic podcast,
but he said, of this era, black Manafort, Stone and
Kelly lined up most of the dictators in the world
that we could find pro Western dictators. Of course, dictators
are in the eye of the beholder. You're saying dictator. No,

(42:09):
he's completely admitting it. And in two thousand fifteen, well, yeah,
I mean that dude is a complete sociopath. Yeah, he
is a hundred percent soulless. It's weird too, though. I mean,
he's the only sociopath I'm aware of that is aware
he's a sociopath and acts on it, like knows what
sociopathy is and how it can be advantageous in the

(42:30):
n Maybe isn't the sociopath He's he's actively bad. Yeah,
I almost, I almost. I hate him less than most
of the terrible people today, just because he never seen
there seems to I don't think there's any doubt in
his head that he's making the world worse. Cares and
it's just okay, Well, you just need to be stopped somehow,

(42:50):
hopefully by just being ostracized politically in some glorious day
in the future, other people who pretend to be good,
I guess, or who we have to go after first,
I don't know. I don't know what you do with
Roger Stone. So over the course of the nineteen eighties,
Stone and Black of you know, Black Manifort and Stone
got even deeper into Republican Party politics. Paul Manafort, though,

(43:12):
did a little bit, started doing a lot less work
in the US and fell in love with working for
shady for an oligarchs. Um. He did continue to do
some work in the United States. He was the deputy
convention manager for George H. W. Bush's Republican Convention. Uh.
It was at that convention in New Orleans where Paul
Manafort and Donald Trump first met. This is in nineteen
eight Here's how Slate described the encounter. Trump was in

(43:35):
town and curious to see how a convention was really run.
Manafort thought it'd be neat to get his picture with
the Donald. The two convened in a trailer outside of
the Louisiana super Dome during a steamy weekday for a
friendly chit chat. This friendly chit chat would eventually lead
to a decades long personal and professional relationship between the
two men. For now, Manafort was by far the political
senior of the two. He hadn't just succeeded in politics,

(43:57):
he'd helped change the game entirely. See in eighteen sixty seven,
as I said, there were sixty four registered lobbyists in
the entire United States due to the lobbying boom that
Paul helped ignite. By nineteen ninety, there were more than
ten thousand registered lobbyists in the United States. That's Paul
Maniforts doing in large part. That's yeah. So by nineteen two,

(44:18):
people with actual souls had started to take notice of
Paul Manafort's work. The Center for Public Integrity published a
report on foreign influence pedaling called the Torturers Lobby. They
called it this because the people Manifort and his colleagues
represented were guilty of torturing hundreds of thousands of people.
The report noted that quote. Both Kenya and Nigeria, who
were clients of Maniforts, have widely criticized human rights records.

(44:42):
Last year, Kenya received thirty eight million in US four
and aid and spent over one point four million on
Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received eight point three
million and expended in excess of two and a half million.
Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding
for the US government? Why? It was Black Maniforts, Stone
and Kelly. They added a Kelly at this point. Yeah. Uh.

(45:02):
Macaw Matua from Harvard Law Schools Human Rights Program stated
of this quote, it's morally objectionable all this influence peddling.
There's no doubt several of these countries couldn't afford these
lobbyists without the help of American taxpayers. In other words,
the aid that these dictators received subsidized their ability to
afford Paul Manafort and his fellow travelers. Wait to say

(45:24):
that again, So they would get eight or ten million
dollars in aid from the US and then they pay
a million or two to Paul Manifford, so he was
he was getting the US government to pay these guys
and the Ganella afford to pay him because they were
getting so much aid from the US. Right, that doesn't
seem like it should be doable, it doesn't. It seems

(45:45):
like the kind of thing that a sane in ethical
society would say. No. But yeah, at some point, at
the very least, we never did. Um. So yeah, I'm
gonna quote from that report the tortures lobby again. A
spokeswoman for Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly told the Center
that the firm does not quote attempt to explain away
concerns about human rights. Instead, she said, we try to

(46:07):
open a dialogue. So that's nice conversational tortures about torturing,
which they need more money to do more of. Well,
you've got to be civil, yeah, and heard that somewhere recently.
Civilities critical, It's the most important thing, even matter you're talking.
You couldn't call a guy like Paul Manafort like a
ship drenched ass nozzle because that's not civil. No, it

(46:28):
doesn't deserve to be treated that way, even though he's
enabled the deaths of hundreds of thousands. I mean, yeah,
that's crazy, this person like committed genocide. It's sort of so, yeah,
he's definitely committed world class human rights violations culpable anyway. Uh.
Spy Magazine wrote an article on all this with the
wonderful title Publicists of the Damned, which is solid titling spy. Uh.

(46:53):
They didn't talk to Paul Manafort, but they interviewed his
friend and colleague, John Donaldson. I think Donaldson's interview helps
explain how these fuckers justified their factory to themselves. They
didn't talk to Paul Manifort, but they interviewed his friend
and colleague, John Donaldson. I think Donaldson's interview helps explain
how these fuckers justify their fury to themselves. Quote when
a friendly Congressional aid took Donaldson aside to express his

(47:14):
misgivings about the black Manifort clients Kenya and Somalia, saying, John,
these guys are real bad. Donaldson responded, Yeah, I know,
but we're really trying to persuade them to clean up
their act. Yeah, well for him, good for him, and
I think things are going well in Somalia these days.
I haven't checked up on them since the early nineties,

(47:35):
but yeah, it seems like a country that's just straight,
straight rocket. Yeah. No, everything has been good there since
the early nineties. Definitely seems like it seems like it. Um. Yes,
So most of that article, the Spy magazine article folks
to round a different firm Van Kloburg and associates, who
are the PR dudes for Saddam Hussein. But Spy recognized

(47:58):
and gave credit to Paul Manifort's company first starting this
industry and dominating it. They ranked all of the influence
peddlers in terms of the amount of bloody hands and
uh Manafort black yeah number one, but on hands rating,
which is the right way to rate this industry absolutely Yeah,
wait that was it was an American PR firm that

(48:19):
these are all supported. This is I can't even handle it, man,
I don't. I guess I knew, I knew it was
this level of corruption, but wow, Okay, it's unspeakable. I
think I'm gonna need more fruit leather pretty soon. Yeah,
fruit leather and Derrito's will help, will help cleanse our
moral pal Yeah. So in the early nineties, Paul Manifort

(48:42):
was a busy guy, as we've just gotten through talking about.
But he was not too busy to help out a
friend in need, a friend like his buddy Donald J. Trump.
Mr Trump came to Paul Manifort with a problem Peaquat
Indians had opened up a casino that was apparently taking
business away from Trump's casinos in Atlantic sit Now, it's
hard to say what exact advice Manaford gave Mr. Trump,

(49:04):
but Trump wound up testifying in front of the House
Native American Affairs Subcommittee, and he said, among other things,
those don't look like Indians to me. What yes? And
so his argument was he was trying to convince them
they're not Native Americans. That's at West where he started.
He was asked, what were they have been? People with

(49:26):
like toner on Native American face? He was crazy what
an Indian looked like in Congress and he responded, you know,
you know. He also insinuated the mob was heavily involved
with these Indian casinos, without any evidence. He claimed that
Indian gaming had been quote a total disaster for Connecticut

(49:50):
man the origin of the phrase a total disaster. I
feel bound by honor to read you this excerpt from
a Hartford Courant article about his testimony. When it was
finally Trump's turn, he discarded the seven page statement he
was going to read. I had a long and boring speech,
he told the panel. It was politically correct and something
that would have gotten me into no trouble whatsoever. With that,

(50:11):
he offered off the cup remarks about some of the
things bugging him lately, such as the mob forget the
Justice Department shrug. Organized crime is rampant, people know it,
people talk about it. Trump insisted, I wonder what j
Edgar Hoover would have said about this. Now. Neil Abercrombie,
a Democrat from Hawaii, wind up getting in the last word.
And that Hartford Corn article and his speaking on that

(50:32):
in nine inadvertently provides the best summary of modern politics
I've ever heard free speech reins, no matter how idiotic. Yeah,
he really nailed totally. So. Other coverage by Hartford Current
at the time revealed that by this point Trump had
been retaining the services of Black, Manifort and Stone for

(50:53):
years for their advice on quote, housing matters. When he
was asked why he needed mister Manifort's services, Trump laughed,
I don't know if this lobbying does anything, but they've
represented me over the years and I'm very loyal because
if we know one thing about Donald Trump Trump crazy
left turn, it's weird because he he seems so maniacal

(51:14):
and so self important that you forget that he's really
like socially incredibly smart. Yeah, Donald Trump, Yeah, he's he's
dumb at so many things that you forget that he's
a genius in one thing, right, absolutely, which is the
most dangerous. There's nothing as dangerous as an idiot with
a trick up his sleeve. I also wonder how dumb
he is. I wonder how much of it actually is calculated,

(51:35):
even like tweeting of like co Fe Fey, you know
how on purpose that was? Yeah, it's it's I've just
stopped paying attention to any anything funny because like he's
we should be laughing at him now. It doesn't matter
how ridiculous the ship he does. He should anyway. This
is not the Donald Trump episode. Although did he this
subcommittee that those are those people were not Native Americans? Okay, no,

(51:58):
No one had to listen to Donald yet. So this
was still that beautiful period where you could just ignore him.
Did they just call him dumb and move on? They
called him dumb and racist, like the people. Yeah, they
were like, this was really racist testiment because he said
they're not they don't look like Indians. It's insanity. Um.

(52:20):
So during the nineteen nineties, Paul began a friendship with
another guy to an arms dealer named Abdul Rahman las Here,
who paid him like ninety grand and nineteen four to
help broker a deal with a French politician to help
Pakistan make submarines. It didn't end well and like eleven
people were murdered, but Paul Manafort still got paid. Um.
According to The Atlantic, las Here was something of a

(52:41):
bad influence on Paul Manafort. They quoted one of his
friends as saying, Paul became aware of the difference between
making three hundred thousand and five million. He discovered the
south of France las Here would show him how to
live that life. So Paul is now hanging out with
like a fucking arms merchant multimillionaire if not billionaire, and
he realizes that like his just millionaire lifestyle is small,

(53:03):
not enough. Yeah, so Paul starts spending less and less
time at the office and more time jet setting around
with Ellis here. Uh. He also started spending money like
he was worried it might evaporate. When his daughter Andrea
decided she wanted a horsey, Paul Manafort bought a farm
in Palm Beach and filled it with pure bred Irish horses.
He also hired a full staff to take care of them.
In nineteen and one, his firm gets bought by another company,

(53:25):
and he makes a bunch of money, and he leaves
in in nineteen five in order to set up another
lobbying firm of his own, more focused on overseas deals,
so he leaves. Black Man of hort and Stone gets
bought and he leaves after a couple of years. Um,
but he keeps. He starts a couple of different firms,
all doing the same thing. Yeah. Um, his life isn't
all fun and games. His wife was injured in a

(53:47):
horrible horseback riding accident in and by all accounts, he
was very devoted to her while she healed. So that's okay,
nice thing. Yeah. One way he seemed to deal with
his stress was by buying houses. Often side unseane. He
just decide I want a new house, and boom. As
Johnny Depp's example proves, this kind of lifestyle is not
sustainable without regular injections of cash. Uh and since working

(54:08):
with dictators wasn't always enough to make the bills, Paul
decided to get it on a great scam opportunity with
his arms dealer buddy las Here. Here's the Atlantic quote.
In two thousand two, he and Manafort persuaded the bank
to invest fifty seven million euros in a Puerto Rican
biometrics company. According to reporting by the Portuguese newspaper Observator,
Manafort was the lead American investor in the company. His
involvement helped justify the bank's investment despite evidence of the

(54:30):
company's faulty products and lacks accounting. Elas Here is alleged
to have extracted bloated commissions from the deal and to
have pocketed some of the banks loans. Manafort reportedly made
one and a half million dollars selling his shares of
the biometrics firm before the company eventually came tumbling down.
So he's just fine fucking over everybody, damn yeah, uh
so yeah. By two thousand and five, Paul Manapour is

(54:52):
known as the guy. If you were a shady dictator
or criminal looking to improve your image abroad, maybe get
in the good graces of US politicians. This led him
to Ukraine and the employee of its wealthiest citizen, a
steel billionaire named Renat Akhmatov. According to PolitiFact, Manafort advised
one of Akhmatov's companies on corporate communication strategy. But it

(55:13):
turned out Akhmatov was a friend of this guy, Viktor Yanukovich,
who was really in a bit of a pickle. Now,
Victor was the Prime Minister of Ukraine and a buddy
of the Putin regime. He wanted to move Ukraine closer
in the geopolitical sense to Russia, but most Ukrainians, particularly
in the western part of the country, did not want this.
They hoped to eventually become part of the EU. It
was a big issue for the country and it came

(55:34):
up front and center in the two thousand five election
when Victor Yunukovitch went up against Victor Yukashenko, who was
pro West. Yukashenko was horribly poisoned with dioxin during the
campaign and Yanukovich was declared the winner. People thought this
was shady and they took to the station yeah to protest.
Uh the Supreme Court ordered a revote, which is apparently
an option in some countries, and yeah, they held a

(55:55):
revote two weeks later. So this guy Yanukovich calls Paul
Manafort two weeks before the new vote and asked him
to help save his ailing presidential campaign, which is very
unpopular since he poisoned. That guy had to have been him.
Oh yeah, sure, I mean, of course, Um, I don't
know why people don't like me. Yeah, yeah, Anyway, Manaford,

(56:16):
being an honest guy, told him that there wasn't much
he could do at this late hour, and Yanukovich did lose,
but he wound up hiring Manafort shortly thereafter. The two
worked together for nearly a decade. On paper, Manafort was
an advisor to Yanukovich's party. In reality, he was also
helping revamp Yanukovich himself. Here's the Washington Post quote. Manaford
and half a dozen businessmen, lawyers, and political analysts involved

(56:40):
in Ukraine at the time brought discipline and focus that
the Yanukovich led campaigns had lacked. He got Yanukovich to
comb his hair better to stay on message during public appearances.
He drilled them on talking points and told them what
suits to wear. He tried to control everything. A former
member of Yanukovich's party recalled how people who represented the
party would be dressed the words they said, their makeup
and style lists, every small detail, and it's it's one

(57:02):
of those things people at the time will say, he
just advised Yanukovich to dress like himself and Comba's hair.
Paul Manafort did because they were kind of the same size,
and Manor was like, just be more like me and
you'll win the election. Wow. Did it work? Well? Uh,
that's just getting a little bit ahead of us. Yeah.
Uh sorry, I I know you're the one with the

(57:23):
yeah spoiler. Yet did totally did, but it took a while. Uh.
In two thousand five, Manaford decided he needed some side
action while he was starting up work with this Yanukovich guy,
so he went to a Russian billionaire named Oleg Deripashka
with an offer. If a Leg would put up a
shitload of money, Paul would put together a program to,
according to the AP quote, influence politics, business dealings, and

(57:45):
news coverage inside the United States, Europe, and former Soviet
republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin's government. So Derri Pashka
says he didn't wind up going through with this idea
and maybe it's true. In any case, that's where Paul
Manaford's head was at in two thousand five visa v.
Vladimir Putin, totally happy to pedal influence to the guy
to the west. So yeah, Paul Manafort spent the early

(58:06):
aughts using his American political know how to shape Victor
Yunukovich in to the kind of guy who could win
an election. Apparently Paul's a strategy was yet to make
you look and dressed exactly like him. Maniford also advised
Ynukovich's party, the Party of Regions, to focus on one
single theme every week, rather than come to grips with
the opposition over a bunch of different issues. Just always
say focus on one thing that week, you know, you

(58:27):
don't ignore anything else, and just yeah, shout about that.
I forget because there's so much death in in these
stories that he's giving them political advice that seems to
be working. Yeah, he's advising him to act like American
politicians in a country that doesn't have a long history
of democracy, be manipulative. Yeah, and so he's just like, yeah,
I just say one thing a bunch uh yeah, right, yeah,

(58:51):
Now we're going to get into a lot more about
Manifort's work in Ukraine and and how that all ended
in blood and fire and horrible death, as well as
the rest of the Paul Manafort story. But that is
going to have to come in another couple of days
because this is the end of part one of our
Paul Manafort podcast, So we'll get back into it on Thursday.

(59:14):
You can hear the conclusion of this thrilling story. Until then,
do you want to plug some plug doubles for the people?
Oh sure, I'm at Dave to the Ross on everything.
That's da V E T O T H E R
O S S, Twitter and Instagram, and it's my website
and also listen to my podcast Suicide Buddies Suicide Buddies.
I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at

(59:35):
I write Okay, just two letters. You can find this
podcast at at Bastard's Pod on Twitter. You can also
find our website behind the Bastards dot com. Or we'll
have pictures from this episode and a list of all
of the many, many sources that were used. So yeah,
come check us out next Thursday and we will we
will continue to talk about what a fantastic piece of ship.
Paul Manaford is. It's a little bit of a spoiler.

(59:56):
He's probably the guy that we're talking about on this
show that I have the most of a personal connection
to because I reported extensively on the Ukrainian Revolution and
on their civil war back in two and fifteen. So
you can you can prepare for me to get real
angry in the next podcast. Can't wait. Yeah, it'll be exciting.
H