There is an excellent thirteen page article in the March issue of the Atlantic Magazine about the vile Paul Manafort. Franklin Foer’s The Plot Against America, Paul Manafort and the Fall of Washington can not be fairly summarized, but a throw away aside in the middle of the article illustrates the venality of the modern Republican party.
As Foer tells it, Manafort stole $10 million dollars from the Reagan campaign which was supposed to be delivered as an illegal campaign foreign contribution.
The indicted Trump campaign manger stole $10 million. The money was for supposed to be used for illegal purposes to influence a Republican campaign. The only reaction from the campaign manager was to whine “I ran the [Reagan] campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash.”
Nothing about the sanctity of the American election. Nothing about illegal foreign influence. No reporting of crimes. $10 million dollars is enough money for a normal person to live off the interest, but Republicans don’t think it stealing it would disqualify a person from becoming a campaign manager.
We truly have a kleptocracy.
Stories about Manafort’s slipperiness have acquired mythic status. In the summer of 2016, Politico’s Kenneth Vogel ...wrote a rigorous exegesis of a long-standing rumor: Manafort was said to have walked away with $10 million in cash from Ferdinand Marcos Marcos, money he promised he would deliver to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign (which in itself would have been illegal). Vogel relied in part on the 1996 memoir of Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant and Reagan’s reelection campaign director. In the book, Rollins recounted a dinner-party conversation with a member of the Filipino congress who claimed to have personally given a suitcase of cash to a “well-known Washington power lobbyist” involved in the Marcos campaign.