Trump Just Hired His Next Scandal

[dixiegrrrrl]

This is an prescient article from last spring, outlining Trump's hire of Manafort, and providing very detailed background of Manafort's sleazy and criminal history..

If Congress ever gets to question Manafort, it might be interesting to know this background. Apparently he was not focused only on Russian/Crimean bad guys.

But Manafort's real specialty is in the netherworld of international lobbying. Trump has criticized both parties as selling out the U.S. to foreign interests. Now he is counting on a man who has represented many of them.

Manafort has offered his services to not one but two presidents driven from power through popular revolution -- Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. He has lobbied for Saudi Arabia, a Bahamanian president suspected of narco-trafficking and a former Angolan rebel leader accused of torture.

Snip....In 2013, Manafort surfaced in a French influence-peddling scandal involving Edouard Balladur, who was prime minister in the mid-1990s. Manafort acknowledged in a Virginia court that he was paid by an adviser to the Saudi royal court more than $200,000 for advice he provided on security issues. That adviser in turn funneled the profits of an arms sale back into Balladur's political campaign.

In 1989, Manafort was hauled before Congress for a classic example of Washington double-dealing. His firm received a $326,000 fee for securing for a client a $43 million Department of Housing and Urban Development subsidy for a block of low-income apartments in Seabrook, New Jersey. Manafort then purchased a 20 percent stake in the Seabrook subdivision that was to receive the federal subsidy for which he lobbied.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-13/trump-just-hired-his-next-scandal-lobbyist-paul-manafort