On Friday, Manafort, who was chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign from June to August 2016, pleaded guilty in federal district court in Washington to two charges of conspiracy against the United States—one involving a lobbying scheme that involved financial crimes and foreign-agent registration violations, and the other involving witness tampering. In the course of his plea, Manafort also admitted guilt on bank-fraud charges on which a federal jury in Virginia hung last month…
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The grain of truth in Sanders’s claim is that most, though not all, of the criminal conduct to which Manafort admitted preceded his work for the Trump campaign, and none directly implicates the campaign itself or Trump. But it is only a grain. For one thing, Trump constantly boasted of hiring the “best people”—and even in March 2016, when Manafort first joined the campaign, it was clear that he was superlative chiefly in influence peddling on behalf of unsavory characters close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. His questionable reputation and murky relationships with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska were matters of public knowledge long before the campaign began.
Indeed, though the specific crimes to which Manafort has now pleaded were not yet public, the most rudimentary vetting would have flagged him as a person of particularly high risk. As Franklin Foer noted in the Atlantic last month, Sen. John McCain rejected Manafort’s involvement in the 2008 Republican National Convention because of his disreputable ties even back then, before his involvement with Yanukovych. Trump hired him anyway.
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In this conduct, Manafort was not alone. He is the third Trump campaign official to plead guilty to having undisclosed relationships with foreign actors that he was obliged by law to make public. According to documents filed by the special counsel, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and Paul Manafort, each of whom served in an official capacity on the campaign, failed to disclose ties to a foreign power in violation of FARA. Three points, as they say, make a pattern—and this pattern is seriously troubling. Surrounding the man who became president were multiple individuals—including his campaign chairman, his deputy campaign chairman and his campaign adviser—who surreptitiously represented foreign interests within the United States. They are also individuals whose potential criminal exposure, in the form of their failure to register under FARA, was known to foreign interests in a position to use it as leverage. One of them—Flynn—went on to join the White House as national security adviser.
All of which is to say that the White House doth protest too much. While Manafort’s plea, in contrast to Michael Cohen’s last month, does not implicate the president or the campaign in any felonies, it is not entirely separate from them either.