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Filing to establish Manafort breached his plea agreement. Unsurprisingly, most of the interesting stuff is redacted—but a reminder there are enormous chunks of this story the public knows nothing about. courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Couple interesting things that jumped out on first skim: Manafort was not only in contact with the administration (mostly via proxies) but working to “get people appointed”—which is to say, not just chatting, but exerting quite significant influence.
(I don’t want to overread, but the document says he was using an intermediary “to get people appointed”—not merely to TRY to get people appointed or recommend candidates, which implies he was, in at least some instances, successful in doing so.)
Final footnote observes that while Manafort did indeed turn over various digital media, there were “more than ten instances” where he did not provide a corresponding password to access their contents. Silent on whether the gov’t was ultimately able to access these.
One obvious question is why the failure to provide passwords isn’t itself cited as an instance of refusal to cooperate, though if he simply claimed he couldn’t remember, it might be difficult or impossible to prove otherwise.
The section dealing with Manafort’s use of an intermediary to “get people appointed” notes that his communication with that official continued through Feb 2018—so he was feeding them personnel picks literally right up until he pled guilty.
There’s a heavily redacted section alleging Manafort lied about a $125k payment. Reading between the (redacted lines) it SOUNDS as though this was probably a payment made on Manafort’s behalf to WilmerHale to settle outstanding legal bills.
The unredacted text doesn’t say that directly, but there are multiple very strong suggestions the money went to legal bills (one witness cited to refute Manafort’s account said he’d declined to contribute to a legal defense fund) and there’s a passage...
...at the start of the section that says: “[REDACTED] Manafort until August 2017.” which is when he ditched WilmerHale for a firm specializing in financial crimes. I’d wager the blacked out bit is “WilmerHale represented...”
The source of the money, which the government is claiming Manafort repeatedly lied about, was apparently a comission resulting from a “consulting contract” related to some entity Manafort was “instrumental in setting up” during the Summer of 2016.
“Summer of 2016,” incidentally, would mean either while Manafort was chairing the Trump campaign or immediately thereafter. Not sure exactly what this refers to, though I assume it can’t be all that difficult to find out.
Whatever this commission was, it appears—again, redactions make it hard to be sure—that the $125k represents half of a 6 percent cut of... something. So the total sum involved would be about $4.17 million.
No explicit indication this was illegal, whatever it was — he’d had his tax preparer declare it as income despite telling the government it was a loan — but obviously invites the question of why he was so determined to obfuscate it.
AH. Ok, I think I have a likely solution to the source of the mysterious Manafort payment.
In summer 2016, Manafort set up the “Rebuilding America Now” SuperPAC, headed by Laurance Gay—an old friend and godfathe to one of Manafort’s daughters. “PAC” and “Gay” fit nearly into the appropriate redacted spaces in the Mueller filing. nytimes.com/2018/12/13/us/…
In addition to being investigated for illegally funnelling foreign contributions, reporting on the PAC has noted that it didn’t seem to be doing much in 2017 beyond paying its head, Gay, an unusually hefty salary. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
The PAC’s FEC docs are online and probably worth combing through. docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg…
In addition to fitting neatly into the description in the special counsel’s filing, it also explains pretty simply why Manafort would be deceptive about the income he derived from the PAC, even if it wasn’t illegal.
The vast majority of the roughly $25 million the PAC raised in 2016 came from a very tiny handful of very large donors. The Mueller filing references a whopping 6% commission to be paid to somone—probably Laurance Gay—half of which actually went to someone else (Manafort?).
There are a few obvious reasons Manafort might want to hide this. Some of those big dollar donors might not have been aware that an insane 6 percent of their contribution was going into the pockets of Manafort and/or his cronies. That’s just a straight up grift.
It also looks incredibly shady when you combine it with the claim Manafort was working hard to “get people appointments” through 2017. Because one of the biggest donors ($6 million in 2016) to Manafort’s PAC was Linda McMahon, now head of Trump’s Small Business Administration.
So, McMahon gives $6 million to the PAC Manafort set up, of which $360,000 goes to an unorthodox “commission”—split two ways, probably between Gay & either Manafort or a proxy. After the election, Manafort’s contacts with the administration focus on “getting people appointments.”
And, who would have guessed it, one of the largest donors to griftPAC ends up with a cabinet-level post.
One of the other major GriftPAC donors, incidentally, was this charming fellow. atg.wa.gov/news/news-rele…
FWIW, there doesn’t appear to be disbursement *directly* from Rebuilding America Now that would correspond to the payment referenced by the SCO’s filing, though given the byzantine arrangements described there, I didn’t really expect to see one. docquery.fec.gov/pdf/406/201707…
Though the filings are worth the skim as a record of a PAC spending impressive sums on “consulting” fees to its principals, travel & hotel expenses, and gobsmackingly expensive meals. Drain the swamp indeed. docquery.fec.gov/pdf/406/201707…
D’oh. I should have known: NYT reported last month that the shady 125k payment was, indeed, funneled through Rebuilding America Now. nytimes.com/2018/12/07/us/…
And here’s @lachlan way back in October 2017 noting that, after the 2016 election, Rebuilding America Now seemed to exist mostly to cut fat consulting checks to its own executives: thedailybeast.com/pro-trump-supe…
@lachlan As you can see from these lists, in 2016 the PAC, which took in $25 million, mostly from a handful of big donors, does indeed spend over $18 million on ad buys. But after that, the biggest outlays are all to the PAC’s own execs (often via their LLCs)
Also, essentially the PAC’s ENTIRE income for 2017 came in the form of a series of staggered refunds from the same firm they paid to do media buys the year before. This isn’t my area of expertise, but that sounds awfully weird. docquery.fec.gov/pdf/406/201707…
In other words, of the $19 million Rebuilding America Now paid Multi Media Services Corporation, they got $1.5 million BACK over the first half of 2017, and then paid it to their own principals in the form of “consulting fees”.
In the 2017 piece by @lachlan, they claim they’re “laying the groundwork” to keep the PAC going, attract fresh donations, etc. But the FEC filings don’t show any of that. Instead, it looks like they’re just divvying up money they reported spending on media buys during 2016.
At the time, Laurance Gay told @lachlan: We certainly aren’t taking ourselves out to dinner… We have had numerous meetings with potential givers, potential advisers, people who had helped us raise money.” thedailybeast.com/pro-trump-supe…
@lachlan Supposedly they were gearing up to play a role in the midterms. But apart from a $25k contribution from Trump supporter Llwyd Ecclestone, they don’t actually seem to have raised ANY money in 2017-2018, despite running a massive tab in travel expenses & meals.
Sorry, yes, plus $5k from Donna Hotze.
Now, I’m just a simple unfrozen caveman, but it’s hard to see how they justify six figure outlays for “consulting,” travel, and food during a period when the PAC was collecting essentially no money, and not doing any actual “political action."
They did make some very small payments to web design and hosting firms—for what is unclear. But they don’t appear to have gotten involved in the midterms at all. What were all those people “consulting” about?
AAAH. OK, looking back at the original Mueller filing alleging Manafort had breached their agreement clears a lot of this up! assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5453…
They’re clearly talking about Multi Media Services, the firm that Rebuilding America Now paid for its ad buys. Their contract gave them a 6% commission on the $19 million RAN spent through them. But apparently they’d agreed to split it—presumably with Manafort or his LLC. 
(So I guessed wrong earlier: I thought the 6% commission might refer to someone's cut of total donations; it’s a cut of the ad buy spend.)
RAN does appear to have done ONE thing during 2018. Apparently they produced a video attacking James Comey. As of this moment, the YouTube video has 219 views.
Also, RAN does appear to have maintained a website (with “Donate!” button) through at least the summer of 2018, but it was down by the end of the year and remains defunct. web.archive.org/web/2018082800…
This is pretty choice—from the initial coverage when RAN launched. cnn.com/2016/06/02/pol…
OK: Summary, since it’s pretty clear now what happened. Manafort taps his buddy Laurence Gay to run the RAN PAC. They quickly raise a ton of cash from large donors, and do a $19 million ad buy with Multi Media Services, the same firm the Trump campaign proper is using.
According to the contract, MMS is taking a 6% cut as their commission—but Gay makes them agree to split it with him personally. A kickback, in other words. Manafort convinces Gay to have MMS pay off his legal bills out of the funds they’ve set aside for this kickback.
On a presumably related note, in 2017 MMS “refunds” $1.2 million of that supposed $19m ad buy to RAN PAC, which Gay and a few others promptly divvy up as supposed “consulting fees” & lavish travel/meal expenditures, though they don’t do any more actual “Political Action."
Manafort tells Mueller a bunch of inconsistent stories about how his bill actually got paid. The details make it seem unlikely this was confusion or a memory lapse.
That much seems pretty solid at this point. When it comes to why Manafort would risk the lie—with what appear to be various fabrications designed to bolster it—we have to get a little more speculative.
The simplest answer is that RAN PAC was a grift, and Manafort didn’t want either Mueller or the donors looking too closely at how a couple million of their funds had been divvied up.
Additional possibilities: Manfort was working behind the scenes to “get people appointed.” Linda McMahon, one of the handful of donors who provided most of RAN PAC’s cash, ended up with a cabinet-level appointment.
Also: The folks who launched RAN PAC came essentially straight from the campaign, and used the same firm (MMS) for media buys. If those expenditures were coordinated with the campaign rather than “independent,” that would be illegal.
Manafort was stil the campaign chair until mid-August 2016. RANPAC started paying millions to MMS in June. If Manafort was party to Gay’s kickback arrangement, beyond being incredibly shady, it’d be pretty hard to claim the PAC wasn’t “coordinating” with the campaign.
Maybe totally tangentially: A pretty astonishing proportion of large early donors to RANPAC appear to be Florida-based construction or real estate firms. Not sure that means anything; just jumped out at me. docquery.fec.gov/pdf/661/201610…
