(September 14, 2018 at 9:35 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: Manafort’s guilty plea exposes hardball tactics he used to thrive in Washington swamp
"Drain the swamp" my shiny metal ass.
Quote:Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort embraced extreme tactics in his lobbying efforts: He schemed “to plant some stink” and spread stories that a jailed Ukrainian politician was a murderer.
He enlisted a foreign politician who was secretly on his payroll to deliver a message to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
And he gleefully fueled allegations that an Obama Cabinet member who had spoken out against his Ukrainian client was an anti-Semite, according to court papers.
With his guilty plea Friday, Manafort admitted the lengths to which he went to manipulate the American political system and the media for massive profit, exposing how he thrived in the Washington swamp that Trump railed against during his campaign.
The president has dismissed the allegations against his former campaign chairman as run-of-the-mill lobbying — and has even contemplated pardoning him. But new details revealed Friday show how far beyond the law Manafort went in pursuit of his goals.
. . . . . . . . . .
Trump has downplayed Manafort’s wrongdoing, writing in an August tweet that he felt “very badly” for his former campaign chairman. “What he did, some of the charges they threw against him, every consultant, every lobbyist in Washington probably does,” the president told Fox News the following day.
. . . . . . . . . .
Manafort, 69, a political operative who had worked for Republican presidential candidates such as Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, helped pioneer the Washington lobbying industry when he founded a firm in the 1980s that specialized in spiffing up the reputations of some of the world’s most controversial leaders, including Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.
He once testified to Congress that while the technical term for his work was “lobbying . . . I will admit that, in a narrow sense, some people might term it ‘influence peddling.’ ”
Now to wait for AM and all the rest of the Orange turd fuhrer supporters to come out and defend their precious leader against the truth.
Disclaimer: I am only responsible for what I say, not what you choose to understand.
