Speed Read: ‘Obama Jews’ and Other Shocking Highlights From New Manafort Docs

Source: Daily Beast | September 15, 2018 | Spencer Ackerman

Special counsel Robert Mueller dropped fresh revelations about Paul Manafort ahead of the ex-Trump aide’s guilty plea in federal court Friday.

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‘Obama Jews’

Manafort owes much of his time behind bars to his work on behalf of Russian-backed Ukrainian political interests—work that made him, according to Mueller’s filings, $60 million. It was a reflection not only of Manafort’s greed but the difficulty of selling the Moscow-sponsored regime of Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions to Washington, particularly against Yanukovich adversary and Orange Revolution veteran Yulia Tymoshenko. But one of his tactics, Mueller reveals, was to get what Manafort described “in a contemporaneous communication [as] ‘[O]bama jews’” to pressure the Obama administration in October 2012.

The scheme was to tie Tymoshenko to antisemitism through association. Manafort got “a senior Israeli government official to issue a written statement publicizing this story.” That’s a reference to a statement from then-Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, a hardliner who is now defense minister, as noted by journalist Noga Tarnopolsky. The story was published by Ben Shapiro at Breitbart, as first reported by The Guardian’s Luke Harding. Manafort, “with secret advance knowledge of that Israeli statement,” bragged as he shopped it around the U.S., “I have someone pushing it on the NY Post. Bada bing bada boom.”

Publicly, Manafort’s message was that “the Jewish community will take this out on Obama on election day if he does nothing.” But privately, through a lobbyist envoy to the Obama administration, he conveyed that Ukraine had “worked to prevent the Administration’s presidential opponent from including damaging language in the Israeli statement, so as not to harm the Administration.” Message: You and all your Jews can trust the valiant Viktor Yanukovich.

‘Stink on Tymo’

That story wasn’t an isolated incident. While keeping his Ukraine work “as secret as possible,” Mueller says, Manafort had lobbyists concoct news stories that Tymoshenko had “paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official.” Manafort insisted the stories should have “no fingerprints” and stressed the imperative that “we have no connection” to them—something illegal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which required him to disclose the lobbying work. “[M]y goal,” he said, “is to plant some stink on Tymo.”

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‘Virtually Non-Existent’

As The Daily Beast reported before Manafort’s indictment, Manafort paid a powerful U.S. law firm connected to the Obama administration, Skadden Arps, to concoct a report whitewashing Yanukovich’s government for prosecuting its rival Tymoshenko. (Skadden Arps, which put Barack Obama’s former White House counsel Greg Craig on the Ukraine report, has consistently refused The Daily Beast’s inquiries on that matter.) He paid the firm $4.6 million, surreptitiously and mostly through an offshore account, for a 2012 report that the Yanukovich government claimed cost $12,000. (In an earlier lawsuit brought by Tymoshenko, the listed cost was $13,000.) Now Mueller reveals that Skadden Arps told Manafort “privately in writing” in November 2012 that the evidence of Tymoshenko’s criminal activity “is virtually non-existent.” It is unclear who at Skadden Arps provided that written assessment.

Mueller adds: “Manafort knew that the report also did not disclose that the law firm, in addition to being retained to write the report, was retained to represent Ukraine itself, including in connection with the Tymoshenko case and to provide training to the trial team prosecuting Tymoshenko.”

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