TRUMP is seriously dangerous

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby JackRiddler » Mon Aug 15, 2016 9:00 pm

stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:27 pm wrote:OK, this is coming from a source on DU I ordinarily loathe, but it made me laugh:

Image


Total bullshit coming from a site where one will be banned for mentioning all the foreign payoffs the Clinton Foundation has received, as reported in increasing detail by the WSJ and others.

Getting sick of this nonsense. One thing can be said of both Trump and Clinton: they are homegrown, American-made phenomena. They're both about the dollars and the power, and fuck the 99%.
We meet at the borders of our being, we dream something of each others reality. - Harvey of R.I.

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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 15, 2016 9:03 pm

I don't know that little hammer and sickle in the elephant is a nice touch

I just don't like the way it's making all Americans having to decide if they are fascists or commies
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby PufPuf93 » Mon Aug 15, 2016 9:36 pm

Modern Russia under Putin is not a communist country.

Communism is primarily an economic system, a subset of socialism. Socialism is an economic system where means of production are owned and controlled by the State. Modern Russia operates under a capitalist system. The Oligarchs are capitalists. Russia is a capitalist society wherein people own private property, businesses make profits, and workers are paid wages.

Modern Russia is at least technically a democracy in politics as a representative parliament and president are elected and come from political parties. There is still a communist party in Russia but it is a minority party with scant influence. Russia is not a liberal democracy as we have in the USA, rather some rights are lacking such as freedom of the press and various individual rights. The United Russia party strongly dominates Russia. As United Russia is the party of Putin, Putin possesses strong powers and legitimate authoritarian control approaching that of a totalitarian state.

I consider modern Russia under Putin fascist.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 15, 2016 10:30 pm

thanks ...I was being a little silly ......but that's how it has felt for me lately .....some people call me a fascist lover...some call me a commie lover...at the very same time...not just here :P



GOP Foreign Policy Experts: Trump Presidency Would Be ‘Ruinous’ For U.S.-Asia Relations
Eight officials who advised U.S.-Asia policy in past GOP administrations signed an open letter denouncing Trump.
08/15/2016 09:07 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Asia experts who served in past Republican administrations said on Monday they would back Hillary Clinton in the presidential race as a Donald Trump presidency would lead to “ruinous marginalization” for the United States in the region.

In an open letter, the eight former senior officials said that with global strategic competition growing, including from China, it was “absolutely the wrong time to elect an unstable, ill-prepared amateur with no vision or foresight to meet the manifold challenges of the 21st century.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/don ... 5f49d7eb25
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 11:17 pm

JackRiddler » Mon Aug 15, 2016 8:00 pm wrote:
stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 3:27 pm wrote:OK, this is coming from a source on DU I ordinarily loathe, but it made me laugh:

Image


Total bullshit coming from a site where one will be banned for mentioning all the foreign payoffs the Clinton Foundation has received, as reported in increasing detail by the WSJ and others.

Getting sick of this nonsense. One thing can be said of both Trump and Clinton: they are homegrown, American-made phenomena. They're both about the dollars and the power, and fuck the 99%.


Image

You're the one spending the most amount of time on this thread spreading the concept of kayfabe, and now you're getting sick of it? :sarcasm

Chill out. No matter who you vote for, the government still gets in. :moresarcasm
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby PufPuf93 » Mon Aug 15, 2016 11:31 pm

seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 15, 2016 7:30 pm wrote:thanks ...I was being a little silly ......but that's how it has felt for me lately .....some people call me a fascist lover...some call me a commie lover...at the very same time...not just here :P


I think the hammer and cycled elephant is sort of cute too. :mrgreen:

This particular election cycle is impossible. And the world has gone mad. Everything is not black and white, particularly when one's own "leaders" are a sleazy class.

I want Trump and Hillary Clinton to go away.

The most popular thread I ever OPed elsewhere was about Libya and much of the thread is calling me a Gaddifi lover and my response, "Am not".

I may be averse to most parties or individuals seeking power, corrupt seeks power.

You have energy I do not possess.

I am thinking the world is not very stable at present.

Is Wendi Deng really dating Putin or internet rumor?

I posted pictures of Dubrovnik, Croatia today in the RI image only thread. Reportedly, Ivanka and Wendi Deng are currently visiting Dubrovnik and there is an internet picture of them on the walk way of the wall of old Dubrovnik. They are pals.

Edit: Found a picture to post.

Image

There is the Dubrovnik pic at this link.

Chelsea Clinton should be with Wendi and Ivanka.

Dubrovnik is a beautiful place. I spent 2 days there in 1981.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby SonicG » Tue Aug 16, 2016 1:48 am

Dubrovnik was featured in the follow up to You've Been Trumped...It really looks like a beautiful place.

A Dangerous Game is a 2014 documentary film and a follow-up to You've Been Trumped. The film was released in September 2014, and continues the story of the locals' struggle against Donald Trump but goes further afield also. It features a story in Dubrovnik, Croatia where a development has been approved to build a luxury golf course on Mount Srđ overlooking Dubrovnik but local residents are campaigning against it and held a referendum which they won but which officials ignored. The film also looks at luxury golf resorts in general, how they damage the natural environment because of high water and pesticide usage, and how they often only serve the super rich whilst bypassing local democracy to please the developers.
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby SonicG » Tue Aug 16, 2016 2:08 am

And FWIW:
https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/DJT_Rad ... Speech.pdf


As President, I will call for an international conference focused on this
goal. We will work side-by-side with our friends in the Middle East,
including our greatest ally, Israel. We will partner with King Abdullah of
Jordan, and President Sisi of Egypt, and all others who recognize this
ideology of death that must be extinguished.
...
I also believe that we could find common ground with Russia in the
fight against ISIS. They too have much at stake in the outcome in Syria,
and have had their own battles with Islamic terrorism.
...
The shooter in Orlando reportedly celebrated in his classroom after
9/11. He too was interviewed by the FBI. His father, a native of
Afghanistan, supported the oppressive Taliban regime, and
expressed anti-American views – and by the way, was just seen
sitting behind Hillary Clinton with a big smile on his face all the way
through her speech. He obviously liked what she had to say.
"a poiminint tidal wave in a notion of dynamite"
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby 82_28 » Tue Aug 16, 2016 6:44 am

Image
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 16, 2016 7:39 am

Manafort has guided dictators and strongmen, but can he manage Trump?
NEWS By Lisa Mascaro - Tribune Washington Bureau 0

Posted: 6:00 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2016


WASHINGTON — Political consultant Paul Manafort was so renowned in Ukraine for helping elect President Viktor Yanukovych that when strategist Roger Stone arrived years later to counsel another aspiring Ukrainian politician, that candidate — as Stone tells it — gave him the once over and asked: "So, you are our Manafort?"

Long a legendary figure in Washington, Manafort has spent a career guiding powerful politicians to office. As a young Republican, he organized for Ronald Reagan. Later, Manafort advised some of the world's most notorious figures, including Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos and Angola guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi.

His experience in guiding strong-willed men with big egos and overpowering personalities should serve him well in his role managing Donald Trump's campaign for president. But some are beginning to wonder whether this time Manafort may have met his match.

"He has an impossible task," said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman who now works as a political consultant.

Taking on Trump offers a second act for the seasoned GOP operative who was a leading player in Republican circles during an earlier era in Washington, before organic restaurants replaced dimly lit steakhouses as the capital's favored after-hours haunts.

Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly — the firm he operated in the 1980s with Stone, Democrat Peter Kelly and Charlie Black, another longtime GOP adviser to former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush — was known for its hard-charging political and business lobbying. Trump was one of Stone's clients.

The firm has long since disbanded, and Manafort hasn't run an election in the U.S. for years. When he was brought in to help Trump this spring, some younger GOP operatives scoffed at his reemergence.

At the time, though, it became clear Trump needed a midcourse correction to salvage his unpredictable rise. He had been losing ground in the bitter primary battle, and Manafort, who had run delegate operations dating back to Gerald Ford, was seen as a skilled strategist who could steer Trump through what was then looking like it might be a dicey convention nominating contest.

The veteran strategist quickly became the adult in the room. Campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was abruptly fired, and Manafort took over operations _ namely, the seeming impossible job of trying to keep Trump on script.

"Manafort's pretty good at looking around corners — what's going to happen," said Scott Reed, senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who was groomed by Manafort during Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign and later hired his old boss to run the 1996 GOP convention in San Diego that nominated Bob Dole for president.

"This guy's one of the most competitive guys I know," Reed said.

At 67, Manafort now finds himself in a younger man's game. He has appeared tired at times, bags under his eyes, his tailored image sometimes undone by the need for a haircut.

Some recent reports suggest that Manafort has become frustrated with Trump's undisciplined style and unwillingness to stay on message — most disastrously his verbal and Twitter assault on the parents of a U.S. Army captain killed in Iraq.

But some close to Manafort downplay such concerns.

"I've talked to him," said Black, who still keeps in contact with his old business partner. "He is fully determined. Presidential campaigns are the Super Bowl, and to have a chance to run one (is) a big deal for him. He'd just like to win."

Even so, others believe there still may come a tipping point at which where a veteran pro like Manafort has had enough.

For example, members of Trump's team publicly contradicted Manafort when he repeatedly denied that Melania Trump's convention speech had been plagiarized, only to have the campaign later admit that parts were lifted from a Michelle Obama speech.

"I can't imagine Paul Manafort just sitting back, going over the cliff with Donald Trump," said Weber, who is not supporting Trump for president. "If he comes to the conclusion his candidate is hopeless, the campaign is hopeless, he would disassociate himself. And I wouldn't blame him. Why be the guy who gets the blame for a candidate who cannot conform?"

Manafort has always enjoyed a bit of an enigmatic reputation as a background fixer known for staying out of the spotlight despite operating at some of the highest levels of Washington power politics.

He keeps a home in the Washington suburbs and a Manhattan apartment in Trump Tower, according to those who know him. But his work is sometimes difficult to trace.

The campaign did not respond to a request for an interview.

His Trump work is volunteer, he has said.

Supporters warn against underestimating Manafort.

Stone, who bonded with Manafort when they were students at Georgetown University, recalled his own 1977 run for chairman of the Young Republicans, a national federation of political groups aligned with the GOP.

Stone faced a tough challenger from Chicago, and Manafort set out to have a chat with the opponent over dinner. He returned with word that he had persuaded the candidate to join Stone's slate, as a running mate.

Manafort and Stone went on to help elect Reagan in 1980, with Manafort leading a Southern strategy focused on turning white working-class Democrats into Republicans, an effort Trump's campaign is trying to duplicate elsewhere today.

"He is an extremely tough guy," Stone said. "He's not a quitter. He's a fighter. He realizes this is a long game."
http://www.myajc.com/news/news/manafort ... -he/nsGCQ/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 16, 2016 7:43 am

Paul Manafort Questioned by Cayman Islands Court About His Fund With a Russian Billionaire
By Masha Froliak | 12:46 pm, August 15, 2016
Donald Trump’s top aid and campaign manager, Paul Manafort, has a proven CV of working for pro-Putin oligarchs. However, Manafort’s business deal with Russian magnate Oleg Deripaska has apparently turned sour according to a lawsuit filed in the Cayman Islands.

Deripaska is one of the richest Russian oligarchs and built his fortune in the aluminum business. He is a close ally of Vladimir Putin. Mr. Derispaska was for years banned from entering the U.S. because of his alleged anti–democratic connections and ties to organized crime. He and Manafort met while Manafort was working on the presidential campaign of now ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, another Putin ally.

According to the court filing, Manafort and his two partners, Rick Davis and Rick Gates, set up a fund in 2007, in which Deripaska invested $100 million. The plan was to acquire small companies in the Ukraine region and then merge them into bigger national companies. But it didn’t work out that way. According to Bloomberg, Manafort’s fund only acquired one company, cable and Internet provider Black Sea Cable. When Deripaska requested an audit of the fund, he received no response from Manafort or his partners. Their last communication was in 2011.

“It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared,” Deripaska’s lawyers wrote in a petition to the Cayman Islands court.

The case is still pending. But Manafort’s close ties to Russian oligarchs and controversial deals are still raising eyebrows.

Deripaska is not the only oligarch with a shady reputation with whom Manafort has partnered. Dmitrii Firtash, who has made his fortune in deals with Russia’s Gazprom and is now wanted by the U.S. on bribery charges, is just another of Manafort’s business connections.
http://heatst.com/politics/paul-manafor ... llionaire/


Leonid Bershidsky: A Trump manager’s post-Soviet connections
July 24, 2016


Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg News
No one who saw former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych rise from the political dead after trying and failing to rig a 2004 presidential election will ever write off Paul Manafort. The U.S. consultant, who now runs Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, helped Yanukovych recover. The Yanukovych connection translated into some bizarre and shady dealings for Manafort.

Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported on one of these deals in April. It deserves a closer look, if only to give some insight into Manafort’s business CV to Americans who want a businessman president.

According to a Cayman Islands court filing by an investment vehicle of Russian aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, Manafort and two partners in 2007 set up a private equity limited partnership called Pericles Emerging Market Partners. They solicited $200 million from B-Invest, a Cyprus-registered company that handles Deripaska’s non-core investments, to do deals in eastern and southern European countries, primarily Ukraine. The filing says they expected at least a 30 percent return on invested capital.

Deripaska’s representatives agreed to pay a 2 percent annual management fee to Manafort and his partners, Rick Gates and Rick Davis, initially based on its $200 million commitment, later scaled down to $100 million.

The partners’ plan was to buy small- to medium-sized companies in Ukraine and merge them into bigger national companies, reaping economies of scale. These national companies would later be sold or taken public.

Gates, who now works for the Trump campaign, offered various potential investments to Deripaska’s people in Moscow. They told Gates and Manafort they didn’t like any of them except one, the planned acquisition of an Odessa company called Black Sea Cable.

The firm was a cable TV and internet provider, the biggest player in the local market.

Its management was reportedly close to Yanukovych’s Regions Party, then powerful in mostly Russian-speaking Odessa. The owners were obscured behind a complex chain of offshore entities that led to a network of hundreds of firms ostensibly controlled — but in fact only fronted — by Latvians Erik Vanagels and Stan Gorin. The network is well known to investigative journalists: Its companies have been involved in some of the recent decades’ boldest scams, including several Ukrainian ones. In 2011, for example, one of its vehicles was involved in the purchase of drilling equipment for Ukrainian state-owned Chernomorneftegaz at a price inflated by $150 million. The scheme was later investigated by Latvian and Ukrainian authorities.

Manafort proposed a structure for the Black Sea deal: To avoid Cyprus taxes, Deripaska would loan $19 million to a special-purpose vehicle set up by Manafort, and that SPV would buy Black Sea Cable’s parent company. Deripaska’s investment managers agreed and transferred the money in the spring of 2008; they had also paid $7.3 million in management fees.

In April 2008, Gates informed the Deripaska people that the acquisition was under way. But by then, the global financial crisis was about to break out, and Deripaska’s industrial empire was in trouble. A Putin loyalist, he barely survived with massive state aid. The Moscow investment managers let Manafort and his partners know they wanted the partnership wound down. Gates allegedly promised to sell Black Sea Cable, but in 2011, the Moscow team was notified by email that it couldn’t be sold “due to market conditions.”

That was the last communication Deripaska’s people received from Manafort and Gates, and subsequent attempts to contact them failed to elicit a reaction. “It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared,” the Cayman filing said.

Black Sea Cable’s current ownership structure looks a lot like its old one. It doesn’t include any Deripaska or Manafort entities. The company is owned by the Ukrainian firm Nika TV, which in turn is controlled by British Virgin Islands-registered CardMan Impex Corp. That firm is recorded in the Panama Papers database, leaked from offshore registrar Mossack Fonseca, as owned by Cascado AG — part of the same Vanagels-Gorin network to which the trail from Black Sea Cable’s original owners led.

Deripaska still hasn’t recovered the money. A lawyer for Manafort told Isikoff, the Yahoo reporter, that his client had already explained everything in a deposition “some months ago” and wouldn’t discuss the matter since it was still pending in the Caymans.

Deripaska has a fearsome reputation in Russia. He survived the bloody “aluminum wars” of the 1990s, fighting off some the most ruthless characters of that predatory era. He was reportedly banned from the U.S. because of alleged criminal connections.

Overall, his relationship with Manafort was beneficial. Manafort’s lobbying firm, for example, arranged for him a meeting with Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona — something Deripaska very much wanted. In the former Soviet Union, connections with the right people are the most valuable commodity.

Both Ukraine and Russia are still open for this kind of business (Trump has connections, too). Today’s Kiev officials, who came to power after Yanukovych was deposed in a popular uprising, are no fans of Manafort, but Yanukovych-era networks are in place in many Ukrainian cities. Wealthy Russians, for their part, are only too happy to serve as proxies for the state, establishing ties where official Russian diplomacy fails.

If Trump wins, Manafort and his colleagues on the team can be relied upon to keep these unofficial communication lines — and the business opportunities they provide — open.

The Trump campaign has kept any pledge to help Ukraine with its campaign against Russian-backed separatists off the Republican Party platform. I’m sure it’s duly noted in Moscow.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer.

- See more at: http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20 ... NCQNC.dpuf
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Aug 16, 2016 8:04 am

Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure
As Ferdinand Marcos used his fortune to cling to power, he found an ally in Trump’s campaign chairman.
By KENNETH P. VOGEL June 10, 2016


When Paul Manafort met Ferdinand Marcos in the 1980s, each had something the other wanted.

Marcos, then in his third decade as leader of the Philippines, had developed a reputation in Washington as a stalwart ally in the fight against communism. But he was facing rising concerns about rampant corruption, plundering of public resources and human rights violations under his increasingly despotic leadership, during which Amnesty International now estimates 34,000 people were tortured and 3,240 killed. Meanwhile, Marcos amassed a fortune estimated at $10 billion, spending big on paintings by Pissarro and Manet, a fleet of private planes and helicopters and Mercedes-Benzes.

Manafort, then in his 30s, was a hotshot Republican operative who had made his name helping Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, and was pioneering a new form of international political consulting. The model, which allowed him to indulge his taste for the high-life, parlayed his clout with the emergent conservative ruling class into lucrative gigs representing foreign leaders looking to buff their reputations in Washington.

A Marcos front group would eventually hire Manafort to try to help him retain his grip on power, agreeing to pay Manafort’s firm $950,000 a year — one of the first big foreign gigs landed by the firm. But back then, during the Wild West days of the international political industry, there was more buzz in Washington and Manila about Manafort’s proximity to Marcos during a period of epic spending to support a lavish lifestyle and to curry favor with influential Americans.

One example, according to documents, including some published here for the first time: Marcos earmarked huge sums of cash for Reagan’s 1980 and 1984 campaigns — as much as $57 million, according to one claim made to Philippine investigators. There’s no evidence that any cash ever made it into Reagan’s coffers, which would have been illegal since U.S. election laws ban donations from foreigners. And, despite extensive government investigations on both sides of the Pacific into the freewheeling spending of the Marcos regime, there’s never before been much serious inquiry of what ultimately happened to the cash intended for political contributions. The lack of a transparent paper trail — combined with the larger than life personas of Marcos and Manafort — spawned a swirl of theories.

In a phone interview this month, Manafort, now 67, acknowledged that for the better part of 30 years, he’s been dealing with speculation that he accepted millions of dollars in Marcos’s cash — either as a bonus or as a donation intended for Reagan.

“It was circulating way back when, when people were out to just pass rumors and things about me. It’s old stuff that never had any legs anywhere,” said Manafort. “It’s totally fiction,” he said, asserting that every penny he received from Marcos’ allies was disclosed to the U.S. Justice Department in mandatory filings. “We’d have done everything by the book,” he said, attributing persistent claims to the contrary to rivals and former colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and suggesting that some are reviving the talk now for political purposes.

After largely disappearing from the U.S. political spotlight for the past 20 years to build to a portfolio of foreign clients, Manafort reemerged in late March as a key adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He was quickly promoted to chief strategist and chairman, and has been working to put his international affiliations behind him (when POLITICO asked him to describe his relationship with Marcos, he laughed and said, “I’ve got to go”).

But Trump’s broadsides against the corrupt political establishment — and his increasing attacks on the foreign cash raised by the charitable foundation of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton — continue to bring attention to the often-secretive international work that became Manafort’s lifeblood. Recent stories have called attention to Manafort’s huge paydays through arrangements with controversial foreign leaders and businessmen, including Zaire President Mobutu Sese Seko, Russian businessman Oleg Deripaska, Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych and France’s Eduard Balladur, among others.

Yet those deals look like middle school civics classes next to Manafort’s efforts to help Marcos maintain his grip on power, according to documents and interviews with more than 40 people who worked in U.S. and Philippine politics and law enforcement in the mid-1980s.

In October 1984, Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda (center), lead ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the landing of Allied Forces in Red Beach during WWII.
In October 1984, Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda (center), lead ceremonies marking the 40th anniversary of the landing of Allied Forces in Red Beach during WWII. | AP Photos
Manafort’s Philippine adventure came at a time when international opinion was turning against Marcos’ authoritarian regime. Yet, one of Manafort’s business partners now says that Manafort neglected to inform him of the firm’s contract with the dictator. That created some embarrassment and raised concerns about a style that several of his former associates portrayed as mercenary and envelope-pushing.

POLITICO found that Manafort worked more closely than previously known with Marcos and his wife, Imelda, in Manila, where Manafort and his associates advised the couple on electoral strategy, and in Washington, where they worked to retain goodwill by tamping down concerns about the Marcos regime’s human rights record, theft of public resources, and ultimately their perpetration of a massive vote-rigging effort to try to stay in power in the Philippines’ 1986 presidential election.

In the run-up to that election, aides to Marcos’s leading opponent Corazon Aquino invoked Manafort’s role with the dictator “to vilify Marcos” with the intelligentsia, said Teddy Locsin, a prominent Philippine journalist and operative who worked for Aquino on that campaign. While Aquino also had help from Westerners — the prominent international consulting firm Sawyer Miller accepted $15,000 from her campaign, which appears to have been mostly expense reimbursements — her team found Manafort an appealing target. In the words of Locsin, who was later elected to Congress, “Manafort's name was like Voldemort today.”

***

Manafort’s international consulting career grew out of turmoil on Reagan’s 1980 campaign. A trio of young operatives had been working together in Reagan’s political shop — Manafort as convention director, Charlie Black as field director and Roger Stone as director of the Southern operation — until Black found himself out of a job when the campaign shuffled its hierarchy after the New Hampshire primary. So he started a political consulting firm, which Manafort and Stone joined in short order. The firm quickly began working for Reagan’s campaign, as well as the Republican National Committee and a handful of GOP congressional candidates.

After Reagan won, the firm built a steady, if unspectacular, business representing Republicans from Northeastern moderates like Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey to southern conservatives like Sens. Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Paula Hawkins of Florida.

But it wasn’t until after Reagan’s 1984 reelection, on which the firm’s founding partners worked extensively, that the swaggering 30-somethings really began making their mark on Washington’s hidebound consulting world and, in the process, making their fortunes. They split their enterprise into two distinct firms — one dedicated to domestic Republican political consulting lobbying and the other to lobbying and international political work — and added a new high-profile partner for each. Lee Atwater, the legendary GOP operative who served as Reagan’s deputy campaign manager in 1984, joined the political firm, while Peter Kelly, the finance chair of the Democratic National Committee, joined the lobbying side, which became known as Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.

K Street veterans grumbled about the breach in the tradition of lobbying shops identifying exclusively with one party or the other. But Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly — headquartered with Black, Manafort, Stone and Atwater in a brick building overlooking the Potomac River in the historic Washington suburb of Alexandria, Virginia — quickly redefined the influence industry.

It began vacuuming up clients attracted by its growing stable of well-connected Republican and Democratic lobbyists lured to the firm by gaudy salaries from prominent congressional or executive branch posts. The firm’s partners were boasting of $450,000 annual salaries (not including bonuses for bringing in new clients) by 1986, though Black at the time protested that those figures were exaggerated.

Major contracts included Bethlehem Steel, the investment bank Salomon Brothers and the cigarette industry trade group The Tobacco Institute — not to mention Trump. The billionaire real estate developer paid the firm to fight the expansion of Indian casinos that could compete with his Atlantic City gambling business, and to change the flightpath of planes at West Palm Beach International Airport, which he said disturbed guests at his newly purchased Mar-a-Lago club.

It was on the international stage, however, that the firm found some of its most lucrative work, landing contracts representing the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Portugal and an anticommunist rebel group in Angola, among others. In 1986, the two firms — Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, and Black, Manafort, Stone and Atwater — combined with Manafort personally to collect $2.4 million from international clients, according to filings with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, young Republicans political operatives, pose for a Washington Post photograph in 1985.
Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, young Republicans political operatives, pose for a Washington Post photograph in 1985. | Getty Images
Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly’s pitch to win the business from the ruling party of the Bahamas, which at the time was being accused of ties to drug trafficking, spelled out the approach of its principals. The firm’s relationships with State Department officials could be “utilized to upgrade a backchannel relationship in the economic and foreign policy spheres,” according to a portion of the pitch published by TIME magazine in 1986.

One of the firm’s associates, Riva Levinson, who worked under Manafort on the Philippines account, recalled that he was not impressed when she informed him that she had to believe in what she was doing. Manafort predicted that “will be my downfall in this business,” she recalled in her memoir, published this month. She wrote that a running joke inside the firm was that its work was “like playing one big game of Stratego: building armies and scheming to take over the world. That is exactly what it feels like working with Manafort. In fact, at times, that is exactly what is going on.”

Peter Kelly, the Democratic partner in the firm, said Manafort was attracted to trappings of wealth and cultivated an aura of an international jet-setter. He would disappear for days or even weeks without telling people at the firm where he was going or what he was doing and would return to submit expenses including Concorde flights to Paris and bills for stays in a suite at the extravagant Hotel de Crillon, according to Kelly and other former employees at the firm.

According to interviews and property records, Manafort drove a top-of-line Mercedes sedan and has purchased, built or rented pricey estates in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia; Palm Beach, Florida and the Hamptons, as well a horse farm in Virginia and a condo in Manhattan’s Trump Tower, where his new boss’ campaign headquarters are located. Several former colleagues and associates recall Manafort boasting about paying to relocate the swimming pool outside the home he built in Mount Vernon because he didn’t like the shade/sun balance, but a former Manafort neighbor told POLITICO it was because the pool was causing problems with the home’s foundation as it settled.

Manafort has told associates that he’s not drawing a salary from Trump’s campaign, and there don’t appear to be any payments to him in the campaign’s Federal Election Commission filings, leading multiple operatives in and around Trump’s campaign to speculate that Manafort is positioning himself to receive a cut from ad buys, polling or other contract work. Manafort rejected that speculation. “No, no, no, no. I’m a volunteer. I’m at a point in my life where I can volunteer my time,” he told POLITICO.

Kelly, in an interview, said Manafort’s driving motivation always seemed to be “to be in the middle of the action. He loved the action. I think that’s what gets him off more than anything. At a certain point, money becomes irrelevant.”

Manafort brushed aside questions that he misled his partners, suggesting that politics was motivating the criticism from Kelly, who was a top adviser to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns. “Peter Kelly was the only Democrat in the firm at that time, so guess what? He has a vested interest in helping Hillary right now,” said Manafort. “That’s all. He’s playing a game.”

But Kelly wasn’t the only former colleague who expressed misgivings about Manafort’s behavior to POLITICO. And Kelly said Manafort sometimes failed to alert the firm of what he was up to, accepting gigs with authoritarian regimes with which some other firm officials felt uncomfortable.

“Paul did a lot of vile things that weren’t appropriate for a firm like ours. We represented 11 Fortune 500 companies, so we didn’t need them worrying about some deals he was making in Paris,” Kelly said. “There was so much of his business that we didn’t know about.”

That included Manafort’s courtship of — and contract with — Marcos, according to Kelly, who said he had to abruptly resign from an election observation mission in the country after learning that his firm was working for Marcos.

It’s unclear when precisely Manafort first began working with Marcos, but multiple Black Manafort officials said the relationship started before 1985. Manafort himself said he had “no idea” when he first connected with Marcos, but emphasized that he followed all disclosure rules.

The Philippine strongman was in dire need of help in Washington after the 1983 assassination of opposition leader Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr., who was Corazon Aquino’s husband. Marcos started taking heat from Congress and even the administration, despite the deep ties he and his wife had cultivated to Ronald and Nancy Reagan, whom the Marcoses had befriended as far back as 1969, when the Reagans attended a Manila gala marking the opening of a lavish cultural center. Ronald Reagan reportedly twirled Imelda Marcos around the dance floor at the gala. The couples remained close, and Philippine investigators later found records indicating that Imelda Marcos gave then-first lady Nancy Reagan a $60,000 “tube emerald necklace,” which Reagan would have been barred from keeping and which the White House said she never received.

“There were congressional hearings at least once a month on the Philippines, and there was talk of withholding aid,” said John F. Maisto, an American diplomat who served as the State Department’s director of Philippine affairs during Marcos decline and fall. “Hell, I was on the Hill arguing for the State Department that we should withhold military and even economic assistance from the Philippines in order to pressure them to put the regime back on a democratic path. And what the regime needed back then was people on the Hill arguing the opposite,” he said. “Manafort was a logical choice. He was close to Reagan, and also to his allies in Congress.”

***

In October 1985, Reagan dispatched his closest friend and ally in the Senate, Nevada’s Paul Laxalt, to Manila to advise Marcos that the U.S. was tiring of his abuses and would pull its support if he didn’t clean up his act.

Laxalt, who had chaired Reagan’s presidential campaigns and remained a key confidant, suggested that Marcos hire Manafort to help address Marcos’s grievances that he was being unfavorably depicted in the U.S. press, according to Stanley Karnow’s 1989 book “In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines.”

U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt (R-NV) talks with reporters at the Manila Airport, Oct. 17, 1985 at the end of a four-day visit to the Philippines on a mission from President Ronald Reagan.
U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt (R-NV) talks with reporters at the Manila Airport, Oct. 17, 1985 at the end of a four-day visit to the Philippines on a mission from President Ronald Reagan. | AP Photos
Not long after the meeting, Laxalt explained to TIME: “Everybody needs a Washington representative to protect their hind sides, even foreign governments.” As a result he said “the constituency for [lobbyists representing foreign governments] is the entire free-world economy.”

Manafort sought and received approval from the Reagan White House before accepting the work, according to Raymond Bonner’s 1988 book “Waltzing with a Dictator; The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy.” Manafort’s firm signed its contract to represent Marcos with a front group called The Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters & Tourism Associations, in November 1985, according to the firm’s foreign agent filings with the Justice Department. The Philippine official who executed the contract was a key Marcos’ ally named Ronaldo “Ronny” Zamora, who would resurface later as a key player in the mystery of the missing millions.

According to Bonner’s book, the month before the contract was officially executed, first lady Imelda Marcos personally delivered the first $60,000 of what was intended to be a $950,000 contract during a visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly (where she ironically decried “injustice, intolerance, greed and dominance by the strong”).

Shortly after her speech, her husband, in a dramatic effort to prove he was not anti-democratic, announced in an appearance on ABC’s "This Week with David Brinkley," that he would call for a snap election with more than one year left in his term.

Manafort revved into high gear, laying the groundwork for the Philippine foreign minister, Pacifico Castro, to visit the United States for three days to try to meet with U.S. officials, according to Justice Department documents and news accounts. He made plans for three prominent American conservative journalists—Robert Novak, John McLaughlin, and Fred Barnes—to visit the Philippines, according to Bonner’s book. And he worked to seed the idea in Washington conservative circles that Aquino, Marcos’s leading rival in the impending election, was soft on communism and would not be a reliable U.S. ally, according to the book.

Then, as the election approached, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly stepped up its lobbying contacts of influential congressional and State Department officials, according to the firm’s foreign agent filings with the Justice Department. A young Manafort protégé named Matthew C. Freedman played a particularly key role with the Marcoses as they fought to protect their power and fortune, according to multiple former colleagues.

Freedman, then 30, had joined Black Manafort as an associate after stints at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He was assigned to the Marcos account in the months before the election, and, according to the firm’s Justice Department filings, he set about lobbying officials at his former agency (U.S. AID) about foreign aid to the Marcos regime and the election.

The firm also helped the Reagan administration put together its election observation delegation, vetoing some names submitted by the State Department and adding other names seen as more acceptable, according to Bonner’s book.

Manafort and Freedman spent the weeks before the election in Manila advising Marcos on public relations and electoral strategy, according to published reports and interviews with three people working on the election in the Philippines. Manafort privately urged Marcos to administer the elections in a way that would appear credible to American observers: "What we've tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico's," Manafort told TIME around the elections.

His efforts apparently fell on deaf ears. There was widespread fraud and violence on Election Day and during the vote-counting, which independent international observers attributed mostly to Marcos’ supporters. The state election commission received a litany of complaints, including "threats and coercion" against voters, shootings in polling places, falsified ballots and theft of ballot boxes.

Many members of the U.S. delegation wanted to issue a harsh statement condemning the election. But some conservative members of the delegation argued against that, and the final statement instead highlighted the enthusiasm of the voters, only briefly mentioning “disturbing reports” of fraud and “serious charges … made in regard to the tabulation system.”

While the state election commission called the election for Marcos, an independent international watchdog named Aquino the victor. A tense three-week standoff ensued during which Marcos barricaded himself in the presidential palace while Aquino’s supporters waged peaceful protests, and the world watched, fearing bloodshed.

In Washington, Black Manafort’s associates repeatedly lobbied Laxalt’s office about the possibility of putting out a statement on the election, DOJ filings show, presumably supporting Marcos’s claim that it was legitimate.

Even as the State Department reported to the White House that Marcos’s allies had been responsible for widespread fraud, Marcos and his allies with help from Manafort’s firm worked to perpetuate the idea that there was fraud on both sides, but that Marcos had prevailed, according to interviews with U.S. diplomats. That was the White House’s line initially, even as international support increasingly mounted behind Aquino.

Black Manafort reported receiving its final payment on record from the Chamber — $258,000 including reimbursements for all manner of pricey meals and travel — on February 24, 1986, according to the firm’s filings with the Justice Department, bringing its total recorded payments for the account to $508,000.

At 3 a.m. the next morning, Manila time, an increasingly desperate Marcos reached Laxalt by phone on the Hill, proposing a power-sharing coalition with Aquino, and trying to suss out whether Reagan really wanted him to step down. Laxalt said he’d check with the president, and, when the Nevada senator phoned the presidential palace in Manila two hours later without a definitive answer, Marcos, exhausted and frail, asked Laxalt for his personal advice. “Cut and cut cleanly. The time has come,” Laxalt famously answered, leading to a long silence on the other end of the line, and prompting Laxalt to ask whether Marcos was still there. “I am so very, very disappointed,” Marcos answered, according to Laxalt’s account of the dramatic calls.

While Marcos, in a symbolic act of defiance later that day, had the oath of office administered for another term, within hours he had left the palace and fled the country under U.S. protection.

A young protester slashes at an oil painting of Ferdinand Marcos as looters storm the presidential palace in Manila, February 1986.
A young protester slashes at an oil painting of Ferdinand Marcos as looters storm the presidential palace in Manila, February 1986. | AP Photos
Manafort had left the Philippines before that historic final day. But Freedman remained behind, holed up in the presidential palace with the Marcoses, from which he remained in regular contact by phone with Manafort, according to multiple former colleagues who had spoken to Manafort and Freedman about the situation. At one point, Imelda Marcos asked to talk to Manafort, so Freedman gave her the phone and she thanked Manafort profusely for his services, according to the former colleagues.

Freedman joined the Marcoses and their entourage in Hawaii, and assisted them for several weeks as they located accommodations, according to a lawyer who worked with the Marcoses. The lawyer said that Freedman so endeared himself to Imelda Marcos that she expressed a desire to give him as a wedding present an iconic Manhattan office building that the Marcoses had secretly purchased in 1981 with the help of a Saudi arms dealer and others.

Freedman did not respond to questions about his time with the Marcoses, or why he continued to work for the Marcoses after his firm reported the relationship was over. Later, Freedman reportedly taunted a consultant at Sawyer Miller, which had worked for free for the victorious Aquino. According to James Harding’s 2008 book “Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin into a Global Business,” Freedman told the Sawyer Miller consultant “We lost, but we got paid.”

***

When Marcos arrived in Hawaii, U.S. customs officials seized thousands of pages of financial documents that detailed his stashing and spending of an enormous fortune plundered from the people of the Philippines. Among them: a one-page ledger obtained by POLITICO from a lawyer who sued the Marcos estate. The document, published here for the first time, appears to detail Marcos’ intended donations to U.S. political campaigns in 1980 and 1982, including $50,000 each to the competing 1980 campaigns of Reagan and the Democratic incumbent President Jimmy Carter. That cash, as well as $75,000 in donations slated for congressional and local candidates between 1979 and 1982, was to have come from a San Francisco-based company that was linked to a Philippine intelligence fund, the ledger suggests. POLITICO was unable to reach the Marcos associate who administered the company, an American citizen who donated tens of thousands of dollars to U.S. campaigns that he claimed came from his own funds.

Another document — a letter from to Marcos from a senior aide that was obtained when his opponents ransacked his files — seems to refer to accounts set up for Reagan and his 1980 campaign manager, the late William J. Casey. The letter catalogues other documents, including "1980-SEC-014: Funds to Casey" and "1980-SEC-015: Reagan Funds Not Used,” according to a 1996 report by The Associated Press former investigative reporter Robert Parry.

A third document — a whistle-blower letter from a group of anonymous bankers — alleged that the dictator planned to donate $7 million to Reagan’s 1980 campaign, $50 million to his 1984 reelection bid and $10 million to “various candidates” in the 1982 congressional midterm elections, according to contemporary media accounts. The letter was delivered to the Philippine commission that investigated Marcos’ plunder of public resources, the Presidential Commission on Good Government, by a former banker named Antonio Gatmaitan in the days after Marcos stepped down.

In an interview, Gatmaitan stood by the claims in the letter, and questioned the degree to which they were investigated by the PCGG, which itself has been the target of corruption allegations, even as it’s recovered an estimated $3.6 billion in Marcos’ assets.

“I don’t believe that they took it seriously, because Marcos was gone already by that time,” he said. “That’s typical here. Once the principals are gone, the stories die.”

Richard Roger T. Amurao, the acting chairman of the PCGG, said he couldn’t find the letter from the anonymous bankers, nor any records suggesting that the commission investigated its charges or other evidence that Marcos intended to donate to U.S. campaigns.

“Somehow our agency … did not look into the matter you were referring,” he wrote in an email to POLITICO. He declined an interview request, pointing out that his term expires at the end of this month, when the incoming presidential administration gets to appoint new commissioners. “Our time now is consumed by the transition work we need to hand over to the incoming administration,” he wrote.

But Philippine observers wonder whether the PCGG and its hunt for Marcos’ loot will survive, given the fading memories of the Marcos clan’s plunder and their resurgence as a political power. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., who goes by the nickname “Bongbong,” is a senator who narrowly lost a bid for vice president in last month’s elections, while his sister Imee Marcos is a governor and their mother, Imelda Marcos, serves as a member of Congress.

On this side of the Pacific, it doesn’t appear their late patriarch’s attempted donations to Reagan were investigated any more rigorously. It’s unclear whether U.S. authorities ever obtained or looked into Gatmaitan’s letter. And the U.S. Justice Department declined to investigate the ledger detailing donations made between 1979 and 1982. That’s because, by the time U.S. Customs officials obtained the ledger in 1986, the three-year statute of limitations for prosecuting federal election law violations had passed. When word of Marcos’ planned donations first broke in 1986, Reagan’s White House press secretary Larry Speakes denied any knowledge of the effort.

It’s also unclear whether the full bounty of documents have been accounted for, or whether there are other documents detailing how Marcos spent his cash.

Marcos had worked to try to prevent documents and assets from being released to American and Philippine authorities, hiring a Washington law firm with deep connections to Manafort and the White House to block the seizure of key possessions that the Marcos’ entourage brought with them to Hawaii. (In addition to the documents, the Marcoses arrived at the Air Force base Hickam Field outside of Honolulu with 27 million freshly printed Philippine pesos, 67 racks of clothes, 413 pieces of jewelry and 24 gold bricks, among other items valued at a total of $15 million).

The law firm, Anderson, Hibey, Nauheim & Blair, also represented Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, and Manafort personally, according to a lawyer who worked with it. The firm worked closely with the Black Manafort associate Freedman in the early days of the Marcoses’ Hawaiian exile. Richard Hibey, the partner at the firm who worked mostly closely with the Marcoses, is currently representing Manafort in a case brought by the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, who accuses Manafort and a partner of accepting $19 million in investment cash, then disappearing and failing to account for it.

Hibey did not respond to requests for comment.

Most of the investigations by U.S. and Philippine authorities appear to have paid little attention to charges that some of the cash was intended for illegal political contributions in the U.S.

A U.S. congressional subcommittee chaired by the late New York Rep. Stephen Solarz devoted significant attention to tracking Marcos’ ill-gotten gains. But it doesn’t appear to have delved deeply into the donation allegations.

Stanley Roth, who served as staff director of Solarz’s subcommittee, said “there was an allegation that we were never able to prove" related to political contribution Marcos intended to make. But he stressed that the subcommittee’s investigative work centered on the hundreds of thousands of dollars in New York real estate deals linked to the Marcoses. “The driving force was not politics or campaign contributions. It was the guy looting the Philippines,” said Roth, adding that he doesn’t remember Manafort’s name being raised at all during the investigation.

***

Marcos, who had struggled noticeably during the snap election with health problems related to diabetes and lupus, declined precipitously while in exile and died in 1989.

But the mystery surrounding the earmarked donations got new life a couple years later. In the run-up to the Philippines’ next presidential election, the veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins traveled to Manila as part of a delegation from the internal consulting firm Sawyer Miller colleagues to help Aquino’s party in the 1992 presidential election.

Rollins and a couple other Western consultants working on the race attended a Manila dinner party with assorted Philippine politicos from Aquino’s party. Among those in attendance was Ronny Zamora, the former Marcos lawyer who had signed the contract with Black Manafort years earlier. According to multiple sources, Zamora had been among a group of Marcos confidants who helped the dictator move and invest the billions that he plundered from the public trough, with some of the so-called “Marcos cronies” becoming quite wealthy themselves.

Bob Rich, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, said Zamora “was one of the cronies who we felt was handling some of the money, but it wasn’t an official position.” Rich later accompanied the Marcoses during their exile in Hawaii, overseeing the logistics around their accommodations and the two planeloads of possessions they brought with them. He said the U.S. had a tough time tracking the flow of cash around Marcos and his cronies, explaining “we didn’t always know where the money was coming from.”

Like most Marcos cronies, Zamora did not face legal charges and later reemerged in Philippine politics backing other parties — in Zamora’s case, Aquino’s.

At the dinner, Zamora boasted that he provided $10 million in cash from Marcos to Manafort to donate to Reagan’s campaign, two attendees told POLITICO.

In demonstrations on February 2, 1986, anti-Marcos protesters carry a box containing the caricatured heads of President Ronald Reagan and Ferdinand Marcos. The sign on the box reads “Seal of the Dictator of the Philippines.”
In demonstrations on February 2, 1986, anti-Marcos protesters carry a box containing the caricatured heads of President Ronald Reagan and Ferdinand Marcos. The sign on the box reads “Seal of the Dictator of the Philippines.” | AP Photos
In Rollins’ 1996 memoir, he recounts the conversation that followed, without naming either Zamora or Manafort, referring to them only as “a prominent member of the Philippine congress” and a “well-known Washington power lobbyist who was involved in the campaign,” respectively.

“I delivered the suitcase with the cash personally to him, and helped get it out the country,” the Philippine congressman boasted, according to Rollins’ book, “Bare Knuckles and Backrooms; My Life in American Politics.” The congressman continued, telling Rollins that the lobbyist had indicated “he would give it to you for the campaign. It was a personal gift from Marcos to Reagan.”

Rollins in the book recalls being “stunned” by the story. “Not in a state of total disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank,” Rollins wrote, bemoaning “I ran the campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash.”

Rollins, who is now running a super PAC supporting Trump, said in an interview with POLITICO that, as soon as he got back to Washington, he asked Bay Buchanan, who served as treasurer of all three of Reagan’s presidential campaigns, whether there was any chance that foreign money had made its way into the campaign’s coffers. “Absolutely not,” Rollins recalls her saying. (Buchanan says she doesn’t recall this conversation).

Later, according to Rollins’ book, he shared the story with Laxalt, a close friend. Laxalt immediately responded “Christ, now it all makes sense,” according to Rollins’ book, which quotes Laxalt’s recollection of his October 1985 meeting with Marcos at which he recommended the dictator hire Manafort, but also passed along Reagan’s message of the importance of reform.

“When I was over there cutting off Marcos’ nuts, he gave me a hard time. ‘How can you do this?’ he kept saying to me. ‘I gave Reagan $10 million. How can he do this to me?’ ” Laxalt said, according to Rollins’s book. “I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Now I get it.”

Two GOP operatives told POLITICO that when Rollins’ book came out in 1996, he told them that the lobbyist in question was Manafort. Some Republicans familiar with the book attributed the passage in the book to tension between Rollins and Manafort, who were both considered contenders for the position of Reagan’s reelection campaign manager, which Rollins ultimately got. Rollins dismissed the idea that he has any bad blood with Manafort. (The two men are ostensibly on the same team now, though Manafort’s allies have tried to steer donors away from Rollins’ super PAC, and to a new super PAC run by a former associate at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.)

The operatives who discussed the Manila dinner anecdote with Rollins said he told them he had withheld Manafort’s name from his book out of concern for then-U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, who was the GOP nominee for president and for whom Manafort was working at the time.

Rollins would not confirm or deny those conversations, but he told POLITICO that when the book came out, “every reporter in the world” chased the story. “Several had come to me and said, ‘I know it was Manafort.’ And I said ‘I’m not confirming it.’“

Manafort called the story “totally fiction,” asserting “there never was any $10 million. … He made it up.”

Charlie Black, Manafort’s lobbying partner, said of the book: “I don’t know where Ed would have gotten that,” adding “I’m pretty confident Paul wasn’t involved in any of that. Paul is a lawyer, so he would have known it was illegal. Plus, he has more integrity than that.” And he said “$10 million was a lot of money in those days and if it had happened, I don’t think we would have seen hide nor hair of Paul again.”

In fact, Black said he and Manafort discussed the book when it came out, since it seemed obvious to informed readers that Manafort was the undisclosed lobbyist. But Black said “Paul didn’t sound like he was losing any sleep over it.”

As for Zamora, who returned to the Philippine congress after being term-limited out in 2010, he rejected Rollins’ account. “I certainly didn’t do anything like that,” he proclaimed, when reached by phone this month. He asserted he’d never met Manafort and added “I’m not even sure that I had that dinner” with Rollins.

Zamora said he and Marcos “never even talked about donating to any presidential campaign.” Pointing out that Marcos also was a lawyer (he boasted of receiving a near-perfect score of 98.8 percent on his bar exam, though that was later disputed), Zamora said Marcos “was careful about complying with election laws, especially American election laws, because you are even more strict than we are.”

Besides, Zamora added with bemusement, “How do you carry $10 million in cash? You know, not to sound too familiar with United States currency, but your currency is a little difficult to carry in cash.” Off the top of his head, he calculated that $10 million in $100 bills must weigh “a couple hundred pounds.” (The precise weight is 220 pounds, according to a U.S. Treasury estimate.)

Zamora did acknowledge signing a contract with Manafort’s firm on behalf of The Chamber of Philippine Manufacturers, Exporters & Tourism Associations. But he said he only did so at the request of Marcos’s late brother-in-law Benjamin Trinidad Romualdez. “He was the one who asked me to sign for the group of the president,” said Zamora, professing ignorance to Black Manafort’s work or anything about the contract beyond the fact that he signed it.

“That’s all that I did, which of course, under American law is more than enough … to get you liable if something comes up,” he said. “But you know after that, remember, we had lost. We were all kicked out, and I never heard anything about this until – well, until now.”

***

Rollins, who was close with Laxalt, told POLITICO that the two discussed Manafort’s work with Marcos and the mystery of the campaign-donation-that-wasn’t for years afterward, but that Laxalt “never wanted to get involved in that because of his own relationships there.”

Laxalt is 93 and in declining health, but his daughter Michelle Laxalt, who worked for Reagan during his campaigns and in his administration on foreign policy issues, says her father occasionally speculated about what happened to Marcos’ campaign cash.

“The rumor about the case of the missing Manila millions was clearly a part of the chatter I was intrigued to listen to Ed and dad most closely to,” she told POLITICO, adding that she also “had heard rumblings in certain circles” beyond her father and Rollins. She stressed, though, that she never heard Manafort’s name in connection with that chatter, and didn’t think her father had either, though that conflicts with the recollection of Rollins.

It’s theoretically possible that Marcos’ money could have made its way into an independent group supporting Reagan’s campaign, said Reagan’s treasurer Buchanan. But she added that there was never any evidence of any outside group spending big money supporting Reagan.

And she stressed that there was absolutely no way that any foreign money made it by her staff, and into the campaign, itself.

“Watergate made a very strong impression on me,” said Buchanan, whose older brother Pat Buchanan worked for Richard Nixon during the Watergate break-in scandal, which also involved illegal campaign contributions. Pat Buchanan was untarnished by the scandal, but his sister said the experience made her doubly diligent about adhering to campaign finance rules.

“I made copies of every single check that was deposited in our account, because we took matching funds in the primary, so we had a 100 percent federal audit. And, in the general, we took the money from the federal government, so we didn’t raise any money at all,” she said, referring to a now-obsolete system that provided taxpayer money for presidential campaigns that agreed to spending restrictions.

Even if Reagan’s campaign had wanted to accept a huge lump sum payment from a foreign leader, it would have been immediately flagged as illegal by the Federal Election Commission, which enforces campaign finance laws. And it would have required a massive amount of clerical chicanery to funnel $10 million into a campaign in a manner that evaded detection, since the individual campaign contribution limit for individuals in 1984 was $1,000 — meaning the cash would have had to have been divided into individual donations from at least 10,000 different so-called straw donors.

“First of all, it would have been illegal,” Buchanan said. “And second, by 1984, it wouldn’t have been necessary, because he was the incumbent president, and we didn’t have any trouble raising money.”

By that point, though, Marcos’s political future was almost entirely dependent on keeping Reagan in the White House and on his side, especially after his Democratic general election opponent, Walter Mondale, came out against Marcos during the 1984 campaign.

So an under-the-table financial contribution might have made sense to him, said the American diplomat Maisto.

“Politically speaking, that’s the way Marcos thought back then. He had all the money in the world, and he knew the American political system functioned on contributions, not unlike the Philippine oligarchy,” said Maisto. “He thought that his ace in the hole was Ronald Reagan, and he didn’t want Reagan to leave the White House, so it makes that he would do whatever he could to ensure that Ronald Reagan was reelected.”



http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... z4HUorxRTS
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby JackRiddler » Tue Aug 16, 2016 10:18 am

stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 10:17 pm wrote:You're the one spending the most amount of time on this thread spreading the concept of kayfabe, and now you're getting sick of it?


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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby PufPuf93 » Tue Aug 16, 2016 11:06 am

SonicG » Mon Aug 15, 2016 10:48 pm wrote:Dubrovnik was featured in the follow up to You've Been Trumped...It really looks like a beautiful place.

A Dangerous Game is a 2014 documentary film and a follow-up to You've Been Trumped. The film was released in September 2014, and continues the story of the locals' struggle against Donald Trump but goes further afield also. It features a story in Dubrovnik, Croatia where a development has been approved to build a luxury golf course on Mount Srđ overlooking Dubrovnik but local residents are campaigning against it and held a referendum which they won but which officials ignored. The film also looks at luxury golf resorts in general, how they damage the natural environment because of high water and pesticide usage, and how they often only serve the super rich whilst bypassing local democracy to please the developers.


I have never watched a Trump TV show nor a reality TV show in general (except for several episodes watched the Anna Nicole Smith show as a good sport long ago).

Dubrovnik is part of a recent series of RI synchronicity for me.

Iamwhoiam (where is that poster?) engaged my thoughts in the global warming thread and said he was prepping a response but instead has gone from RI for now anyway. He noted his experience in municipal waste and I was prepared to talk about urban wood waste and specifically a wood waste study for Toronto Metro Authority back in 1989-1990.

Saith Iamwhoiam on May 12, 2016, (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=26525&start=2430)

"PufPuf, I've been gathering information from two old computers in order to respond to you and to argue intelligently and convincingly demonstrate why biomass burning is dirtier than burning coal. It's been a bit of an arduous task to refresh my poor memory. It would be ideal if you could locate a Title V air permit for a biomass incinerator, perhaps one you're familiar with so we could both use the same evidence for one facility.

My area was municipal waste management rather than woody biomass, but the permitting for stationary sources of reportable and regulated emissions is the same, regardless of fuel source. I do have many allies who work specifically in biomass and forestry and will be drawing in part from information they've shared with me over the years. It's too late for me to begin now, but I surely will tomorrow. Sorry for taking so long to give you a proper response,"

During that time in Toronto I visited my old friend who was/is a professor at University of Toronto (and who I have not spoken to since 1995). I met her the same week in 1976 I met my exe and initially dated them both at the same time. She was the female half of the couple we traveled with to Dubrovnik in 1981. Thinking of wood waste in Toronto I discovered my old friend had gotten mega-famous (past President of the American Anthropological Association) and I subsequently took an internet trip in May and June 2016 tracing our travels in Greece and Yugoslavia. I posted just the other day in the image thread a fortress we visited on Corfu from the long ago trip and internet ramble 2016. I posted in the image thread on July 30, 2016 a statue of a woman and seagull in Opatija, Croatia (our last day in then Yugoslavia) and then there was an RI seagull and crow thread started by 82_28 on July 31, 2016.

woman and seagull images

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9089&start=6750

82_28's bird thread

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39916

Scroll down for more pictures of the Opatija maiden and seagull and my first mention of my RI synchronicity and my verbiage:

"The post is about the splendid time spent on the Croatian coast from Dubrovnik to Opatija (then Yugoslavia) in 1981. I mention the maiden with the seagull. I has just realized thanks to the internet how world influential my friend who invited me to Belgrade and we then traveled had become. I have not seen or spoken to her since the mid-1990s when I had work in Toronto where she was then and is now a professor at the University of Toronto. I also noticed yesterday that Iamwhoiam had not posted and that is because we had some give and take in the Global Warming thread not finished. Circa 1990 I worked as a consultant for Toronto Metro to estimate the amount and nature of wood waste passing through nine Toronto Metro transfer stations and / or directly into the two Toronto Metro landfills and searched for Monica in the process"

I thought I had posted November 15, 2015 at RI about a 1981 trip to then Yugoslavia and had:

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=39357&p=580286&hilit=Dubrovnik#p580286

"Then we drove to Sarajevo and then to the Adriatic Coast at Dubrovnik. As we traveled, we visited natural and historical features. We had a rental Czech car, Zastava 101. Crossing the high mountains on the way to Dubrovnik, there was a traffic stoppage that lingered and the various cars, tractors, trucks, and ox carts grew. In front of us was an army ambulance with crew and we (or the Serbo-Croation speakers among us) were cracking up BSing with the soldiers. The soldiers were told we were modern Slovenians and that was why we dressed and talked funny (the rental car had a Slovenian plate). Of course the soldiers knew we were joking. They then went back to their ambulance and pulled out with sirens and lights flashing and waved for Tim to follow. We passed 100+ vehicles and what was going on was there had been an accident between a small truck and an ox cart in a tunnel. We had gotten an VIP escort by the Yugoslavian military through an accident scene while others waited.

In Dubrovnik we stayed several nights outside the old city in a then modern hotel that was full of bus loads of Russian tourists. We saw singing and dancing in the old city and the exe bought a beautiful white full length crocheted dress and a mess of silver filigree jewelry for a pittance. The next several days we slowly worked up the coast to Split. We stayed in private guest villas and each day watched the Sun go down eating fine fish and fresh bread and drinking local wines. We were treated as honored guests because every where we stayed they knew Tim and his parents. Tim and his wife flew back to Belgrade from Split and we continued up the coast. The last night was in Opatia. We stayed in an outrageous hotel room about 200 yards from this statue on the Adriatic. It was the Saturday and Sunday nights of Eastern Orthodox Easter and so beautiful with many flowers, the Adriatic was so blue."

Now this is weird that Ivanka and Wendi Deng Murdoch show up this week in Dubovnik and Ivanka is wearing a white crocheted dress. We paid IIRC $120 for the crocheted dress in Dubrovnik which was a lot at the time 1981 but maybe not for the specific dress that probably was several years in the making. The young woman seller was a street merchant (while patiently crocheting) in old Dubrovnik with maybe 4 or 5 items for sale and her attention getter on a wire manniquin was the dress bought for my then wife.

Now I have wandered way off topic and have this to say about synchroniticity, Jung's acausal connection principal: synchronicity is easy to develop in hind sight but tickles the fancy for some anyway.

And Trump is seriously dangerous, please don't vote for him.

Someone should photoshop Chelsea Clinton on the walls of Dubrovnik with Wendi and Ivanka.
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Re: TRUMP is seriously dangerous

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Tue Aug 16, 2016 6:21 pm

JackRiddler » Tue Aug 16, 2016 9:18 am wrote:
stillrobertpaulsen » Mon Aug 15, 2016 10:17 pm wrote:You're the one spending the most amount of time on this thread spreading the concept of kayfabe, and now you're getting sick of it?


Is there a paradox in that? If I was writing about malaria, would I have to like it?


It is somewhat of a paradox, but it would be hypocritical of me to be truly mad at you for doing that. I spend a shitload of time writing about the deep state, global warming and other subjects that I can't say I like, but am constantly fascinated by. Fascinated to the point where if I delve deep enough, I either get extraordinarily infuriated, at which point I usually shut off the computer and find something else to focus on to put my spirit at peace, or I get extraordinarily jaded, at which point I start laughing my ass off at the absurdity of it all.

That said, I agree with you that most of the time, DU is an abomination (Obamanation? Same diff.) Chaplin was an abomination too (pedo child rapist) but if I was channel surfing and one of his movies was on, I'd probably watch it because if something is genuinely funny, I'm not too discriminating on the source. Hope I don't get judged too hard for that admission.
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