Around dusk yesterday, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s long-time associate and short-time campaign manager, emerged from a federal Corrections van and was escorted to his new residence in the Northern Neck Regional Jail in nearby Virginia. This followed his arraignment that afternoon on eight federal felony charges ranging from money laundering to witness tampering to obstruction.
In yet another crushing defeat for Manafort, the judge found that he had broken the terms of his bail on numerous occasions. The government filed a motion that his $10M bond be revoked and that Manafort be remanded to jail until trial. The evidence is compelling, including a complaint from one of the unnamed witnesses against Manafort that he had tried to intimidate him and had the recording to prove it. The judge had no alternative but to rule for the government because Manafort had so brazenly violated the no-contact rule in his bail. She also felt that these new indictments increased his flight risk.
This is a good point to look back at how this Manafort debacle began with the innocent curiosity of a Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn grandmother and her neighborhood blog. The Manafort debacle is possibly the first crowd-sourced criminal investigation in history leading to federal indictments and convictions. Sure, Manafort has had a long and sleazy history specializing in doing dirty work for wannabe dictators and tyrants. He’s been on the FBI’s radar for years. But this incident is was what made him a front page story in the international media from Australia to Russia. Let’s step into the Wayback Machine…
Shortly after Donald Trump’s contentious inauguration in February 2017, a friend and former Time/Life war correspondent, Ed Barnes, texted me about a neighborhood blog in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, called Pardon Me For Asking, run by a blogger, Katia Kelly. Katia’s blog isn’t much different than my Brooklyn Row House, with the exception that she updates hers a helluva lot more frequently than I do mine.
Ed had been working the international angles on Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager and former PR gunslinger, since 2003. His investigation began with Manafort’s management of the Ukrainian presidential campaign of Putin stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, which resulted in corruption charges against Manafort in Kiev over an alleged embezzlement from Ukraine’s treasury. That’s what originally attracted Ed’s attention but he said that even a cursory look at Manafort’s professional résumé uncovered a rat’s nest of sleaze, corruption and self-dealing going all the way back to the 1980s. That was when Trump first hired Manafort and his associate, Roger Stone, to smear casino ownership by native American tribes to Congress with a ridiculously false and racist narrative that they were just a front for the Cosa Nostra. It was an unsubtle attempt to divert media attention away from his own failing casinos and the NY and Philly mob associations being exposed behind them.
Ed asked me to assist him in tech research including trips into the Dark Web to retrieve information I definitely didn’t want on my computer.
I remember Ed’s comment when he sent me Katia’s blog link, “Holy shit! She got him!”
Katia wrote about an eyesore property in her neighborhood that had a NYC Dept of Buildings Stop Work order on the front door. She did some research and found that the building was bought by Paul Manafort a few months earlier. She dove into public records at the NYC City Register’s Office and learned that it was purchased for under $3 million but, curiously, had $12 million in mortgages on it, split between two banks, including one with the unfortunate but revealing name, FSB. There were other suspicious records associated to his LLCs in the Dept of Finance database too. FSB would later turn out to be a second-floor private bank with very low assets run by Stephen Calk, a member of Trump’s economic advisory board. These deals had all the earmarks of money laundering, which in fact it was.
Spoiler: Calk also went to prison over this scandal.
Banks don’t normally write mortgages for 4x the value of the property so this story attracted the attention of a real estate attorney from the neighborhood who was a reader of Katia’s blog. He contacted an attorney friend in Bay Ridge and together, they created their own blog, 377 Union, (the address of Manafort’s Brooklyn building) to focus on these suspicious transactions as well as on other curious Manafort dealings.
Another regular neighborhood user of Katia’s blog was an FBI agent specializing in white collar crime. The snowball started rolling…
Nine months later, Paul Manafort and his deputy were facing federal charges adding up to scores of years in prison, millions of dollars in fines and the Trump White House in full damage-control mode. Today Manafort is in jail, possibly for the rest of his life, unless of course Trump pardons him to keep him quiet [which he did]. Trump has attempted to minimize his relationship with Manafort with “he only worked for me for a very short time“, which is a lie. Manafort and Roger Stone had Donald Trump as one of the first clients for their Washington, DC public relations firm, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, back in 1982. The firm worked for Trump until the early 90s, when Manafort went to work for corrupt Putin-backed candidates in the Ukraine and Africa.
BONUS: Rachel Maddow reports on a Halloween prank against Manafort’s Brooklyn brownstone. For the record, I know nothing about it. As my Irish buddy used to say, “A wink’s as good as a nod”, so *wink*.
Katia is just a Brooklyn woman who normally writes about restaurant openings and park events in her quiet, gentrified neighborhood. But she became the snowball that started one of the biggest investigative media avalanches since Watergate. It proved the power of an alert citizen with a blog.
It’s nice seeing Katia getting some recognition. The Daily Beast did an article on her and her cyber-partners today. If Pulitzer had a category for Citizen Journalist, Katia would surely win it.
Spoiler: Paul Manafort was convicted and sentenced to prison for 8 years by two different federal courts. Trump pardoned Manafort on December 23, 2020, as he did for so many of his crooked friends. It’s reported that Manafort was quietly welcomed back into the Trump 2024 campaign by our “law and order” president. The gullibility of Trump’s MAGA crowd continues to astound me.
