The 2016 election was not Paul Manafort’s first time at the rodeo of swaying political elections. He’s an old pro.
INTERNATIONAL ELECTION INTERVENTION: While @TIME focused on efforts by MANAFORT & DERIPASKA to advance pro-Russian interests in Montenegro, the duo also waded into other countries' elections. This memo reveals that they backed a political party in CYPRUS. https://t.co/ryHxwaB9j5 pic.twitter.com/L7GaQP0fvL
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) January 3, 2019
Bottom line, Manafort was very much in debt. He had to figure out a way to get out of it. So, sell out the United States, why not? TIME Magazine:
When the U.S. government put out its latest sanctions list on Dec. 19, the man named at the top did not seem especially important. Described in the document as a former Russian intelligence officer, he was accused of handling money and negotiations on behalf of a powerful Russian oligarch. The document did not mention that the man, Victor Boyarkin, had links to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump.
A months-long investigation by TIME, however, found that Boyarkin, a former arms dealer with a high forehead and a very low profile, was a key link between a senior member of the Trump campaign and a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In his only interview with the media about those connections, Boyarkin told TIME this fall that he was in touch with Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in the heat of the presidential race on behalf of the Russian oligarch. “He owed us a lot of money,” Boyarkin says. “And he was offering ways to pay it back.”
Victor Boyarkin is an interesting character.
The outlines of Boyarkin’s career suggest a life spent at the intersection of Russian espionage, diplomacy and the arms trade. Having served at the Russian embassies in the U.S. and Mexico in the 1990s, dealing primarily in military affairs, he says he turned his focus to the arms trade in the early 2000s. His specialty was the export of small and medium-sized warships and other naval vessels that were produced in Soviet-era shipyards across Russia.
Read the entire article and it will begin to make sense to you why Donald Trump panders so much not only to Vladimir Putin, but to the other mega-buyer of arms in the world, Mohammad bin Salman. It’s all about debt and not being able to handle money. Donald Trump and Paul Manafort are birds of a feather — ostrich, perhaps.
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