The upside to the Trump presidency is that obviously bad actors are finally being identified as such. As it turns out, Russia is a threat, and Paul Manafort is a crook.
Who knew?
Manafort, who served as President Trump’s campaign chairman all the way through August 2016, was found guilty Tuesday on eight separate charges of bank and tax fraud.
“Manafort was found guilty of all five tax fraud charges, each carrying a maximum of three years in prison. The jury found he filed false income tax returns in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014,” the Washington Examiner’s Kelly Cohen reported. “Manafort, 69, was also found guilty of one count of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts in 2012, which carries a maximum of five years in prison.”
It’s as bad as it sounds. It’s also 100 percent unsurprising. Manafort has long been known in political and media circles as an extraordinarily shifty character. He’s the sort of person that when he was found guilty Tuesday, few were surprised by it.
Conclude what you will about the president hiring such an obviously unfit and corrupt operator to serve as his campaign chairman. I believe it says a lot about the president that his former personal attorney and campaign chairman pleaded guilty Tuesday to multiple crimes, but I also believe that’s the subject of an entirely different post.
[Also read: Trump’s ‘bad week’: Manafort found guilty, Cohen enters plea deal]
Keeping the focus on Manafort for a second, the funny thing here is: He has been doing this stuff for years. The man was notorious for his underhanded dealings. It wasn’t until Trump won the election that prosecutors cared enough to do anything about it.
This is not a defense of Manafort. This definitely isn’t me saying it’s unfair he had all this additional scrutiny called down on his head because of his association with the winning 2016 candidate. I’m saying it’s funny that it took for a bizzaro candidate like Trump winning the White House before law enforcement officials thought it worth investigating Manafort’s corruption.
Again, it’s like newsrooms’ newfound concern for Russia.
Before the election, you’d be hard pressed to find a group of media and political commentators willing to talk about Russia the way they do today.
In fact, pooh-poohing concerns about Moscow’s obvious hostility to the U.S. was all the rage as recently as 2012. It was a great punchline during the presidential debate between then-President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney.
Similarly, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in law enforcement who gave a good damn about Manafort before the 2016 election. That guy has been running scams and engaging in clearly unethical and illegal behavior for years. And it’s not like he was a non-entity. Most just didn’t care. They likely didn’t care because Manafort isn’t an outlier so far as political operatives in the nation’s capital are concerned. He just a speck in a constellation of rotten. But now that Trump is president, it’s a very serious matter that this one villain be thrown behind bars.
I’m all for getting the crooks. I’m all for rooting them out, one by one. I just wish it didn’t take for Democrats losing a presidential election for it to happen.
