Trump Trades One Crook For Another

Paul Manafort has been officially dumped. Manafort “resigned” earlier today after the latest revelations about his shady lobbying work on behalf of Viktor Yanukovych and pro-Russian forces inside the Ukraine. The revelations about nearly $13 million in secret cash payments to Manafort from a Ukrainian government off-the-books account were followed up by a story on Thursday showing that Manafort had organized a secret lobbying campaign in the US for those pro-Russian Ukrainian interests. Unfortunately, Manafort did not file any paperwork to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act that is required, but not diligently enforced, for lobbying activities of foreign governments. Failure to do so is clearly a criminal violation punishable by up to five years in jail. Normally, this may have just slid by. But Manafort’s position in the Trump campaign and the Trump’s reputed connections to Russian investors had made this much more high profile than a simple lobbying campaign. At some point, prosecutors will be forced to look at this and when an investigation like this starts who knows where it will end. His continued attempts to get Trump to stay on message probably meant he was bound to be dumped by Trump eventually. This scandal just hastened his eventual departure.

Of course, new campaign CEO (please tell me what that means) Steve Bannon hardly comes with no baggage either. Apparently Bannon had some difficulty keeping up with his taxes in the 1990s and had a lien put against him by creditor as recently as 2011. Between 1994 and 1998, Bannon had five federal tax liens against him totaling nearly $500,000. In addition, there were three state tax liens against him totaling nearly $120,000 in the same period. All those liens were released in 2000. Then in 2011, Bannon had a civil judgement lien of over $80,000 brought by creditors. As the article points out, liens do not indicate any criminal activity. But it is certainly in line with Trump’s policy of not paying what he owes and then trying to either outlast his creditors in court or negotiate the amount due down. In that sense, he is a perfect match for Trump. And all this makes Trump’s claims of fiscal discipline for our government an even bigger joke.