Alas, times change. In hindsight, that sentencing can be viewed as something of a high-water mark in the fight to corral these foreign lobbying networks. Not only did Trump pardon Manafort shortly after his conviction, driving a stake through the heart of America’s anti–foreign lobbying efforts, but just this week, The New York Times reported that Manafort is back and once again up to his old habits. Years have passed, and nothing, it appears, has changed.
Taken together, a clear picture has emerged. Instead of the broken, chastened man Manafort once claimed to be, he’s cannonballed back into the world of cementing authoritarian forces around the globe. And instead of being a symbol for how far the foreign lobbying industry had fallen, Manafort is now an avatar for the industry’s resurgence—and for just how much of a field day Manafort and his ilk will have under a new Trump administration, which is set to toss its doors open to more foreign influence campaigns than any administration ever before. Whatever impunity Manafort may have once felt, those days are long gone. The bad old days are back again, and they are set to be worse than ever.
And that’s not even including the way that the Trump Organization itself is set to act as an open, obvious sieve for foreign influence. Unlike in the first term, the Trump Organization has said it will do business in whichever foreign country it likes, and open as many new foreign deals while Trump is president as it chooses. While the company has claimed it will not ink any new deals with foreign officials specifically, that leaves the door wide open for shell companies, regime proxies, or related oligarchs to bankroll it—and directly bankroll a sitting American president.
This inaction extends, unfortunately, to Manafort as well. Thanks to previous investigations, we know that Manafort maintained clandestine links in 2016 with a man described in the Republican-led Senate report as a “Russian intelligence officer.” Not only did Manafort secretly send internal documents to this Kremlin cutout, but the two then used “sophisticated communications security practices” to hide their trails, discussing a pro-Kremlin “peace plan” that Trump could implement along the way.
Instead, as the clock ticks toward the end of the Biden administration, we’re left once more in the dark. As Manafort, Trump, and the rest of their pro-authoritarian claque turn once more ascendant, autocratic forces around the world are champing at the bit to be the first through the doors that an administration more than willing to succor them has publicly planned to throw wide open. We may have wanted justice, or at least transparency into how these networks operate. But instead we’re getting impunity, to be meted out by the world’s most reprehensible goons.
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