THE SWAMP
BUILDERS
How Stone and Manafort helped create the mess Trump promised to clean up.
n that particular April 1 in Washington, in the midst of a presidential primary season trending toward a Reagan landslide, Paul Manafort had a lot to celebrate.
The Republican operative with the thick, meticulously parted black hair and magnetic smile was turning 31. And by a quirk of bureaucratic fate, his new business happened to be officially launching on that same day in 1980.
The little shop that Manafort opened in Alexandria, Va., was envisioned as a political consulting business, like so many others in the capital. But in the coming months — as the candidate he worked for, Ronald Reagan, swept into the White House — Manafort had another idea to bounce off his two partners, Charlie Black and Roger Stone.
They should be lobbyists, too.
“I said, ‘Why in the hell would we want to do that? It’s boring as hell!’ ” Black recalled in a recent interview. “Paul said it wasn’t at all boring.”
Manafort had one more thing to say: “It paid well.” . .
One of the first clients of the firm they christened Black, Manafort & Stone was a New York developer named Donald J. Trump, brought into their portfolio by Stone, who’d met him through the notorious Gotham lawyer Roy Cohn.
The brash Reagan boys would become essential architects of the city Trump now dominates, a place where the line between the lobbyists and the lobbied is so blurred that some question whether it exists at all.
By the time their business was born, they were already expert navigators of loopholes — Black and Stone, along with GOP operative John T. “Terry” Dolan, had founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee, best known as Nick-Pac, five years earlier. The hyperaggressive group was one of the first to bundle contributions to circumvent limits on individual campaign contributions, and was a precursor to the rise of super PACs, which candidate Trump lambasted four decades later as prime examples of Washington’s swamp problem.'>>>
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/paul-manafort-roger-stone/
The Vast RIght-Wing Conspicacy
= new reply since forum marked as read