DNC Superdelegate Promoting Brokered Convention Is A Significant GOP Donor, Health Care Lobbyist

[ehrnst]

57. How about a Superdelegate that used to be a BUSINESS ASSOCIATE to PAUL MANAFORT?

Last edited Sat Feb 29, 2020, 12:00 PM - Edit history (1)

Thanks to Robert S. Mueller III’s prosecution of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman and sometime business associate of Devine, we now have an unusual glimpse into the role the Democratic ad man had in electing and preserving the power of Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, a crooked pro-Putin autocrat. Though American political consultants routinely rake in cash from foreign leaders — even shady ones — Devine’s seamless pivot from advocate for antidemocratic thug to champion of a principled democratic reformer shows extraordinary flexibility.

Devine wrote with Manafort a January 2006 memo when Russia was cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine, showing Yanukovych how to ride his “good neighbor” policy toward Russia to victory. He became prime minister. Devine drafted a presidential victory speech for Yanukovych in February 2010 (“We are all Ukrainians first,” the American wrote) and later that year wrote talking points showing how Yanukovych and his party could attack the opposition.

Yanukovych’s fraudulent election in 2004 as Ukraine’s president was invalidated, but not before his opponent was poisoned by dioxin. Yet testimony in the Manafort trial and documents released by Manafort’s lawyers show Devine helped Manafort on Yanukovych’s comeback as prime minister in 2006 and successful presidential run in 2010. Devine produced a memo of advice for Yanukovych’s party in 2012, even though by then Yanukovych had thrown the leading opposition politician in jail and had built a $100 million mansion — complete with zoo, helipad, golf course and replica galleon on an artificial lake — while his people were, in Devine’s own words, struggling with “joblessness, hunger and the general despair.”

By April 2012, Yanukovych had jailed his opponent and become an international pariah. Devine told Gates, “I regret that we will not be able to work with you” on Ukraine’s parliamentary elections. But four months later, Devine wrote a strategy memo for Manafort. “The number of people who admit they are having difficulty feeding their family throughout Ukraine today is stunning,” he wrote, urging Yanukovych to “signal” his concern and calling for his party to attack. “I would recommend a roughly 3:1 negative to positive ratio in the advertising,” he wrote.
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Manafort, who worked for the world’s sleazebags, made no pretense of scruples. But Devine was the guy molding the Sanders campaign as a righteous, everyman’s insurgency against the corrupt, wealthy establishment. Devine, who had worked on Sanders’s first campaign for the Senate in 2006 (the same year he plotted Yanukovych’s comeback), earned more than $5 million for his firm from the populist Sanders presidential campaign and at least $10 million in commissions split with another firm, according to a Slate tally.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bernie-sanders-ad-man-who-played-paul-manaforts-game/2018/08/01/0df78c18-95c7-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html