Judgment Day

Paul Manafort and the dirty world of Ukrainian politics were naturally simpatico: the former is a skilled political consultant for hire who, it is now alleged, had a penchant for hiding the extent of his income from U.S. authorities; the latter is a cynical and deeply corrupt universe in which offshore accounts and tax-evasion schemes make up the system’s basic essence. Manafort was a natural in that world, helping his client Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s former President, play up ethnic and linguistic cleavages (remind you of another campaign?) until he was ultimately deposed, in mass protests, in 2014. One imagines that Yanukovych, for whom Manafort worked from roughly 2006 until 2014, according to the indictment, and who kept an ostrich zoo and a garage full of antique cars at his illegally privatized residence outside of Kiev, didn’t always pay in fully transparent and properly declared bank transfers. That much, in fact, we have known for some time.

Last year, when I was reporting a story for the magazine on a pair of journalists turned parliamentarians in Ukraine, one of the piece’s subjects—a prominent Ukrainian investigative journalist named Sergii Leshchenko—showed up at a meeting with a stack of papers. These were secret ledgers, Leshchenko told me, detailing off-book illegal payments by Yanukovych and his party for all sorts of services. They also included twelve million dollars in payments to Manafort. (The Times had published an article on the ledgers in August, 2016.) “It’s the dark side of politics,” Leshchenko told me. Today that dark side was made a shade lighter. Today’s indictment is a reflection of how corruption in one country rarely stays there but leaks out into the global financial system, where ill-gotten cash can make its way from the Ukrainian treasury to Brooklyn real estate. Manafort likely believed that what happened in Kiev would stay in Kiev. And maybe it would have, if it weren’t for his work for Trump, and his latest client’s unexpected victory—and the scrutiny that followed. Today it’s possible that Manafort is wishing his last, and greatest, political-campaign triumph didn’t turn out so lucky.