After Yanukovych fled Ukraine, Manafort had difficulty finding new customers. He tried to win a $6 million contract to represent a group of former Regional Party candidates, but in the end, he received only a fraction of the promised amount. By 2015, Manafort’s abundant cash flow in Eastern Europe had completely evaporated, causing a sharp financial crisis. Manafort’s lavish lifestyle came with staggering monthly bills — in certain years, he paid more than $200,000 for landscaping his Hamptons estate alone — and it didn’t take long to get into debt. pile. There are also other sources of financial pressure. Representative lawyer Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, the Russian billionaire oligarch who first sent Manafort to Kiev, to hunt him down for the missing $19 million that Manafort had invested on his behalf in a Ukrainian telecommunications company in 2007. Deripaska then demanded demand return of its investment funds, as a global financier. The crisis is destroying his balance sheet. When Manafort failed to repay him, Deripaska filed a lawsuit in 2018. A Manafort spokesman told the Washington Post that “we were surprised by the filing,” adding that he believed the problem was “addressed and resolved many years ago.” The case has been stalled since the federal government imposed sanctions on the Russian government and industry, including Deripaska’s company.
As Manafort’s bank account tightened, the man whose annual clothing budget regularly exceeded $210,000 began trying to save cash. “He suddenly became extremely cheap,” his daughter Andrea commented in a 2015 text message, containing years’ worth of her messages that were obtained and posted by hackers. online. While planning a pre-wedding reception for Andrea and her fiancé, Manafort refused to pay for drink dispensers or ice, instead proposing a low-cost event with plates paper and sausages. “Sausage. Can we discuss how horrible that is,” Manafort’s other daughter, Jessica, wrote in a text exchange with her sister, Andrea. “This is not a damn barbecue,” Andrea replied.
As these financial troubles escalated, Manafort faced a crisis at home. A few months after breaking up with Yanukovych, his daughters discovered that he was having a complicated love affair. Manafort arranged for his lover, who was more than three decades younger than him, an apartment in Manhattan, a Hamptons beach house and access to an American Express card. “He had sex with his mistress while grandma was in surgery,” Andrea wrote in a text message. In the spring of 2015, Manafort’s wife, Kathy, confronted him about his affair. According to text messages from one of Manafort’s daughters, he broke down, asked for forgiveness and checked into a rehab clinic in Arizona. While at the clinic, Manafort’s only contact with the outside world is 15 minutes of phone calls a day. “I guess he was sobbing. Like a lot,” Andrea texted a friend. Over time, his daughters became increasingly concerned that he might harm himself. Jessica texted Andrea: “He acts like his life is about to end.” Andrea replied: “He was writing to his mother and then he said he was leaving forever.”
While Manafort was squirming at the Arizona treatment center, a prominent client of his former lobbying firm was coming down the escalator at Trump Tower on his way to the press conference where he would announce his candidacy. elected to the White House. Gates said Manafort’s dream is to return to American politics. But such a return always seemed impossible. In the two decades since he last worked on a US presidential campaign – Bob Dole’s ill-fated venture in 1996 – Manafort’s relationships with flashy arms dealers and Evil foreign tyrants have made him too great a burden for any mainstream candidate. During the 2008 presidential race, according to Gates, one of Manafort’s well-connected friends urged John McCain’s campaign leaders to bring him in, but to no avail. Trump is different. An outcast of the Republican establishment, he did not have many experienced Washington agents in his orbit. And thanks in part to his own past scandals and bad press, he’s willing to overlook a few problems in the backgrounds of the people he hires.
Manafort shares some loose ties with Trump. In addition to his former firm’s lobbying work on behalf of the New York mogul in the 1980s and 1990s, Manafort and his wife elected Trump around the 1996 Republican National Convention, in San Diego. At one point, as Kathy led Trump through the pomp and excitement of the convention floor, she heard Trump talking to himself.
“This is what I want,” he said. “This is what I want.”
In the years after Manafort bought the Trump Tower apartment, he occasionally chatted informally with the real estate billionaire when they ran into each other in the building. There are also some mutual friends. Manafort’s former lobbying partner, Roger Stone, served as a political consultant to Trump when his casino business was a lobbying client of Black Manafort. Billionaire founder of private investment fund Tom barracks has been close to both men for many years.
By early 2016, Manafort was taking the first steps toward his surprising comeback. With his finances in shambles, his personal life in shambles, and his emotional state so depressed that he’s suicidal, he’ll use the New York playboy’s brand of right-wing fire as his means of escape. out of darkness. After four weeks in rehab, Manafort reached out to his friend Tom Barrack. “I really need to meet” Trump, he said, according to what Barrack told the newspaper. Washington Post.
Manafort positioned himself to secure a role in the high-profile anti-government campaign. With Barrack acting as intermediary, he sent a five-page presentation to Trump in February 2016 in which he recounted his retirement from Republican politics as a selling point. “I have had no client relationship with Washington since approximately 2005. I have stayed away from Washington politics since 2005,” Manafort wrote. “I will not carry Washington’s baggage.” To emphasize this message, Manafort mentioned Karl Roveex-Mr. George W. Bush strategist who emerged as a strong critic of Trump, as “my blood enemy in politics” stretching back to the College Republicans in the 1960s. Manafort also alluded to his campaign work. lobbyist he had previously worked for Trump and mentioned his position at Trump Tower.
