Behind the Bastards - Part Two: No Matter How Much You Hate Paul Manafort, You Should Hate Him More (And Here’s Why)

Episode Date: August 2, 2018

Robert is joined again by Dave Ross (Suicide Buddies Podcast) to continue talking about Paul Manafort. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome once again to Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans, our host, and my guest this week is Dave Ross, a co-host of Suicide Friends. Nope. Damn it! God damn it! That's okay, man, it's Suicide Buddies. Suicide Buddies.

Suicide Friends. It's funny, the impact of Suicide Friends. That sounds like a kid's show. Off-mic. Oh, this is not going to go. I mean, it could. This is great. You should.

I don't know, man. I like my favorite thing in the world is mistakes. It's where all of my comedy comes from. My own mistakes. So I love it. It's especially galling because we're recording this immediately after recording part one, so I haven't even had that. It's immediately after recording part one, so I haven't even had the excuse of a couple

of days' wait time to get this wrong. No, we've been hanging out. Yeah, you got my name wrong at one point. I am a terrible person. At one point, off-mic, you referred to the podcast as Suicide Club, and I just love that. Because that really sounds like we're going to die on the podcast. Suicide Buddies does, too. It does.

Yeah, it's my podcast, and I'm still not entirely sold on the name. Suicide Buddies, we're trying to imply that it's a fun Suicide podcast because it is. It is. It's like we talk about a different person in history every week who killed themselves. Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, it's fun. But we're two comics, so we get real ridiculous with it. Sure.

Well, let's get ridiculous with Paul Mann for it again. What a segue. Yeah, if you're just tuning into this and you didn't hear part one, I would recommend listening to part one of our Paul Manafort episode. We talk about how he changed lobbying from a thing that people didn't really do into a thing that there's tens of thousands of lobbyists now, and it influences their democracy at every level. A lot of that's Paul Manafort's doing. He's the guy who brought lobbying for dictatorships to the United States back into Vogue.

It's so funny. You didn't even invent lobbying. He just made it bad. He just made it worse and bigger. He fucked our whole democracy by doing it. But at the point of our story that we're at, he is fucking Ukraine's democracy. He started working with a guy named Viktor Yanukovych and a Russian billionaire named Oleg Daripashka, both of whom's names I pronounced correctly, I think, while getting your name

Dave wrong just a minute ago because I am the real bastard behind this show. You truly are my Paul Manafort. Everyone's someone's Paul Manafort. That's probably true. Paul Manafort thinks about that when he needs to feel better about himself. I wonder, that is probably not that inaccurate. Look, other people are bad too. Sherry or whatever his wife's name is.

So what if I've helped a couple civil wars last longer? Yeah. Man, it's funny to think that you're right. No matter who you are, there's someone out there who's like, uh, uh, Dan Ross. I'm Dan Ross now. You said it off, Mike. It was, I'm the one bringing it back up. I'm Paul Manafort.

No, but I want people to know how terrible I am. It's important. I want people to know how terrible I am. Well, this is a great show to be on then. We should start a podcast called The Paul Manaforts. The Paul's Manafort. No, that's true. It's like a trinity's general.

You're right. No, that was unfair of me. I don't want to be unfair to Paul Manafort. So yeah, Paul Manafort has, you know, advised Victor Yanukovych on what he needs to do in order to win the presidency because he lost back in 2005. He has him change his hair, has him get new suits. He changes the way his party starts, you know, agitating and basically trying to get him to use U.S. style political tactics to win election Ukraine.

And this strategy works. Yanukovych's party over the next couple of years wins a bunch of seats in parliament. And in 2010, Yanukovych was finally elected president. His opponent was arrested a year later and Yanukovych sort of went full dictator, buying himself an enormous palace with a floating restaurant on a private lake and turning the federal riot police, the Berkut, into an instrument for enforcing his will. He did that like, like a fucking finger snap fast, like just instantly dictator. It's almost, almost laudable how quickly he's like, all right, gonna jail my opponent and

start building a palace. Suddenly dictator sounds a lot like the phrase suddenly Susan. Yes. Which, that was a TV show, right? It was. It was a corny, I think, TGIF sitcom. Well, someone should reboot it and Susan should be a Eastern European dictator. Yeah.

Yeah. Just putting people on the rack, batoning their feet. Yeah. Yeah, but with a laugh track. But with a laugh track, of course. Yeah. So people know the torture scenes are funny as opposed to horrifying. Right.

Yeah. So, you know, this went great for Paul, obviously, the fact that he had actually successfully gotten a dictator into power. So he just basically started writing down blank checks for the sums of money he needed to continue to help Yanukovich out. Yanukovich would send his chief of staff out to shake down oligarchs for cash, and they always paid because Manafort had given them control of the entire country. So he's getting millions of dollars.

These oligarchs are getting to do whatever they want without human rights concerns. And Victor Yanukovich is getting to move his country closer to Vladimir Putin's Russia, even though most people in the country don't want that. Right. So it's working out for everybody. Right. No one gets hurt in the process at all, for sure. No, it's wonderful.

And it seems like it's going to last perfectly forever. Manafort also continued to work with Oleg Deripaska during this period. Now, Oleg had amassed a preposterous fortune in Russia's bloody aluminum wars, which caused more death than a lot of actual wars. So when the Soviet Union fell, under the Soviet Union, all of these different industries and stuff are owned by the state. So they're owned collectively by all the people. Right, right, right.

So when the Soviet Union stops being a thing, the thing that they land on essentially is giving all the people vouchers for a tiny percentage of control of these various industries, the gas industry, these aluminum companies, whatever. Everybody gets a chunk of that. And it seemed like the right way to, at the time, sort of nationalize the economy and benefit all the people. But what happens in practice is that a small number of enterprising billionaires basically buy up all of these people for beer money and then wind up amassing enormous fortunes.

Whoa. We're running the conflict. Beer money. Oleg is considered, yeah, they would bribe people with enough money to get drunk for a night for shares and gas problems. And they're like, sure, they're so broke. They're sure. Yeah, exactly.

And they're like, well, it's just a piece of paper. I don't give a shit. And some of these guys wind up being a few of the richest people in the world, who apparently meddled in our election. But after hearing about what Manafort's been doing, anyway. So, yeah, Derek Poshko was one of the bloodiest of the oligarchs of this period. And in 2007, he was worth well over $20 billion. And that's the year that he promised Paul Manafort $100 million to help him start an

investment fund called Pericles. Now, Manafort took at least $19 million of Derek Poshko's money and bought maybe nothing with it. So he was supposed to be using this money to purchase a telecom firm for this investment company, because he was hoping the firm would appreciate in value. That price tag included $7.35 million in management fees for Paul. But right after the purchase, the global economy collapsed, and Derek Poshko was suddenly worth a whole lot less than he had been.

So Derek Poshko asks for his money back, and it turns out that Paul Manafort doesn't have the money, and also didn't buy the firm that he said he'd bought, so they can't even sell the firm. It seems like he just stole $19 million from this blood-drenched Russian billionaire. What is funny about this is that, yeah, this is all crazy and evil, but I don't care that someone stole $19 million from that guy, I don't care at all. But he's bad, I keep saying bad, I mean, what's the word, what do you use to describe these people?

I don't know. Bastards, I guess. Yeah, bastard is a good starter term. This story makes it, because if you remember from part one we were talking about, there's a rumor that he basically stole $10 million from Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator of the Philippines, and Paul denies it. So this makes it almost certain. This makes it, yeah, of course he did that.

Of course he did. This is what he does. He puts money from terrible people and assumes he'll be fine, because they will probably need him in the future. Oh man, tell me there's a hit-out on him now or something like that. There's gotta be. There's no way to confirm it, but yeah. So things start to go off the rails for Paul Manafort at this point, because in spite of

all of the money coming in from Yanukovych, which was at least $12.5 million by the mid-oughts, in the $19 million he stole from Daripashka, Paul was deep in debt. This is because he loved debt and thought anyone who wasn't deep in debt was a sucker. He took out a $15 million in loans over a two-year period backed by his real estate, which the experts say is a classic money laundering tactic. Robert Mueller's indictment alleged that Manafort actually lied on several loan applications in order to get money, so he's committing shitloads of crimes and just assuming no one will ever look into it.

Which in this period of time no one is looking into it. He's just getting loans left and right in millions of dollars and buying houses and horse stables. He's fine. But he wound up being in real trouble in November of 2013, when crowds assembled in Kiev's independent square, better known as the Maidan. These protesters were angry that President Yanukovych had decided to back out of signing an association agreement with the EU in favor of closer relations with Putin's Russia.

So Yanukovych sent his elite Berkut riot police in to disperse the protesters. They did this with tremendous violence. This sparked more protests and brought a wider swath of the population out into the street, including the parents of the kids who'd first been beaten for protesting. Things got out of hand very quickly, like as out of hand as they could possibly get. Within a few weeks, the protests had turned from protests into people building an ice fortress in the center of Ukraine's capital. This fortress had the resources of a small city, including communal kitchens, restrooms,

media areas, a library, medical tents, and catapults. So these protesters are fighting against the dictator in the center of his capital city, with police laying siege to them and ice walls that they're defending with catapults, throwing hundreds of Molotov. What? This is one of the first stories I ever covered, and there are videos you can find of police tanks trying to ram the walls of this fortress and then throwing so many Molotov cocktails that the tanks' treads melt to the ground.

Whoa. It's fucking nuts. The Ukrainian Revolution of 2014 is one of the craziest-looking protest movements you will ever see. Wow. Yeah, it's fucking nuts. And the Burkut, these police that he's turned into, essentially his Gestapo, are doing things like arresting people they suspect of supplying this protest camp and stripping

them naked and throwing them into the snow in the middle of the Ukrainian winter, which is like, that's the winter as it fucking gets. And some people die doing this. So the fortress is the protesters, or the tanks are the protestors. The fortress is the protestors, the tanks are the government. This would make sense, but still, how do you get a fortress? And it's such a nuts protest that people hate Yanukovych so much in Ukraine that there are Nazis fighting alongside Jewish people and communists against the government.

Like, it was that kind of fucking crazy. Like everyone can agree, we gotta get this fucker out of office. So it's like, that's how much people hate him within Western Ukraine. He's actually pretty popular in the East. And again, Paul Manafort's strategy for trying to build popularity for the Yanukovych regime was to exacerbate and emphasize sort of the differences between the East and the West. Because the East part of the Ukraine liked Russia and wanted to be closer with Russia, and the West liked the EU more and wanted to be closer to the EU.

And so his big strategy for Yanukovych was play to the East and shit on the West as much as possible and get the two sides of the country angry at each other, because that will ensure more popularity for you. So that's big, Paul Manafort's whole strategy is to incite civil unrest within the country in order to make things easier for the Dictator. So this is how Paul Manafort suggests playing Ukraine and exactly what Yanukovych does. In December, when all of this is really hitting a point of crazy escalation, Paul Manafort sends a text to his daughter, Andrea.

He says, Obama's approval ratings are lower than Yanukovych's and you don't see him being ousted. So that's his, him figuring it's going to be okay. Because for him, it has to be okay. Because he is so deep in debt that if he doesn't keep getting the millions of dollars, he's getting from. Dictators. Yeah, exactly.

From this dictator. This is his big whale right now. If this money train stops, he's fucked. So he just tells himself it's going to be fine. Crazy. And you said that he likes debt. Yeah. Couldn't he just pay this debt off?

No, because he's spending his money as soon as he makes it. He's buying houses without even looking at them. Like he said, he does stuff like when his daughter says she wants to learn horseback riding. He buys her a stable. Right, buys her a farm. And he has purebred horses flown in from Ireland along with a full-time staff to take care of him.

Right. Like that's how he's spending money. Okay. And so everything's flying out of his hands as quickly as possible. Before this point, he urged the Yanukovych to exacerbate tensions between East and West in order to really solidify his reign. And when this protest movement starts picking up steam, he advises him to start brutally suppressing the protesters, which you can debate on how much suggestion Yanukovych needed

to do that, because he's a pretty bad guy himself. Well, but even to make the suggestion is crazy. Yeah. And we'll get into who says that he did that a little bit later, because it's pretty damning. So in January and February of 2014, the Ukrainian Revolution escalated to a point of true insanity. I conducted dozens of interviews with protesters during this period, people who reported being beaten with truncheons and shot with rubber bullets at point blank range. One of the guys I was interviewing at one point, I asked him what he planned because

he was a guy like driving cars full of supplies into this place and out and like avoiding the police on the streets while it happened. And I asked him like what he planned to do if the police came after him. And he just pulled a revolver out that he had in his jacket and said like, this is what I plan to do if the police catch me. And I never talked to that guy again. I tried to. I don't know what happened to him.

A lot of people disappeared during this period of time. He's one of the people I've never gotten back in touch with. I don't know what happened. So from February 18th to the 20th, President Yanukovych took the gloves off, possibly at Paul Manafort's behest. In two days, his police shot nearly a hundred protesters dead. The police advanced in huge numbers and a giant medieval battle was raged over the Maidan ice fortress.

A lot of it was streamed live and I remember watching the last few minutes before the signal cut off. Their ice walls had been torn down and broken apart by the police. So they had built a wall of fire and were burning all of their structures and tents. In the middle of the Ukrainian winter, one of the last things I saw was people stripping off their jackets and clothing in the frigid cold and throwing it into the fire to keep the fire going. To keep the fire going and the police away.

So this is how fucking insane it looks like the end of the damn world. But it worked, they succeeded in raising so much unrest in the western part of Ukraine that President Yanukovych had to flee the country for Russia. So they ousted their president. And of course, a civil war immediately sparked right after that. Essentially a big chunk of the east declared itself a separate country and Russian-backed separatists is the term you'll hear for these guys. A lot of them are Russian soldiers who would just take off their uniform patches and walk

across. And Russia annexes the Crimea, all of this stuff happens. And this whole east-west divide that led to a civil war that's killed 10,000 people in counting was again, Paul Manafort saying you should exacerbate the divide between east and west in order to increase your own power. So you can credibly say Paul Manafort had a major role in sparking the Ukrainian civil war. Because it kind of happened as a result of Yanukovych following his advice.

Again, not to take credit for being a monster from Yanukovych away, because he's a piece of shit too. But Paul Manafort has a lot of blood on his hands, is all I'm saying. So yeah, by the end of February 2014, Yanukovych is out and the country is no longer safe for Paul Manafort, which was a problem because his office right next to the Maidan was filled with papers that showed he'd been paid millions of dollars that he hadn't reported yet to anyone, including the U.S. government, who thanks to that FASA Act that we heard about in the first part, you have to register when you're working.

And Manafort hadn't, and he hadn't been reporting these payments, and he hadn't been paying taxes on these payments, but we'll get into more of that later. I mean, everything he did is so awful that I'm like, I don't even. Yeah, the tax fraud thing, but that's what'll bring him down because we live in a topsy-turvy society where everything else he did was fine. Anyway, yeah, so around 2014 is when Paul Manafort's life starts to come off the fucking rails. His daughters catch him having an affair with a woman 30 years younger than him.

He'd apparently paid for his mistress's $9,000 a month apartment in Manhattan. He'd bought her a house in the Hamptons. He'd also given her an American Express card and let her spend however much she wanted. During this time, his mistress went on a friend's podcast and said, quote, I only go to luxury restaurants, and then talked about how fancy her life was. This is part of how his daughters found out about, yeah. So when his daughters go to him, Manafort apologizes to them and promises to clean up his act.

Then six months later, they catch him cheating again with the same woman because she posted about one of their trips on Instagram. Yes. It's so crazy to be so, so savvy with manipulating people and to be so stupid at the same time. Yeah. There's some people who are like, George Bush is a very specific piece of shit. He was a piece of shit in a couple of specific ways, but the rest of the time, as a parent, as a husband and stuff, nobody has any complaints.

Paul Manafort is comprehensively a piece of shit. Right. Top to bottom. Top to bottom. Going for the gold in every single category. Yeah. Like how can I be the worst person I can possibly be? I think even it's funny.

It's a daily question. On the last part one, we talked about how his daughter was conceived between conference calls and thinking about that a little bit more, like initially I thought that that's a crazy thing to tell your daughter, and it's crazy alone to just be like, hey, you know how we were conceived, whatever, to even say that. That's disgusting. Do you know your mom and I had sex at this specific place, and that's where you came from? Oh man.

Yeah. Paul Manafort. Yeah. So this is as good a time as any to talk about Paul Manafort's lovely daughters. Now we're fortunate enough that several Ukrainian hackers managed to steal his daughter Andrea's text message records. And in fact, I haven't had a chance to use them for this episode, but just today someone posted a searchable database of the Manafort text.

So you can. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. WikiLeaks refused to publish a lot of them. Really? Yeah.

Because they're shady. Because WikiLeaks is shady? Yeah. Yeah. But they're out there, and they're amazing. In these texts, which Paul Manafort himself has said are legitimately texts from his daughter and him, in these texts Andrea tells her sister Jessica that their dad has quote, no moral or legal compass.

Don't fool yourself, she says. The money we have is blood money. So. Wow. Yeah. Andrea sounds nice when you hear that part. Right? It does.

She does. And in her text to her friends and family, Andrea implicates her father in the murder of 100 Ukrainian protesters, quote, you know he has killed people in Ukraine knowingly as a tactic to outrage the world and get focused on Ukraine. Remember when there were all those deaths taking place a while back? She's talking about all the people who were killed those two days in the Maidan. About a year ago, revolts and whatnot, do you know the whose strategy that was to cause that to send those people out and get them slaughtered?

He is a sick fucking tyrant and we keep showing up and dancing for him. We just keep showing up and eating the lobster. Nothing changes. Wow. Yeah. So you hear that and you kind of like Andrea and you think maybe evil skipped a generation. Yeah. We're gonna get a little bit deeper into her personality, but first, advertisements, capitalism,

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So here is a conversation from March 17th, 2016, Jessica Manafort, guess who called dad last night and asked him to run his convention? Andrea Manafort, mom told me he was going to call dad. She told me to get ready for Trump to be president and pick the position in the White House I want. Jessica, dad gave him his list of requirements and so long as he can fulfill the list, dad accepted. So that's super charming.

I promise them jobs in the White House because Paul Manafort's going to be running Donald Trump's campaign. They're all excited about that. I should note that in 2015 Paul Manafort had something of a breakdown after he was caught cheating a second time. This may have had something to do with the fact that he was running out of money. He threatened suicide over the phone to his daughters and wound up at a clinic in Arizona and that's when those texts that were very negative towards Paul Manafort were sent.

So it may be that they were just angry that the money train had stopped and that their dad was being whiny to them, which is maybe why they're more friendly later on. So we'll see. And when he got out, obviously, gets out of this clinic thing, Paul goes shopping for despots because he needed money and the only thing he knows how to do is help authoritarian strongmen and everyone turned him down because the Ukraine had been a really high profile fuck up for him. So I should say everyone turned him down until he went to Donald Trump, who was of course

his old client as we discussed in part one. And also the guy- That's why he ran Trump's campaign. Yeah. Well, he was also renting a room from him. Every murderer said no. Yeah. Okay.

Sure. Okay. Donald Trump. No, no, no. It's okay. And it's great because he reached out to Donald Trump and asked if he could work on his campaign and stuff. And when he started doing that, he was talking to his friends about it and his friends all

said the same thing, which was basically, Paul, you are the shadiest man in the world. You commit crimes constantly. The last thing you should do is get involved in a presidential election. There's no way that this ends well for you. But he did it anyway. When he offers to work on the Trump campaign, he offers to do it for free because obviously, like again, he got his start because he helped Reagan win and then helped place people in the Reagan White House.

Right. And then Bobby, that's what he's planning to do again. Right? So he doesn't, whatever money Donald could legally offer him is not going to help him. So he just offers to do it for free. And on May 19th, 2016, he becomes Donald Trump's official campaign manager. But even before that point, he was a big part of the Trump operation, which we know because of what his daughter, Andrea, texted to a friend on March 29th.

Friend, I'm not paying enough attention to really form an opinion, but yeah, I think economy makes sense. I just hate what an asshole Trump is in the process. She's clearly saying, you've been paying attention. Anyway, Andrea says, well, hopefully my dad will help scale that back. That's part of the reason he was brought on. He is refusing payment because he doesn't want to be viewed as Trump's employee, only having his expenses covered.

He is involved purely because he wants to help the country. And he thinks Trump is best so long as Trump gets trained a bit. P.S., this is all top secret, so please do not repeat. Your texts are never top secret. Andrea, dude, he is second in command, perhaps arguably running it. The campaign manager is all for show. Corey Lewandowski doesn't do shit. Trump has been managing his own campaign.

And Andrea's view of things, which is probably the view of things Paul wanted to present to his daughter. He's a master puppeteer controlling Donald Trump on a string. For the sake of portraying the full picture, I've decided to include some other recollections of Donald Trump and Paul Manafort's working relationship. Our first source is this fantastically named Business Insider article, Trump reportedly once ordered his helicopter to fly low so he could stay on the phone to yell at Paul Manafort.

That's the table of the article? That's incredible. That says a lot. That editor is great. Yeah, that's the best title. Now, this is all based on Corey Lewandowski's memoir, so it should be taken with as much salt as what Andrea says. Neither of them are reliable narrators in this.

But this is the other view of things, is that Trump's angry at him a lot. Lewandowski says that he was angry and this specific incident because Manafort had advised Trump not to go on TV after doing something dumb. Trump cursed him out and said, I know guys like you with your hair and your skin. These people. They're just garbage. They're not even good at being funny. No, no.

You would think if you're that evil you would at least be funny, you know what I mean? No, the charming evil guy is a misdirected. You're scheming. None of them are like Hans Gruber where you're like, you're so bad but you are so satisfying to listen to. Yeah, I want them to have at least like cute catchphrases. No, none of that shit. So yeah, Lewandowski claims Trump was infuriated after a New York Times article came out that

suggested members of Trump's campaign went on TV to talk to their boss. The article was like Paul Manafort showing up on CNN so that Trump will listen to what he says because that was what the New York Times was alleging. And Trump reportedly said, you think you got to be on TV to talk to me? You treat me like a baby. Am I like a baby to you? I sit there like a little baby and watch TV and you talk to me? Am I a fucking baby, Paul?

This happened during the 2016 election. That's what Corey Lewandowski says. Wow, Trump is like this with everybody who works for him, right? I have no trouble believing that both sides of this could be true, that Paul Manafort was manipulating Trump and that Trump also accused him of treating him like a little baby. So it seems like a campaign manager's job is to treat the candidate like a baby. Because they know and you don't.

I mean, not that I'm defending Paul Manafort. Like I said, his work with Trump is the least terrible thing he's done in this whole story. So Andrea's texts again represent what Manafort wanted her to believe and that said, here's what she said to a friend on April 7th. The friend asked, is Paul getting a bigger role? Seems like it. Andrea said, you're surprised? I told you this was the game.

You think Paul does anything in moderation? Friend. And like if Trump gets elected, guess who's going to be chief of staff? Andrea. Pfft. He would never accept. Friend. Too many skeletons in his closet?

Andrea. Too constrictive. Paul is a lone wolf. He wants to go his own way, do what he wants and how he wants. He doesn't have room for other people in their needs once. Friend. Yeah, that sounds about right. Andrea.

He likes the challenge. That's why he's doing this. It's a game for him. He isn't being paid. Friend. Man, I bet he's loving it. Andrea. This is pure sport.

He's a power hungry egomaniac. Yes, he is loving it, conclusively. Him and Trump are perfect allies for this agenda. It's so weird he is my dad. It's just weird. Like my dad doesn't seem that smart. Like he is smart. But I know I'm smarter than him.

Friend. I don't doubt that. He's a master manipulator, which seems pretty key. Andrea. He is very manipulative. I did inherit that ability, but I don't exploit it like he does. I know all his tactics. They aren't that brilliant, but they do work.

Friend. Yes, you're right. You have a moral conscience, but she meant conscience. Andrea. Like he just tells you the sky is green over and over, and eventually you are like, is it? I don't possess the ability to just lie like he does. Friend.

Yeah, he works his charm. Andrea. It's confidence. If it's something unwaveringly, people start to believe it. Friend. I mean, yeah, that's what got Trump where he is today. Andrea. Yep.

Perfect allies. Trump probably has more morals than my dad, which is really just saying something about my dad. My dad is a psycho. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. At least Trump let his wives leave him. Plus, Trump has been a good father. Andrea.

Which, that's kind of heartbreaking. If you consider Donald Trump a good father compared to your dad. No shit. At least Trump let his wives leave him. There's like nothing for me to get into specifically about that, but like, something horrifying is happening that we don't even know about yet. At least he lets his wives leave him. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, then what is Paul Manafort doing to his wife? I don't know. I assume. Trapping her at the very least. Yeah, I assume Andrea is going to, because of some things she texts later, I assume we'll get a book from her eventually that gives her side of what was going on when she decides anyway, Andrea, Trump waited a little too long in my opinion, but I can attest to the fact that he has now hired one of the world's greatest manipulators.

I hope my dad pulls it off. Then I can sell my memoir with all his dirty little secrets for a pretty penny. Oh, why do you think she's going to write a book? Yeah, she's not great. It's so funny the difference in tone between those two conversations. She literally said the exact same things, one of them being mad, one of them thinking it's cool. Yeah, exactly, and she clearly thinks it's cool now that he's helping to put a guy in

charge over here. Here's another thing she texts on April 12th, Andrea, to a friend, by the way, if you want to exploit my dad to better your career, please let me know. A friend, are you serious? Andrea, completely. A friend, I wouldn't be opposed to exploiting him, Andrea, I am on a business email basis with my dad, which is another heartbreaking sentence. In another exchange, a friend whose dad worked at Lockheed Martin asks Andrea to talk to her

dad so the campaign can reach out to them, since Lockheed didn't want to be seen as reaching out to Trump but wanted to talk, Andrea said she was happy to be a quote conduit, and this quote pretty much gives you her whole moral compass. Andrea, totally get it, not every day you know the man behind the man, gotta exploit it, which is why I'm happy to help, because fuck it, hopefully someone can benefit to my relationship to the Count of Monte Cristo, which is what Paul Manafort's nickname was in DC for a while. The Count of Monte Cristo?

Yeah, as people called him, in like the 80s and 90s. It's not short. It's a bad nickname. No, it's a bad nickname. These people are bad at everything that manipulate in governments. Yeah. After he resigned as Trump's campaign manager on August 19th, 2016, because it was revealed that he'd been taking millions of dollars in payments from a Ukrainian dictator without,

yeah, that all got discovered. That's why he had to leave. Andrea claimed that it was basically a fake resignation and he was still active behind the scenes. Quote, yes, for sure, he said that in the next few weeks we should hopefully be seeing a new Trump, so to speak. Last night's speech was a speech my dad had been pushing him to make for several weeks and since it was so well received, he thinks Trump will be more responsive to doing things

a bit differently. Later, friend, thoughts go out to your pops. I can only imagine that he's relieved, angry, hurting, a combination of a lot of emotions, wishing you and your family the best. Andrea, ha ha ha, you're so silly. It's all just PR. Oh, God. I don't like Andrea.

No, I don't like her at all. People are all garbage. She turned out better than her dad, but that's a low bar. I mean, yeah. That's a low bar. I don't even know what to say. I know, right? It's just so terrible.

Every time something happens, I just don't, there's nothing to say. It's like, yep, that's shitty. It's just a big old garbage pile. How old is Andrea at this point? Or Andrea? I think she was born in 84, so she's like 34 in the mid-30s. She's a grown up. Yeah, she's a grown up.

She got the horses. Her sister, Jessica, has been in some movies. Jessica Manafort, you can find her on IMDb, some of the high school days, or days DAZE. Oh, okay. Like that shit. And Paul Manafort subsidized that with millions of dollars. Really? Yeah.

She got to be a producer and a bunch of stuff. Wow. Yeah. He helps his little girls make their dreams come true with dictator money. So Andrea did not text about the June 9th, 2016 Trump Tower meeting Manafort held with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and a lawyer connected to the Russian government. The ostensible purpose of that meeting was so the campaign could receive leaked info about Hillary Clinton.

According to Manafort, they quickly realized the meeting was actually about their appeal of the Magnitsky Act, which basically sanctioned a bunch of super-rich Russians because they murdered a guy who was investigating their corruption. The Russians want that removed, and Manafort just, his claim is that, no, we just wanted dirt on Hillary Clinton, and they started talking about this, and so the meeting was a nothing burger. Anyway, this gets us caught up to the stuff that most people actually know. All Manafort helped Donald Trump on his way to power, again, that's not the worst thing

he did. It is, however, the thing that finally tore his world apart. Since 2014, he went from funding his daughters and their dreams to being able to provide nothing more than hot dogs and no ice for Andrea's wedding reception and ceasing all funding of Jessica's artistic career. So the money train has stopped for the Manafort daughters, unfortunately. That hot dogs and no ice thing, is that a line that you wrote, or is that a real? He eliminated a line item on her wedding budget for ice and suggested that they use hot dogs

in the reception because he doesn't have, he doesn't have the money, he doesn't have the money anymore. It's got to pay a lot of lawyers right now. Fuck him, dude. I know, I know, fuck this. This is one of those rare stories where he's a real piece of shit, and it looks like he's going to get his comeuppance, because he just fucked up too hard. And if he'd just stayed away from Donald Trump, lived a little bit less like a rich guy for

a couple of years, none of this would have been found out. But because he gets that public, people find out about the Ukraine stuff, and it just starts this avalanche of shit. Last July, federal agents raided his home, frisked his wife, and took a shitload of his records. In February, a federal grand jury handed down a combined 32 indictments for Paul in Manafort and Rick Gates, his assistant. Paul faced, quote, seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial

records, five counts of bank fraud conspiracy, and four counts of bank fraud. So he is committing some fucking, he'd been committing these crimes for years, now people give a shit. One of the many things that got him in trouble is obviously he hadn't registered as a foreign agent under FASA. He tried to in 2017, and officially filed that he had made more than 17 million or so from Yanukovych, but we know it's a lot more. Manafort turned himself in and was released on $10 million bail and given house arrest.

His two trials were scheduled in Virginia and DC in late July and September. Robert Mueller believes that Manafort funneled more than $75 million through offshore accounts, so Mueller says even when he registered and said he got $90 million, he was lying by a factor of like four. And he says Mueller says that Manafort succeeded in laundering about $30 million of that by the time he got caught through a variety of real estate transactions and other rich guys' shadiness. Mueller says they failed to pay taxes on any of this for a decade and also used fraud

to get more than $20 million in bank loans during this period in time. So Paul was not about to take being accused of committing multiple federal crimes lying down. He got out of his trusty cell phone while he was on house arrest and started texting two people who were working as witnesses against them. These people had earlier helped him lobby and were now state's witness against him. Paul Manafort asked them to pretend the lobbying work had only been in Europe and not in the United States so that he hadn't violated FASA.

He also asked them to put in a good word for him to several European leaders they'd previously lobbied. These guys basically didn't say anything and ignored his calls because they were already talking to the federal government and stuff, but Paul kept texting them. And that's how Mueller found the text in real life. What a fucking idiot. What a fucking idiot. Yeah.

Like, this is Paul. We should talk. I have made clear that they worked in Europe. And eventually Mueller caught on and so Paul Manafort went from being in house arrest in a mansion to going to an actual fucking jail. For a while he was in a rich VIP cell with a private shower and access to a laptop. But he has since been moved to an actual jail where he wears a prison jumpsuit like in jail with a bunch of other people who are in fucking jail.

Really? Yeah. Good. Yeah. Here is his fucking mugshot. I've seen that photo. Yeah. That's a good one.

Oh man. He's a real fucking piece of shit. Fuck you Paul Manafort. That feels good. It feels great. It feels good in a way that we don't get often these days. Also just saying fuck you Paul Manafort. Yeah.

There's a thing like every now and then I'll just say fuck Trump on stage when I'm performing. And it's not a joke. It does nothing for the show. But god it feels good. It's a little bit of a catharsis and you almost never get that. Try it in your day to day. Yeah. Yeah.

Fuck Trump and fuck Paul Manafort. The fucker behind the fucker. Absolutely. Yeah. So I guess for a little bit of a rant. As I said I visited Ukraine for the first time in 2015 and I reported on the revolution remotely in 2014. And I visited in 2015 and I interviewed survivors of the Maidan protests and I also reported

on the civil war that it's since broken out in that country. At one point I found myself in a little town called Avdivka near the front lines of the civil war. The Russian back separatists were shelling the little town when I arrived and I spent a memorable morning in a city administrative building with a bunch of middle aged office workers. The building had been hit several times before. The bathroom had been collapsed and by shell fire most of the windows were gone.

But it otherwise looked just like any other like small government municipal building like little old ladies with Garfield like stuffed animals and stuff on their desks. But every now and then you'd hear a big 155 millimeter how it's a fire and everybody would just tense up for a second until you realize the round wasn't going to land nearby. So Avdivka had been under siege for about a year at that point in the civil war that Paul Manafort helped start. And the local government had been reduced to basically just handing out plastic sheets to people who'd had their windows shattered by mortar fire because the winters are too

cold to not have your house sealed. So that's all the government can do at this point is people are handing in like their IDs and getting marked down how much plastic they're getting and then these ladies are cutting them pieces of plastic sheeting to take back to their houses. And at one point while I'm just sitting around interviewing these people an elderly couple comes in and their house had been hit that morning. The husband was shaking and couldn't focus his eyes and he had just blood pouring down his forehead.

And his wife was sort of guiding him into the room and she seemed to be the more together of the two. It almost looks a little bit like someone has kind of like a palsy when they've been very close to an artillery barrage like it does shake things up in their head. And that's how this guy looked at the time. I didn't encounter Paul Manafort's name while I was in Ukraine reporting on all this. But I realized much later than a number of people had talked about him to me. Like in the Philippines years before Manafort had become a hated and cursed figure in Kiev.

Over and over again people had told me about the carnage that he had helped incite. But they hadn't used his name. They blamed it on an American political technologist. This is the term that they used. Now I've come to really like the term political technologist because I think it accurately gets at what's inside the head of a man like Paul Manafort. To everyone else politics is about human lives. People striving for some case basic necessities in some case trying to make the world a better

place trying to improve the human condition. That's what politics is to normal people to people with souls. To Paul Manafort politics a political campaign a regime is like a broken watch or a broken appliance a refrigerator that's busted. And all he cares about is going in there and doing what he needs to fix it and get it working. And it doesn't matter what the machine is or what it does to him. It doesn't matter how it's going to be used. His job is to get it working.

That's the fucking man that he is. Wow. I think it's a term we could stand to use more in our own country political technologist. Wow. Anyway, that's my podcast so wonderful way to define that. I'm just sort of soaking in that phrase man. Yeah. Ukraine's a lovely country.

Do you think that's what they meant? That's the term they used. I didn't really know what they meant at the time. It was always explained to me as they're Americans who know how to run fancy American style elections and our guy brought them in to sort of help. Technologists. I really like that term. I like it too.

Yeah. So, Paul Manafort. I'm straight up rocked man. Honestly, I do not appreciate you having me on your podcast. I feel horrible. No, thank you. This was a lot of fun. Yeah, that happens a lot.

Yeah, I mean it's a happy ending in that there's a good chance he'll die in prison. Right. And that's what should happen to Paul Manafort. Absolutely. And if he does get out of prison, he pissed off that Russian billionaire who will definitely have him murdered. Yeah. There are hits out on him.

They're happy to be. Definitely. And not just from Russia. Yeah. Or Ukraine. Because so many people have to want this fucker dead. Absolutely. At least in the Philippines.

I don't want him dead yet. I want him to spend the rest of his life in prison and what I want to have happen is for his wife and his kids to visit him a couple of times and then gradually stop. And then no one visits Paul Manafort and the world moves on and he's just in prison for another 30 or 40 years. Well yeah, and for the people in prison to slowly find out about what he did. Because I don't know who's in this prison, but I would venture a guess that most people in that prison don't think it's that cool to incite violent revolutions that kill thousands

or millions of people. Yeah, they were just selling some smack or whatever. Yeah, totally. They're not monsters. He is. But even then, I'm excited for when they forget what he did and he's just another name. And he'll never wear a fancy suit again. He'll never eat gourmet food again.

He'll never know the glorious taste of Doritos ranch cheese. He'll just be... Just a shithead in prison. Just a shithead in prison and he'll die alone and unmoored. And he'll know that. Yeah. Yeah. Damn.

Fuck you, Paul Manafort. Fuck you, Paul Manafort. So eloquently said, I couldn't have come up with a better punishment for him. Yeah, yeah. It's nice. This is really the only time we've had other than Gaddafi on our podcast so far where like a bad guy got what was coming to them. Yeah, that feels good.

Yeah, it feels good. It almost never happens, but it feels good when it does. So you should plug your stuff. Oh, sure. Yeah. You can't see, but I'm laying down in a bed right now. That's the sad bed. It's critical to our operation.

I'm laying on a bed, reaching above me, making coffee. My name's Dave Ross. I'm a comedian. I tour. My podcast is DaveTotheRoss.com, and my podcast is Suicide Buddies. It's dark, but a lot of fun. Yeah, check out Dave Ross and Suicide Buddies. Suicide Friends.

Thanks so much for having me, man. Yeah, man. Thank you for being on. And I'm, of course, Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. Just two letters. I've got a book on Amazon, a brief history advice, so check that out too. You can find this podcast on the internet at BehindTheBastroods.com.

You can find us on social media at At BastrodsPod, where we'll have all of this mini sources for this article and pictures like Paul Manafort's Glorious Mugshot. So yeah, check us out next week, and you know, I love statistically about 40% of you. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them?

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Alphabet Boys told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about

a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.