June 26, 2016

After returning from the commercial break, Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, introduced his next guest to the audience of his venerable Sunday morning program. “Joining me now from Southampton, New York, is the chairman of the Trump campaign—the head coach, if you will—Paul Manafort,” he said. “Mr. Manafort, welcome back to the show, sir.”

It was early summer in the nation’s capital, one month before the Republican National Convention, and four years after Manafort had launched his joint lobbying venture with Tony Podesta. For Manafort, the former hotshot of 1980s Washington, time had certainly left its mark. Through their TV screens that morning, viewers encountered a sixty-seven-year-old man with a fleshy face and a droop beneath his eyes. His hairline, which was dark brown during the Black, Manafort & Stone era, was now frosted with silver, and he was carrying additional weight in his torso and hips. Yet in his crisp dark suit and precisely coiffed hair, Manafort radiated the same polished, self-assured charisma that he’d used to conquer the capital city a generation earlier. With the artistry he’d developed during a lifetime of machinations, he succeeded in turning each of Todd’s questions into an attack on his boss’s Democratic opponent.

In response to a query about England’s plans to leave the EU, Manafort replied: “This election, in 2016, where Donald Trump is the only change agent, is set up perfectly on those same themes, because Hillary Clinton is the epitome of the establishment. She’s been in power for twenty-five years.”

Manafort was an unlikely vessel for Donald Trump’s revolt against the Beltway establishment and the global elite. After enriching himself as a DC influence peddler, Manafort had spent the second half of his career in the shadowy business of foreign political consulting. As he guided his Kremlin-aligned clients to power in a volatile Ukraine, Manafort amassed the sort of fortune that’s typically associated with French monarchs or Wall Street kingpins. At the time of his Meet the Press appearance, he owned three Land Rovers, a $21,000 watch from an appointment-only menswear boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and an $18,500 python-skin jacket. Among his roughly half-dozen different properties was a 2.4-acre Hamptons estate with a ten-bedroom house, a putting green, a waterfall, a tennis court, a pool, a basketball court, and a display of flowers arranged into the shape of the letter M. But for this inveterate political hustler, the Make America Great Again movement wasn’t an expression of populist rage. It was a vehicle out of a crisis.

Despite the aura of confidence and prosperity that he projected on Meet the Press that morning, the truth was that Manafort’s life was in a state of implosion. Roughly two years earlier, around the time that his principal client, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted from power in a popular uprising, Manafort’s finances had begun to unravel. Business dried up, unpaid bills mounted. A Russian oligarch was hassling him about a missing $19 million investment. As the cash crunch intensified, Manafort experienced a more personal calamity. His wife of twenty-seven years, Kathy, discovered that he’d been keeping a mistress and threatened to leave him. Manafort ended up in a rehabilitation facility for sex addiction in Arizona, where he sobbed nearly every day. At one point, things got so dark that he suggested taking his own life. “My dad,” Manafort’s daughter Andrea said in a June 2015 text, “is in the middle of a massive emotional breakdown.”

While Manafort was at his lowest point, Trump’s White House bid became the lobbyist’s path to redemption. As it happened, the real estate mogul was just then searching for an experienced fixer to help him navigate a potential floor fight at the upcoming GOP Convention. With the help of an old lobbying partner, Roger Stone, Manafort was able to talk his way onto Trump’s team, and when the campaign’s manager was fired in June 2016, Manafort got the top post. It was an astonishing turn of events. One year earlier, Manafort had been blubbering into the phone at a sex-addiction clinic and expressing thoughts of suicide. Now he was hashing out strategy with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner and appearing on prestigious Sunday-morning political shows. Over the next several months, as he navigated Trump through the treacherous RNC nominating process, Manafort would help elect a right-wing populist whose antiestablishment fury would dismantle the very pro-business policy consensus that Manafort had spent the first half of his career working to erect.

Yet even then, as he flashed his cocksure smile at the Meet the Press viewers, Manafort was already looking beyond the 2016 election, plotting an even bigger score. Joining the Trump campaign, after all, was only the first step in Manafort’s master plan to reclaim his standing in Washington, get the creditors off his back, and accrue even more influence than he’d wielded during the heyday of Black Manafort. “He was going to do what he had done before,” says Rick Gates, the former Manafort deputy, “but on a much grander scale.”

Manafort’s Ukrainian gravy train began to stall out about the time that a wave of civil unrest engulfed the capital city of Kiev. In late 2013 President Yanukovych—the Kremlin-aligned leader whom Manafort had steered to office—rejected an agreement that would have strengthened Ukraine’s ties to the European Union in favor of aligning the country more closely with Russia. The development sparked widespread protests in Kiev; angry citizens poured into the city’s Independence Square. When Yanukovych tried to quell the unrest through force, dozens of unarmed demonstrators were shot and killed; the country appeared on the brink of civil war. In February 2014 Yanukovych fled Kiev with the assistance of the Kremlin, as Putin has said; the ousted Ukrainian president eventually landed in Russia. In his absence, Ukraine’s parliament accused Yanukovych of “mass killings of civilians” and voted to remove him from office.

As the situation in Kiev deteriorated, and false rumors circulated about Yanukovych having been captured or shot, the American consultants retreated to Washington, where Manafort slipped into a haze of disbelief. “He was,” Gates says, “just desperately upset.”

According to Gates, Manafort had been urging Yanukovych to sign the European Union accord, and he considered the agreement’s rejection to be a personal betrayal. Beyond that, when the protestors took to the streets, Manafort had expected Yanukovych to reach out for advice, Gates says. But the call never came. Instead, once Yanukovych slipped away to Russia, he cut Manafort out of his circle of advisors. According to Gates, Manafort thought Yanukovych must have blamed his American strategist for the political upheaval that led to his ouster. The excommunication was tough on Manafort’s self-image. “You spent ten years of your life building this,” Gates says, “and then all of a sudden everything flips on a dime.” It was even more punishing on Manafort’s business. His work in Ukraine had grown so lucrative that he’d neglected to develop clients elsewhere; almost all of his revenue was tied to this single country. And amid the turmoil in Kiev, Manafort’s income was drying up. “All of the oligarchs who were funding the party and therefore funding Paul are now in their own scramble,” Gates says, “trying to get out of the country.”

But even before Yanukovych’s ouster, Manafort had fallen behind on payments to the Podesta Group and Mercury for their work in the Ukrainian lobbying venture. In December 2013 Tony Podesta complained to Gates about the missing fees. “Any updates on bank wires,” Podesta wrote in an email. “We are pushing 5 months in arrears.” A few weeks later, when Podesta’s unpaid invoices reached $200,000, he forbade his staff from working on the project. In early 2014 the lobbyists received dubious letters from “Loyal Bank” in the West Indies regarding the late payments. In the unsigned letter, the bank’s chairman apologized for the “difficulties you may have faced in having outward and inward wire transfers transacted through our bank in the last few weeks” and promised to promptly resolve the matter. Lawyers for the lobbying firms described the letters as “very questionable.” Though the firms did receive some payments over the following months, they were still owed money. By April 2014, Podesta had seen enough. He dropped Manafort as a client and, shortly thereafter, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine shut down.

After Yanukovych fled Ukraine, Manafort struggled to find new clients. He managed to secure a $6 million contract to represent a slate of former Party of Regions candidates, but in the end, he received only a fraction of the promised payment. By 2015, Manafort’s cash-flow bonanza in eastern Europe had completely evaporated, touching off an acute financial crunch. Manafort’s lavish lifestyle had come with staggering monthly bills—in certain years, he paid more than $200,000 for landscaping on the Hamptons estate alone—and it didn’t take long for debts to mount. There were other sources of fiscal pressure too. Lawyers representing Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who first sent Manafort to Kiev, were after him about the missing $19 million that Manafort had invested on his behalf in a Ukrainian telecommunications company in 2007. Deripaska later asked for the return of his investment funds, as the global financial crisis was wrecking his balance sheet. When Manafort failed to repay him, Deripaska filed a lawsuit in 2018. A Manafort spokesman told the Washington Post that “we are surprised by the filing,” adding that he believed that the issue had been “addressed and resolved years ago.” The case has been on hold since the federal government placed sanctions on Russia’s government and industry, including Deripaska’s company.

As the squeeze on Manafort’s bank account intensified, the man whose annual clothing budget regularly exceeded $210,000 began scrambling to save cash. “He is suddenly extremely cheap,” his daughter Andrea remarked in a 2015 text message, which was contained in the years’ worth of her texts that were obtained by hackers and posted online. While making plans for a prewedding reception for Andrea and her fiancé, Manafort had refused to pay for drink mixers or ice, recommending instead a cut-rate event with paper plates and hot dogs. “Hot dogs. Can we just discuss how gross that is,” Manafort’s other daughter, Jessica, wrote in a text exchange with her sister, Andrea. “This isn't a fucking grill out,” Andrea replied.

As these financial troubles escalated, Manafort faced a crisis on the home front. A few months after his break with Yanukovych, his daughters discovered that he was carrying on an elaborate affair. Manafort had set up his paramour, who was more than three decades younger than he, with a Manhattan apartment, a Hamptons beach house, and access to an American Express card. “He was fucking his mistress when Grandma was in surgery,” Andrea wrote in a text. In the spring of 2015 Manafort’s wife, Kathy, confronted him about the affair. He broke down, begged forgiveness, and checked into an Arizona addiction clinic, according to a text from one of Manafort’s daughters. While at the clinic, Manafort’s only contact with the outside world came during the fifteen minutes of phone time he was allotted per day. “I guess he sobs. Like a lot,” Andrea texted a friend. Over time, his daughters grew concerned he might harm himself. “He is acting like he is going to end his life,” Jessica texted Andrea. “He is writing a letter to mom and then he said he will be gone forever,” Andrea replied.

While Manafort was coming unglued at the Arizona treatment center, a celebrity client of his former lobbying firm was gliding down an escalator at Trump Tower on his way to the press conference where he would announce his White House bid. It was Manafort’s dream to get back into American politics, Gates says. But such a return had always seemed impossible. In the two decades since he last worked on a US presidential campaign—Bob Dole’s ill-fated 1996 venture—Manafort’s ties to flashy arms dealers and vicious foreign tyrants had made him too much of a liability for any mainstream candidate. During the 2008 presidential race, according to Gates, one of Manafort’s well-connected friends had urged the top brass of John McCain’s campaign to bring him aboard, but to no avail. Trump was different. As an outcast of the Republican establishment, he didn’t have many experienced Washington operatives in his orbit. And thanks in part to all the scandal and bad press in his own past, he was more willing to overlook a few problems on the resumes of the people he hired.

Manafort shared some loose affiliations with Trump. In addition to his ex-firm’s lobbying work on behalf of the New York mogul in the 1980s and 1990s, Manafort and his wife had squired 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 speaking to himself.

“This is what I want,” he said. “This is what I want.”

In the years after Manafort purchased his Trump Tower apartment, he would occasionally exchange friendly small talk with the real estate billionaire when they bumped into each other in the building. There were also some mutual friends. Manafort’s old lobbying partner Roger Stone had been a political advisor to Trump when his casino business was a lobbying client of Black Manafort. The billionaire private equity founder Tom Barrack had been close with both men for many years.

By early 2016, Manafort was taking the first steps of his improbable comeback. With his finances in shambles, his personal life in chaos, and his emotional state so despondent that he was hinting at suicide, he would use the New York playboy-turned-right-wing-firebrand as his vehicle out of the darkness. After his four weeks in rehab, Manafort reached out to his buddy Tom Barrack. “I really need to get to” Trump, he said, according to what Barrack told the Washington Post.

Manafort set himself to securing a role in the famously antiestablishment campaign. With Barrack acting as an intermediary, he delivered a five-page pitch to Trump in February 2016 in which he recast his exile from Republican politics as a selling point. “I have had no client relationships dealing with Washington since around 2005. I have avoided the political establishment in Washington since 2005,” Manafort wrote. “I will not bring Washington baggage.” To accentuate this message, Manafort referred to Karl Rove, the ex–George W. Bush strategist who’d emerged as a vocal Trump critic, as “my blood enemy in politics” stretching back to the College Republicans in the 1960s. Manafort also alluded to lobbying work he’d done for Trump in the past, and he mentioned his place in Trump Tower.

The pitch landed on Trump’s desk during a period of the campaign when Manafort’s talents seemed particularly valuable. Though Trump had secured key primary victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina, political operatives from the GOP’s establishment wing were plotting to torpedo his candidacy by engineering a delegate revolt at the upcoming Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Manafort, of course, had helped arm-twist Gerald Ford to victory during the GOP’s last contested convention, in 1976. “You’ve got to bring Manafort on,” Roger Stone told Trump in a phone call. “He knows how to deal with delegate selection. He understands what the rules are. He’s got experience in the national campaigns; you need him to come in and be the delegate coordinator, convention coordinator.”

For the famously tightfisted Trump, there was another benefit to retaining Manafort. “I am not looking for a paid job,” Manafort explained in his memo. Such an unpaid role, Manafort believed, would make it more likely that Trump would see him as a peer, as opposed to a subordinate. But the veteran Washington insider also understood that if Trump won the election, his ties to the new president would enable him to earn far more money as a K Street influence peddler than he could ever make as a campaign staffer.

At first, Trump was suspicious of Manafort’s offer to forgo a paycheck. “Everybody wants something,” Trump said to Manafort in the days after hiring him.

“Maybe in the future I’ll want something,” Manafort responded, “but right now I just want to get you elected.”

Trump welcomed Manafort to the team in March 2016, and, right away, he was impressed. Trump liked Manafort’s political experience as well as his polished presence; he mentioned to aides that his freshly tanned new advisor appeared many years younger than his age. (Manafort was sixty-six when he joined the campaign.) “Dad and Trump are literally living in the same building,” Manafort’s daughter Andrea wrote in a text to her sister, Jessica, “and mom says they go up and down all day long hanging and plotting together.” Trump often bragged about how much value he was getting out of his unpaid strategist. Though a convention-floor coup never materialized, Trump soon found a more important role for the operative. In June 2016, when the campaign appeared to be in jeopardy amid declining poll numbers, anemic fund-raising, and growing doubts about Trump’s temperament, the billionaire real estate mogul fired his hotheaded campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. The move made Manafort, who’d been promoted to chief strategist a month earlier, the operation’s top official. “I think it’s time now for a different kind of a campaign,” Trump said of the leadership change.

Manafort’s daughters were thrilled by the news. “Im not a trump supporter but I am still proud of dad,” Andrea texted her sister. “He is so happy,” Jessica replied. “I told him this is what happens when you straighten out your life.” Once word of Manafort’s new job became public, a friend reached out to Andrea with a reference to her father’s past. “sadly [Charlie] black went elsewhere,” the friend texted, “but with [Roger] stone and Manafort w Trump, all we need is the ghost of Lee Atwater and the whole dirty tricks team is back!!! This is awesome.”

In many ways, however, Trump was advancing the opposite agenda of the one that Manafort and the “dirty tricks team” had helped enshrine in Washington. As a member of Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Manafort worked to promote the free-market ideology of America’s corporate establishment. During his years on K Street, he and his partners helped bend federal policy to the desires of Wall Street kingpins and multinational conglomerates. Now Trump was thundering his way to the top of the Republican primary field by railing against corporate-friendly trade and immigration policies and excoriating individual firms for moving jobs overseas. In July 2015, for instance, when he learned that the automaker Ford Motor Co. planned to move some of its manufacturing activities out of the United States, an outraged Trump took to Twitter and promised to stop it as president. A month later, Trump said he would boycott Oreo cookies after Mondeléz International Inc., the maker of the world-famous treat, said it was transferring some production to Mexico. Following his victory in the New Hampshire primary, Trump blasted a US-based air conditioner company, Carrier Global Corp., for its plans to do the same. “It’s disgraceful that our politicians allow them to get away with it,” he said several months later, during a speech at the Economic Club of New York. “It really is.”

Trump’s appeals proved popular with the rural and blue-collar voters who’d been left behind by the prior four decades of federal policy making, when Washington raced to globalize the economy without regard for the millions of workers who had neither the skills nor experience to succeed in the new economy. Lacking the shelter of strong unions and assertive federal regulators—protections that had been gradually whittled away by Tommy Boggs, Black Manafort, Tony Podesta, and other Big Business lobbyists—these workers were unguarded against the free market’s destructive potential. So, unlike their onetime allies in C-suites and boardrooms, many working-class Americans began to view corporate capitalism not as a pathway to prosperity, but as an instrument of industrial collapse, stagnant wages, poor social mobility, and structural hopelessness. Some thirty-five years earlier, many of these workers had joined Ronald Reagan’s revolt against the federal bureaucracy. Now they would power Donald Trump’s crusade against the corporate elite.

While Trump’s economic nationalism was anathema to the free-market conservatives Manafort had spent much of his life putting in office, Manafort wasn’t one to let ideological purity get in the way of his ambitions. And his primary objective, according to his longtime deputy Rick Gates, was to get Trump elected so that he could use his clout with the new White House to escape his deep financial hole. “He was immediately thinking about how to monetize this,” says Gates, who went to work as a top lieutenant to Manafort on the Trump campaign. Manafort planned to get Trump elected and then get back into the influence-peddling business, representing high-paying foreign clients before an administration he’d helped bring to power.

While other campaign staffers were angling to secure West Wing desks in the event of a Trump victory, Manafort’s eyes remained fixed on the influence business. At one point during the campaign, according to Gates, Trump approached Manafort with a question. “Hey, if we actually win this thing, what Cabinet position do you want? I’ll give you anything that you want.” Manafort responded that he had no interest in joining the administration. It was precisely the same calculus that Manafort had made back in 1980, when he and his three pals had converted their ties to the Reagan revolution into the era’s signature influence-peddling enterprise. Only this time, in Trump’s unlikely rise, Manafort saw an opening to parlay his MAGA connections into the sort of lobbying empire that would make Black Manafort look like a charity. “He knew better than anyone how much financial compensation you could get on the international side,” Gates says.

As soon as he joined the Trump campaign, in fact, Manafort began looking for ways to use his newfound political influence to settle his old debts. He emailed news articles about his role in the Trump campaign to a former associate in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik. “How do we use to get whole?” Manafort asked. “Has OVD operation seen?” referring to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska, whose lawyers had been hounding Manafort about his missing $19 million investment. Kilimnik was hopeful, suggesting in one reply that Manafort’s and Deripaska’s teams “will get back to the original relationship.”

Though such windfall payouts would only materialize if Trump won the election, Manafort was confident he could deliver. He saw in Trump the same potential that he’d identified in his former Ukrainian client, Viktor Yanukovych. According to Gates, Manafort considered Trump “a blank piece of paper” whom he could craft into a more polished and disciplined candidate capable of appealing to a broader array of voters, just as he’d done for Yanukovych six years earlier. “Paul thought Trump was the ideal candidate for him,” Gates says. “He said, ‘If I get this guy scripted on a message—the right message—he’s a shoo-in.’”

There was, however, a fundamental problem in the plan. Manafort discovered quickly that Trump was not nearly as coachable as his Ukrainian client. The former reality-show star fumed when Manafort spoke on his behalf during media appearances. “The only person that speaks for Donald Trump is Donald Trump,” the future president told Gates. When a leaked audio recording captured Manafort telling a private audience of RNC officials that Trump had merely been playing a “part” on the campaign trail and that he was currently in the process of “evolving” into a more conventional candidate, Trump was apoplectic. “That was the first time that he blasted Paul as an underling, not as a peer,” Gates says.

Despite the growing tension, Manafort’s relationship with Trump didn’t fully rupture until August 2016, when Manafort’s prior work in Ukraine became the subject of a series of unflattering new articles. The New York Times delivered the first serious blow, revealing the existence of handwritten ledgers in Kiev indicating that nearly $13 million in off-the-books cash payments from the pro-Putin Party of Regions had been earmarked for Manafort. The disclosures were especially damaging to Trump in light of his repeated insistence that he wasn’t beholden to outside interests. Manafort released a public statement denying the most salacious claims, but he generally followed the old Washington adage that campaign staffers should never willingly draw press attention away from the candidate and toward themselves. This muted response displeased the future president. As a veteran of New York City real estate battles and tabloid grudge matches, Trump expected his campaign’s top strategist to rebuff the allegations more aggressively. Manafort’s refusal to engage in a public slugfest over the negative press was, in Trump’s eyes, an indication of weakness. “You could be guilty or you could be innocent, but you’ve got to fight,” Gates recalls Trump saying. “Why isn’t Paul fighting this?”

Days later, Trump’s top strategist faced an even more damaging revelation: this time about the 2012 joint venture with Tony Podesta and Vin Weber. “AP Sources: Manafort Tied to Undisclosed Foreign Lobbying,” read the headline from the Associated Press. The story revealed that, by using the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine as a pass-through, Manafort had “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to” the Podesta Group and Mercury Public Affairs, doing so “in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence US policy.” Such surreptitious foreign lobbying, the article suggested, might violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act—just as Podesta’s employees had warned. In fact, some of the firm’s own staffers helped expose the truth about the campaign. When an AP reporter reached out to the Podesta Group lobbyists who had refused to work on the Ukraine matter, he found sources who were willing to corroborate the story.

From there, Manafort’s demise came swiftly. Trump’s family members withdrew their support, and internal adversaries rooted for his dismissal. Trump sidelined Manafort by appointing a new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, and chief executive, Steve Bannon. Five days after the media frenzy began, Manafort surrendered. “This morning Paul Manafort offered, and I accepted, his resignation from the campaign,” Trump said on August 19. “I am very appreciative for his great work in helping to get us where we are today, and in particular his work guiding us through the delegate and convention process. Paul is a true professional, and I wish him the greatest success.”

For Manafort, the development shattered everything. Ousted and scandal tarred, he would never be able to build the lobbying juggernaut he’d envisioned, the one that would make Black Manafort look like a charity. His K Street fortune would vanish before it had even come to him. Just months after his big promotion, Manafort was right back where he’d been during his stint in rehab: mired in financial uncertainty, suffering from professional humiliation. And while his former client would go on to a stunning victory in November’s presidential election, Manafort’s circumstances were about to get even worse.

Excerpted from The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government. © 2024 by Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.