And, right on the heels of the Gates plea...

Perhaps after Manafort's statement that he was going to keep fighting. And perhaps after Gates putting up something for his part of the plea bargain.

New charges were filed late Friday against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in the special counsel investigation.

[...]

The new indictment came less than two hours after Gates pleaded guilty to two criminal charges in federal court and pledged to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russia and the 2016 presidential election.

[...]

Prosecutors allege that Manafort, with the assistance of longtime business partner Rick Gates, "secretly retained a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States."

  CNN

That just doesn't sound so juicy though, does it?

Prosecutors say Manafort orchestrated a group of former European politicians, called the "Hapsburg group," to pose as independent voices. Yet they covertly pushed positions favorable to Ukraine as paid lobbyists. Manafort used offshore accounts to pay the former politicians 2 million euros.

Manafort also allegedly used $4 million from an offshore account to fund a report on the trial of a political opponent jailed by his clients. A lawyer involved in the report -- Alex van der Zwaan -- pleaded guilty to lying to investigators earlier this week.

Yeah, I'm pretty lost on that whole thing.

Gates admitted in a guilty plea Friday that he and Manafort had sent letters to the Justice Department in November 2016 and last February that falsely asserted they hadn't lobbied on behalf of Ukraine in the United States.

I don't even get why they didn't just register as lobbyists. There must be something nefarious. Was it because of where the money was coming from and going to? Was it part of their money laundering schemes? Were they getting something from the Ukrainians that they shouldn't have been?  Were the Ukrainians simply laundering mob money through Manafort?  Was there an Iran-Contra type deal going on? Or is it something mundane?  I'm going to need somebody to write a book. And draw some pictures in it.  The sad part is, I may have even known at one point, but this monstrosity has sprouted way too many arms.

I've made a feeble attempt to answer the question by Googling up a couple of stories, which I'll forget as soon as another arm sprouts on the investigation.  Which may be any moment now.

[November 1, 2017] FARA was passed in 1938 over concerns about Nazi propaganda agents operating in the United States before World War II. The law states that every person working on behalf of a foreign entity— lobbyists, lawyers or advertisers, for example— needs to register with the Justice Department and provide details of the arrangement.

It would certainly help the influence of the law to have more people properly register. According to a Justice Department document published in 2016, 62% of initial registrations were late.

“It’s no secret among those of us who have tried to be totally complaint that a lot of people out there simply don’t bother to register,” says Toby Moffet, a former Democratic congressman now at Mayer Brown.

  Time

[October 30, 2017] I've written about foreign lobbying and Manafort for more than 20 years. During that time, I’ve seen only a handful of cases brought against people or organizations accused of not registering as foreign agents. And it was always some foreign group, or Washington outsider, or foreign group—the Cuban 5 or someone allegedly connected to Irish Republican Army—never a wired Washington lobbyist like Manafort.

[...]

The Center for Public Integrity, again in the early 1990s, reported that only about half of foreign lobbyists bother filing under FARA, and it's surely gotten worse since then.

[...]

The Department of Justice’s own inspector general has confirmed just how toothless the FARA enforcement is. In September 2016, DOJ issued a report that tallied all the prosecutions under FARA since 1966—a total of seven. Only one of the individuals charged was convicted at trial; according to the report, two pleaded guilty to FARA charges, two were convicted on non-FARA charges and two saw their cases dismissed. An important reason for this lack of enforcement is that there are virtually no enforcers. The FARA team at DOJ is small, poorly funded and relies on voluntary compliance. According to a POLITICO story from October, “it usually investigates possible failures to register only when its staff reads about them in the media.”

[...]

I wrote about Manafort as recently as August 2016—one story for Fusion focusing on his Ukraine work and another story for my website WashingtonBabylon.com, that looked at his historic work for dictators and crooks.

In 1992, Spy magazine ranked his lobbying firm as the “sleaziest of all in the Beltway,” giving it a “blood-on-the-hands” rating of four. As I wrote in my piece: “That was a full bloody hand more than the rating accorded to runner-up Edward von Kloberg, whose clients—listed in his Rolodex under D for dictators—including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaucescu, and Liberia’s Samuel Doe. It’s no surprise that when asked by the Washington Times what historical figure he’d like to meet, Manafort replied: Machiavelli.” Furthermore, I added, Manafort was born to modest wealth but “monetized his misdeeds at every step of the way.”

[...]

The same year as the Spy piece, the Center for Public Integrity issued a report titled “The Torturers' Lobby,” which cited Manafort and his firm’s work on behalf of human rights abusing regimes in Nigeria, the Philippines and Kenya, as well as a thuggish band of Angolan rebels known as UNITA. All this work, for which he was well-paid, was known precisely because he registered under the FARA laws. But somewhere down the line, it appears, Manafort discovered that registering simply wasn’t necessary, which made it harder to follow his activities.

[...]

It certainly appears that Manafort received undisclosed money from the Ukrainian government or its business allies, and maybe it was laundered offshore. If true, and it has looked that way for a while, that's bad. But if you're going to indict and prosecute lobbyists for failing to disclose their activities, roughly half of Washington would be under arrest.

[...]

Manafort has been under investigation since 2014, but if the DOJ’s track record is any indicator, it’s quite likely that had he not been Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort would be kicking back and enjoying his allegedly laundered cash at this very moment.

  Politico

So maybe the answer is Manafort just got sloppy and didn't expect anything to ever come of his lobbying without registering. But, when he went to work for Trump (for what I suspect is tied to his dealings with Russian mobsters and his own personal debts), he should have gotten all those ducks in a row.  He did retroactively register re Ukraine lobbying some time in 2017, so it looks like it may simply have been sloppiness.

At any rate, the FARA charge may be just another one to pile on for weight in an effort to get Manafort to spill the Trump beans.  Or the way to bring in money laundering charges, if that was going on in the deal.  And maybe it's also a notice to other lobbyists that the USG is going to get serious about anything that could make it easier for foreign governments to interfere with US elections and influence US politicians.  And maybe it's just that Robert Mueller got involved and he's a man who dots every "i" and crosses every "t".

Like I said.  I need a book with pictures.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

It definitely wasn't a sloppy oversight on Manafort's part.



Continue reading.

UPDATE  3/26/18:

Politico has a somewhat lengthy article about Rick Gates and his importance to the Mueller team now that he's flipped.  Check it out.