"Otherwise blameless"

Speaking of Judge Ellis' very light sentence for Manafort, whom he called "otherwise blameless"...

In 2016 or early 2017, Paul Manafort’s 32-year-old daughter Andrea’s cell phone was hacked. A database containing hundreds of thousands of her purported text messages, many in conversation with her sister Jess, was released online in February 2017.Politico confirmed the veracity of enough of the texts to enter them into the public record.

[...]

[Various] articles quote Andrea and Jess contending with their father’s corruption (“He has no moral or legal compass”), what they believe was his active role in the murder of hundreds of Ukrainian protestors (“Do you know whose strategy that was to cause that / To send those people out and get them slaughtered”), his humiliatingly public affair as a sugar daddy to a much younger woman (“He got her A PRIVATE JET AT ONE POINT”), his role on Trump’s campaign (“He is refusing payment. Bc he doesn’t want to be viewed as Trump’s employee”), and their own tormented desire to free themselves from their family complicities (“Don’t fool yourself. That money we have is blood money.”).

Yet one cluster of texts never entered public discourse in the same way. For eight months after these texts were released online — an eon, in internet time — no one wrote about them. The sleaziest gossip outlets, which enthusiastically published other dirty details about Manafort (including his membership in BDSM sex clubs), wouldn’t touch it. Deep transparency conspiracy theorists didn’t Tweet about it. A March 2018 Atlantic profile on Manafort by Franklin Foer only very delicately alludes to the matter, commenting that, “after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters.”

That’s a rather dainty way to refer to over a decade of coercive and manipulative sexual behavior, in which Manafort allegedly forced his wife, vulnerable from having sustained brain damage after a near-death horseback riding accident years before, to engage in “gang bangs” with black men while he watched.

She shouldnt have to do that and i would feel the same way
she keeps saying she has tried so hard
but she can’t keep doing it
and the stuff he has made her do is outrageous

mom thinks dad will end their marriage bc she won’t do it anymore
i don’t even know what to think
Im in shock
This is abuse

[...]

This is contested terrain, obviously — particularly in the era of #MeToo press stories. In this moment, behaviors previously deemed private and professionally irrelevant are now seen as both relevant and potentially disqualifying.

[...]

Because when we are given access to evidence of a man’s most private acts and desires, we reread his public conduct through the lens of this information. It is revelatory of an entire ecology of behavior.

During his early years as a Republican strategist, Paul Manafort was responsible for Ronald Reagan’s decision to launch his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi — site of the murder of three Civil Rights activists — as a racist dog whistle to white Southern voters. He then built his fortune making dictators and strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Jonas Savimbi — torturers and killers of their own people — palatable to American politicians doling out foreign aid. This subject was addressed as early as 1992 in “The Torturer’s Lobby,” a report published by the Center for Public Integrity. In the same year Spy Magazine ranked Manafort’s firm as having the highest “blood-on-the-hands” score in the Beltway.

[...]

When I asked one journalist why he hadn’t written about [the Manafort daughters'] texts, he became extremely defensive. What does it matter, he asked, what gets Manafort’s dick hard? The journalist saw the material as Manafort’s private business — not evidence, meriting consideration, that the man was a sexual abuser.

[...]

[T]wo published articles have attempted to address the fraught topic of Manafort’s sexual treatment of his wife. A July 2018 essay in Psychology Today discusses the underpinnings of conservative men’s desire to participate in the “cuck” fetish of wife-sharing. It explores what might be behind Manafort’s sexual fantasy but does not touch upon issues of race, marital rape, abuse, or manipulation. By contrast, an article in The Spectator argues that the texts are critical to understanding Manafort’s criminality yet does not really know how to prove the case. Regarding Manafort’s marriage, it lands by quoting the old French proverb, “no man is a hero to his valet,” concluding that the texts merely describe the “banal truth” that “everyone saves their worst behaviour for those closest to them.”

Manafort’s worst behavior may be many things; “banal” hardly seems one of them. Something terrible happened, and no one knows how to say it.

  

Or maybe willing to say it.

Perhaps no one wants to write about Manafort, in part, because the data has already been dumped — and we don’t want to belabor his attachment to such humiliating desires.

I think it's still taboo in major media to go beyond a certain threshhold about sex. Especially if there's no verifiable proof. The Epstein lawsuit may crack that resistance.

but apparently he has a thing for black men
hard core.
one time it was 6 black men in a hotel room
i hate him jessica. i think i hate him.

she asked why so many black men and he said bc they are the ones
willing to do it

Mrs. Manafort, brain damaged as reported, would only be subjected to the Martha Mitchell treatment - or worse - if she attempted to go public with the confessions she apparently made to her daughter.

And by the way, I Googled this guy Roger Stone, because he looks like he pays black guys to bang his wife. And I found out in 1996, he was forced to resign from Bob Dole’s campaign for asking black guys to bang his wife. I’m not kidding. Look it up, it’s fantastic. As a black man, I don’t know whether to feel offended, or a little appreciated.

— Michael Che, Saturday Night Live (January 26, 2019)

The above joke, from a recent “Weekend Update” sketch, is the closest the Manafort material has come to reaching a wider audience. Tellingly, it’s displaced from Manafort onto his long-time business partner, Roger Stone, with whom he made the transition from early career Republican dirty trickster to powerful political consultant to, currently, indicted target of the Mueller investigation.

Roger Stone did not ask black guys to bang his wife. He did advertise for “exceptional muscular well-hung single men” to join him in three-ways with his wife (who seemed an enthusiastic participant).

And by the age-old white man fantasy/fear, who is supposedly "muscular" and "well-hung"? Yes, that's right. Black men.

The National Enquirer’s exposé on the Stones’ swinging marriage lost Roger his role as Bob Dole’s political consultant during the ’96 presidential campaign. The humiliation appears to have been galvanizing for Stone, who transformed himself into a defiantly flamboyant agent provocateur, rat-fucking on more subterranean levels of the Republican party politic.

[...]

Whole gossip industries run on barely substantiated rumors about the salacious proclivities of public figures. But the entertainment only works when the activity is clearly consensual. Every publication that used the hacked texts lingered over prurient details of Manafort’s extramarital affair — but remained silent about his treatment of his wife. It is precisely because the gang bang texts describe a non-consensual situation that no one wants to touch it.

I don't know about that. They don't mind printing about child sexual abuse. It's something to do with the wife thing, I have to think.

If Manafort’s wife divorced her husband, or pressed charges, or made any public claim of injury, it would have been fair game. But she did not. She suffered in silence. This lacuna, within the confines of a marriage, defies us to speak.

[...]

One of the more surprising things to me about the #MeToo moment is the fact that so many men seem shocked to learn that women share such sexual details with one another. [...] Over the past year, we have witnessed not only a renegotiation of the borders between public and private life, but also a revelation of the coping strategies women have always used to deal with men.

[...]

And yet, even as we revive the ’70s rallying cry that “the personal is political,” we struggle to integrate private experience into public space and public systems of discourse.

One thing that has become clear, in these repeated narrative convulsions, is that the legal system’s form of due process more often than not does not work on behalf of the women who have been wronged or violated, professionally or personally. Rape kits go untested, police find fault with accusers, prosecutors don’t proceed for lack of evidence or because they know that only the most “ideal victim” can stand up to hostile scrutiny of their motives. Similarly, proto-legal systems — university administrations, HR departments — allow many powerful men to slip through the cracks.

[...]

A blockbuster exposé of a serial abuser happens only when a journalist has enough women, abused by the target, who are willing to go on the record as sources. Every source must have backup in the form of witnesses who contemporaneously heard about the abuse at the time of its occurrence. Direct testimony is elaborately and assiduously scaffolded with as much documentation as can be collected.

[...]

Manafort’s story is journalistically problematic because there is no way to prove the allegations.

I think that's it. However, if someone could find the alleged black men, and they were willing to talk...But no one is interested in doing it.

One cannot verify these texts weren’t inserted post-hoc. Or access the men in foreign countries who were purportedly paid to participate in the gang bangs. And in this case, the putative victim — Manafort’s wife — has not announced her victimhood nor stated any desire to have a public discussion of her marriage.

I'm sure she doesn't dare.

A characteristic arc of the #MeToo-era story is that it begins in innocence, travels through serial abuses of power, and finally (and most importantly) ends.

[...]

Life rarely works so neatly, however. The cultural predominance of such narratives can be attributed to a willingness of people to speak only once they are safely finished with a professional or personal relationship.

[...]

Some of the most agonized #MeToo stories — the ones that tend to come out in public accounts that are personal, not journalistic — involve people confessing to being in abusive situations they never explicitly refused or escaped. Instead of heroic resistance, these are tales of ambivalence, of helplessness, of going along to get along, of privileging financial security or professional livelihood or family peace. [...] The torment comes from the realization that you have been caught in the current of your own choices — from wondering how much those truly were your personal choices. These stories lack a single moment of moral clarity, a stark revelation of bad behavior and its costs — the moment that provides such palpable relief for the people who do have them.

We can see this pained complicity in the texts exchanged between Manafort’s daughters, as they negotiate their father’s treatment of their mother. The situation does not unfold in the narrative order we have come to expect in #MeToo stories — 1) encounter abuse, 2) recognize it as abuse, 3) decry abuse, 4) abandon or escape abuser. Instead, the daughters initially complain about their father’s affair and discuss the myriad ways their annoying mother has driven him to a midlife crisis: her OCD behavior, her fear of technology, her lack of enthusiasm to try new things.

While negotiating their parents’ incipient marital dissolution, Andrea and Jess learn that their mother was an unwilling, manipulated participant in group sex for over a decade. Her recent resistance to these sexual arrangements had led their father to the ultimatum that they were “a condition of their marriage.” Andrea and Jess go through denial, shock, anger. They parse details from conversations with both parents. They argue over their mother’s role:

Its half moms fault
she couldve said no

i know
she thought she had to
to save her marriage

That’s retarded

i know
but he is manipulative
and i bet she just never could imagine leaving him


You dont do things that dont feel right to you. She didnt have four
children to make him happy
She stopped at two

She has a lot of repression happening. She said used to be afraid of dying
and now she isn’t.

He wanted 4.

The sisters gradually come to perceive that their father’s behavior constitutes abuse, and they [...] try to help their mother — find her a therapist, ensure she won’t remain financially tied to their father.

But then there is a turn, based on their mother’s recalcitrance. Kathleen Manafort takes her husband’s side regarding conflicts over financial help he had promised for Andrea’s wedding.

[...]

And as long as that shit doesn’t affect my life, whatever.
I know my dad is a horrible and moral-less human. Total selfish sociopath. I don’t ever fool myself or forget. He is a master manipulator

[…]

The best part of this wedding is as soon as it’s over, I have not even ONE string tied to my dad anymore.
And Chris is my entire life.
I can’t wait.

If her husband-to-be is her entire life, she may be finding herself in her mother's position soon enough.

This is only about you and Chris, just focus on that! And once the last check clears … f him

Agreed.

The irony they cannot see. Sticking to their father because of the money they get.

Instead, she continues to chew over her father’s behavior. She shares the darker details with her cousin (“He raped my mother Collin”), who offers to bring in his own father to attempt some sort of intervention. Andrea responds:

There’s nothing anyone can do
We keep showing up and eating the lobster. Nothing changes.

Well to be fair nobody really knows what’s going on except your nuclear family

I know
I’m not really blaming the extended family.

So if they knew it would be different

I guess I just don’t think it would be different

I do.

Bc if my mom says she is staying w him and she is fine, I feel like everyone would just be like okay cool

At least I know my dad wouldn’t go.
But he’d be there for your mom.

And I feel like if I “out” her and the family refuses to be around him, then I just ruined the family

[...]

Just a few weeks later, Andrea begins fielding congratulations from her friends about her dad’s involvement with the Trump campaign.

[...]

At the end of the day, Andrea remains anguished about dancing on her father’s string but can’t give up access to her father’s money, his power, and, ultimately, his values.

I've nothing to add to that.  Other than to suggest if we knew half of what really goes on in the lives of the powerful among us, we'd be stunned silent anyway.

But, speaking of Martha Mitchell...I found this while looking for an article to link to when I mentioned her:

Stephen King, 76, a longtime confidante and booster of House Speaker Paul Ryan (and former business partner of Ryan’s brother, Tobin), [...] is the new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. He has no diplomatic experience and had never spent a day in Prague before taking up his post there on December 7. Radio Prague, the official state news outlet, called him “a rich Republican businessman…who worked for the FBI early in his career.”

Left unsaid was that King reportedly played a crucial role in the 1972 Watergate affair. According to several accounts over the years, King helped cover up ties between President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and the burglars arrested inside the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex—and in a particularly violent fashion. None of that came up during his confirmation hearing.

  Newsweek

He was the guy who kept Martha captive and drugged to keep her quiet about Watergate!

In June 1972, King was an ex–FBI agent working as a security aide for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP, Nixon’s campaign arm. His duty on the week of the break-in was to protect—and keep a close eye on—Martha Mitchell, the talkative wife of Nixon’s campaign director, former Attorney General John Mitchell, while the Mitchells were on a campaign swing in California.

Martha Mitchell, an outspoken Arkansan dubbed “the Mouth of the South” in press reports, had been complaining vaguely to anyone who would listen about campaign operatives carrying out “dirty tricks” against the Democrats. [...] [S]he called a favorite reporter, United Press International’s Helen Thomas.

Enter King, who “rushed into her bedroom, threw her back across the bed, and ripped the telephone out of the wall,” wrote veteran Washington reporter Winzola McLendon in her 1979 biography of Martha Mitchell, to whom she was close. “The conversation ended abruptly when it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand,” Thomas reported.

[...]

Thomas added that when she called back, the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”

[...]

Reporters scurried to find Mitchell for a follow-up. A few days later, one did. Marcia Kramer of the New York Daily News tracked her down at the Westchester Country Club in Rye, New York. Kramer, a veteran crime reporter, described Mitchell as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms. A later account in McCall’s magazine said that after King ripped the phone from Mitchell, he “summoned” a doctor, who gave her “a tranquilizing shot” and “[saw] to it that no more of her outgoing calls [would] be taken by the hotel switchboard.”

Mitchell eventually returned to her husband from Westchester, but only on condition that he resign from CREEP and that King be fired. He did resign, but when she learned that King had been promoted to security chief for the campaign, she wrote a letter to Parade magazine, the Sunday newspaper supplement, saying that he “not only dealt me the most horrible experience I have ever had, but inflicted bodily harm upon me.” [...]

On December 11, [2017] King told Newsweek, “I do not wish to comment further on this old story."

In McLendon’s authorized biography years later, Mitchell told a story that seemed scripted for The Shining. After King ripped the phone from her hand, she related, she ran to another room to make a call. “Again...she was thrown aside while the phone was disconnected,” McLendon wrote. “Steve then shoved her into her room and slammed the door.”

Mitchell next tried to get to an adjacent villa via the balcony, but “King ran out and pulled her back inside. She claimed he threw her down and kicked her.… The next day...she slipped downstairs, planning to escape, but King spotted her just as she reached a glass door. In the ensuing scuffle, Martha’s left hand was cut, so badly that six stitches were required in two fingers.”

That’s when the doctor was summoned to sedate her. “Before [the shot] took effect, she tried to get away, but according to Martha, King saw her dashing toward the door and ran over and slapped her across the room.”

[...]

[T]wo more years passed before anyone came forward to corroborate Mitchell’s story of what happened after her call with Thomas was abruptly terminated. In 1975, McCord, convicted of conspiracy in the Watergate affair, admitted that “basically the woman was kidnapped.”

“Thank God somebody is coming to my assistance,” Mitchell told The New York Times. “I was not only kidnapped, but I was threatened at gunpoint, and you can put that in.”

During his August 1 confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, King was not asked about his alleged role in roughing up Mitchell.

Roughing her up?

It doesn’t matter that King’s role in the Watergate affair occurred nearly a half-century ago; he should have been questioned about it, says Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar on public policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

No shit.

Sean Bartlett, a spokesman for the Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says King was asked about the Watergate episode before his public testimony. “After questioning him, and measuring his other qualifications and responses to questions on a range of issues, staff did not believe there was evidence or reason to delay his nomination,” Bartlett says.

Jesus Christ. What would it take to disqualify a person?

Not that the Republican majority in Congress or President Donald Trump’s White House would be inclined to fire him, says Ornstein. The bar for what’s acceptable conduct, he maintains, has been dramatically lowered by Republicans since Trump took office. “This just one example, among many very sordid ones, including judges and Cabinet officers.

What the everloving fuck?

Is it strange that he's amabassador to Melania's part of the world?

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