Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

21. In 1981 Atwater authored one of the most infamous quotes in American electoral history, describing the Republicans’ so-called Southern Strategy. As Atwater said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N*gger, n*gger, n*gger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘n*gger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N*gger, n*gger.’” See Rick Perlstein, “Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012.

22. Edsall, “Partners in Political PR Firm.”

23. Vogel, “Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure.”

24. Michael Lewis, “Three Words a Lawyer Should Never Say to Clients,” Bloomberg, March 27, 1998.

25. Evan Thomas, “The Slickest Shop in Town,” Time, March 3, 1986.

26. Steven Mufson and Tom Hamburger, “Inside Trump Adviser Manafort’s World of Politics and Global Financial Dealmaking,” Washington Post, April 26, 2016.

27. Manuel Roig-Franzia, “The Swamp Builders,” Washington Post, November 29, 2018.

28. Thomas, “The Slickest Shop in Town.”

29. Roig-Franzia, “The Swamp Builders.”

30. One other element of the “swamp” refined by Manafort and his team: the political action committee. According to both Manafort’s memoirs and reportage elsewhere, Manafort’s colleagues formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee in the 1970s. Per Manafort, it was “the first real political action committee in the United States.” It was also a “precursor to the rise of super PACs,” according to The Washington Post, helping lay the groundwork for deep-pocketed donors to flood American elections with financing. See Manafort, Political Prisoner; Roig-Franzia, “The Swamp Builders.”

31. Edsall, “Partners in Political PR Firm.”

32. Roig-Franzia, “The Swamp Builders.”

33. Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler.”

34. Katy Daigle, “Trump Criticizes Pequots, Casino,” Hartford Courant, October 6, 1993.

35. Shawn Boburg, “Donald Trump’s Long History of Clashes with Native Americans,” Washington Post, July 25, 2016.

36. Joseph Tanfani, “Trump Was Once So Involved in Trying to Block Indian Casino That He Secretly Approved Attack Ads,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2016.

37. Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, August 2017.

38. Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler.”

39. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, “Mystery Man: Ukraine’s US Fixer,” Politico, March 5, 2014.

8. SHAME IS FOR SISSIES

1. David R. Gayton, “A Letter by Walt Whitman: ‘The Spanish Element in Our Nationality,’” Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal (University of California, Berkeley), Fall 2022.

2. Spy, February 1992.

3. “Who’s the Sleaziest of Them All?,” Spy, February 1992, 55.

4. Ibid.

5. Filings can be found in the FARA database, available at FARA.gov.

6. Bill Berkeley, “Zaire: An African Horror Story,” The Atlantic, August 1993.

7. Art Levine, “Publicists of the Damned,” Spy, February 1992, 55.

8. K. Riva Levinson, “I Worked for Paul Manafort. He Always Lacked a Moral Compass,” Washington Post, November 1, 2017.

9. Cristina Maza, “Here’s Where Paul Manafort Did Business with Corrupt Dictators,” Newsweek, August 7, 2018.

10. Don Van Natta, Jr., and Douglas Frantz, “Lobbyists Are Friends and Foes to McCain,” New York Times, February 10, 2000.

11. Tom McCarthy, “Paul Manafort: How Decades of Serving Dictators Led to Role as Trump’s Go-To Guy,” The Guardian, October 30, 2017.

12. Levine, “Publicists of the Damned,” 62.

13. Kenneth P. Vogel, “Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure,” Politico Magazine, June 10, 2016.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Evan Thomas, “The Slickest Shop in Town,” Time, March 3, 1986.

17. Mark Fineman and Doyle McManus, “Vote Fraud on Grand Scale Reflected in Manila Area,” Los Angeles Times, February 16, 1986.

18. Ibid.

19. Vogel, “Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure.”

20. Fineman and McManus, “Vote Fraud.”

21. Vogel, “Paul Manafort’s Wild and Lucrative Philippine Adventure.”

22. J. C. Sharman, The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management: On the International Campaign Against Grand Corruption (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).

23. Pamela Brogan, “The Torturers’ Lobby: How Human Rights–Abusing Nations Are Represented in Washington,” Center for Public Integrity, Washington, DC, 1992, https://cloudfront-files-1.publicintegrity.org/legacy_projects/pdf_reports/THETORTURERSLOBBY.pdf.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Levine, “Publicists of the Damned.”

27. Ibid., 58.