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

44. Manafort, Political Prisoner.

45. Ibid.

46. Adam Weinstein, “Trump Aide Connected to 2006 Attack on US Marines in Ukraine,” Task & Purpose, December 23, 2020.

47. Adam Weinstein and Ken Silverstein, “Trump Aide Manafort Implicated in Pro-Russian Protests Against US Troops,” Fusion, August 18, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160821164541/http://fusion.net/story/338016/trump-manafort-marines-nato-protests/.

48. Weinstein, “Trump Aide Connected to 2006 Attack.”

49. Ibid.

50. Weinstein and Silverstein, “Trump Aide Manafort Implicated.”

51. “Ukraine: Opposition Creates Tempest over ‘Sea Breeze’ in Crimea,” June 6, 2006, WikiLeaks, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06KIEV2190_a.html.

52. Casey Michel, “The Crime of the Century,” New Republic, March 4, 2015.

53. “Ukraine: Opposition Creates Tempest over ‘Sea Breeze’ in Crimea.”

54. Maxim Tucker, “Trump Campaign Chief Linked to Secret Kiev Cash Payments,” Times (London), August 17, 2016.

55. Weinstein and Silverstein, “Trump Aide Manafort Implicated.”

56. Waldeck, The Black Ledger.

57. Barry Meier, “Lawmakers Seek to Close Foreign Lobbyist Loopholes,” New York Times, June 12, 2008.

58. Silverstein and Weinstein, “How Trump Aide Paul Manafort Got Ridiculously Wealthy.”

59. Ibid.

60. Ibid.

61. Kenzi Abou-Sabe, Tom Winter, and Max Tucker, “What Did Ex-Trump Aide Paul Manafort Really Do in Ukraine?,” NBC News, June 27, 2017.

62. Meier, “Lawmakers Seek to Close Foreign Lobbyist Loopholes.”

63. Burns and Haberman, “Mystery Man.”

11. BLOOD MONEY

1. Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015).

2. Yanukovych’s zoo would not be Manafort’s only brush with an ostrich. As investigators later discovered, Manafort owned an ostrich-skin jacket worth $15,000, as well as a separate ostrich-skin vest worth $9,500. He further owned a python-skin jacket worth $18,500. See Ashley Hoffman, “The Internet Can’t Stop Plucking at Paul Manafort’s $15,000 Ostrich Jacket,” Time, August 3, 2018.

3. Darmon Richter, “Occupy Mezhyhirya: Squatting the Mansion of Ukraine’s Ex-President,” Ex Utopia, July 29, 2020.

4. Julia Ioffe, “Of Course the Ousted President of Ukraine Commissioned a Nude Portrait of Himself,” New Republic, April 30, 2014.

5. “Monument to Corruption: Ukraine’s Most-Wanted Man Built $75M Home on a $25G Salary,” Fox News, December 5, 2015.

6. Franklin Foer, “Paul Manafort, American Hustler,” The Atlantic, March 2018.

7. Michael Kranish and Tom Hamburger, “Paul Manafort’s ‘Lavish Lifestyle’ Highlighted in Indictment,” Washington Post, October 30, 2017.

8. Shortly thereafter, I sat with a friend in a Marquis de Sade–themed café in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. On the televisions—which were draped by lace stockings, high heels, and whips—played Tymoshenko’s prosecution and perp walk on loop. It remains one of the strangest, most surreal meals of my life.

9. It didn’t hurt that, around the same time, U.S. attorneys also become key tools in transnational money-laundering networks, providing attorney-client privilege for kleptocratic clients looking to inject their wealth into the American economy. See Alexander Cooley and Casey Michel, “U.S. Lawyers Are Foreign Kleptocrats’ Best Friends,” Foreign Policy, March 23, 2021. As elsewhere, all lobbying-related filings are located in the FARA digital database, such as Baker McKenzie’s filing to lobby on behalf of the regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo: https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6821-Exhibit-AB-20200508-1.pdf.

10. Casey Michel and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, “The Dictator-Run Bank That Tells the Story of America’s Foreign Corruption,” Foreign Policy, July 7, 2020.

11. All filings regarding Skadden’s work in Ukraine are located in the FARA digital database, including https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6617-Exhibit-AB-20190118-1.pdf.

12. Sharon LaFraniere, “Trial of High-Powered Lawyer Gregory Craig Exposes Seamy Side of Washington’s Elite,” New York Times, August 26, 2019.

13. Craig initially connected with Manafort because of another bipartisan link. Doug Schoen, a leading Democratic pollster, had offered to help Manafort in Ukraine—and personally recruited Craig to Yanukovych’s cause. See ibid.

14. FARA filing regarding Skadden’s work in Ukraine: https://efile.fara.gov/docs/6617-Exhibit-AB-20190118-1.pdf.

15. Greg Farrell and Christian Berthelsen, “Skadden Settlement for Manafort Work Suggests Ex-Partner’s Peril,” Bloomberg, January 17, 2019.

16. U.S. Department of Justice, “Prominent Global Law Firm Agrees to Register as an Agent of a Foreign Principal,” press release, January 17, 2019. For the most detailed examination of Skadden’s work for Yanukovych, see the Skadden settlement agreement, January 15, 2019, at https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1124381/download.

17. The entire Skadden report on the Tymoshenko trial can be found at https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/538591/tymoshenko.pdf.