Paul Manafort and How the Swamp Was Made

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He doesn't exactly have a household name.

In fact, until he became head of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, most Americans had probably never heard of Paul Manafort.

Now, he's been indicted on charges of conspiracy and money laundering by the special counsel Robert Mueller.

What does the rise and fall of Paul Manafort reveal about corruption around the world?

And what will it mean for the White House?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

And with me in the studio in DC today is Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic.

Hello, Jeffrey.

Hi, Matt.

And with both of us today is Franklin Forer.

Author of the Atlantic's March 2018 cover story, The Plot Against America, about Paul Manafort.

Frank, thanks for joining us.

Honored to be with you.

And honored.

Are you really honored?

Truly honored.

Truly.

Not just superficially

in that fake sort of way that I'm normally honored, but

the Washington way.

No, no, no.

We'll get to that.

This is beyond Washington honored.

All right, we'll get to that.

Honored to have you at the table.

Alex Wagner, our co-host, is off gallivanting this week, but will be back with us again next week.

Frank, I want to start with a passage that appears deep in your story, but is something

that does to prove that he read your story, but the thesis of the story.

Quote: Corruption has become the master narrative of our times.

We live in a world of smash and grab fortunes amassed through political connections and outright theft.

Paul Manafort, over the course of his career, was a great normalizer of corruption.

Helping elect Donald Trump in so many ways represents the culmination of Paul Manafort's work.

What is Paul Manafort's work?

So, one of the things that emerges from your story is that Paul Manafort is a guy whose career can't exactly be neatly placed on a LinkedIn profile.

He has had different types of jobs than your typical guy, and the type of work that he does is kind of hard to describe.

So

in your words, Frank, having dived into this guy's history, what is Paul Manafort good at?

So Paul Manafort began as a political consultant, as a strategist.

He worked for Gerald Gerald Ford.

He worked for Ronald Reagan.

And after he had this experience, he set up a firm in Washington, D.C., where he started out intending to help people get help Republicans get elected to political office.

But once he arrived in Washington, he just started getting almost bombarded with phone calls from corporations who said, you know what, can you help us lobby on Capitol Hill?

And so his consulting firm became a lobbying firm.

And over time,

he morphed into becoming this substantial player in Washington and Republican politics, and then actually in global politics.

And there's this theme that runs through all these different iterations of Paul Manafort, which is that his job is to help people.

I mean, there's this kind of run-of-the-mill thing that consultants and lobbyists do, which is that they try to help their clients look good.

Now, Paul Manafort happened to see the tremendous business opportunity that lies with helping not just corporations look good and in turn get goodies from the capital,

but there were all these figures around the world who had their own political and business reasons for improving their image.

And they happened to be a lot of them goons, authoritarian dictators, oligarchs, and they needed to improve their image in Washington in order to

protect themselves from the federal government in some instances.

But in other instances, they were trying to get arms from the federal government.

And then primarily, you had people who had obtained their power and their fortune through ill-gotten means who needed to not just, you know, we talk about the laundering of money, but in some ways, the laundering of reputation is its own big parallel business.

That in order to function in this world, you can't be a pariah.

You need somebody like Paul Manafort to help reshape your image so that you become a passable member of global society.

And that helps your business.

It's a prerequisite for your business, in fact.

I will note, and maybe we can come back to this: that Paul Manafort is not necessarily a guy who's mastered his own image in public.

No, it's a bitter irony.

It's what we call a bitter irony.

But come back to this point about dictators.

Was he the first person to do this in Washington, or was he just the best?

So, starting in the 1970s, there were a few pioneers who had started to work in this field.

There was a company called Sawyer Miller that had begun to work, take the techniques of American political consulting and export them to the rest of the world.

But what Paul Manafort did was he offered this full service shop.

to dictators where he said, you know, I'm not going to just help you run Potempkin elections in your own country.

I'm not going to help you just lobby for dollars in Washington.

I'm going to give you the full suite of services.

And I'm going to become, in a way, your consequeri.

Why wasn't this illegal?

But why would it be illegal?

Why wouldn't it be illegal?

No, but I mean, it's.

It's, I mean, an American, I mean, think about it.

I mean, maybe you're so part of the swamp that you don't see how gross it is.

But, I mean, does a swamp creature know he's in a swamp?

Does a fish know he's in water?

We're all in the water gate in D.C.

We're literally in the water gate right now taping this.

I'm asking by the hour, right?

I'm asking a faux-naive question,

but

how did it come to pass that American political consultants affiliated with particular American political parties got to do flak work for pay for foreign dictators?

There has to be some law

that precluded that.

Well,

there's a law that aimed to control it, which is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, which was passed on the eve of World War II, where there was this publicist called Ivy Dye who got hired by a German company to try to improve the Third Reich's image.

And so our response to that's a task.

We've passed Holocaust Remembrance.

Right, right, right.

No,

that's the hardest job in PR, right?

Yeah, no.

And so what we said was, if you're going to represent a foreign government,

you have to make that known.

Okay, but what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, what happened in the, why did the system break down to the point where Congress, president at the time, didn't say, wait, this should simply be illegal.

This is crazy.

This is one of the things that emerges from your story, Frank, which is the line between

illegal corruption.

and just indecent

behavior and just like indecent behavior.

Yeah, corruption.

Okay, so first of all, I think we need to say that this was actually one of the nightmares of the founders: that Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, they lost a lot of sleep about the idea that foreign governments would be able to get influence in the democracy.

And so, foreign corruption was something that

they wrote about or they thought about.

They didn't necessarily enshrine anything specific about it within the Constitution, but it was, I mean,

we're in this age where I think we have this new appreciation for democratic norms and for the culture of a democracy.

And so something like working for a foreign dictator is something that would probably strike most people within

our society as being horrific.

And so that it didn't happen.

And the people who did it were extreme outliers.

And what happens is that the system starts to break down piece by piece over time.

And if we follow the trajectory of somebody like Paul Manafort, you can see the ways in which he understood the weaknesses in our system of norms and that you could just keep pushing the envelope.

And so something that had been beyond the pale, you kind of suddenly make that an acceptable business practice and

you proceed to the next to destroy the next norm and make that an acceptable business practice.

I mean, this is what I was going to say.

What emerges from your story is this picture of a guy who, among his gifts, among his unique abilities is an ability to find the norm and step past it, to find the norm that may already be somewhat troubling, the thing that we may consider corrupt, and go beyond what other players in his universe are willing to do.

Right.

I mean, this is, I mean, and in other fields,

if you're in other fields,

you consider that innovation and creative destruction.

But when you're in the field of influencing the U.S.

government, it just becomes destruction.

So a specific question for you, Frank.

If I were to ask you to name to take to go back to paul manafort's linkedin profile for a second who do you imagine that paul manafort might list first among his references if i were to check his references as a would-be as a dictator who wanted to get his reputation laundered who do you think i would be pointed to first well so i think his his greatest political project was the president of ukraine viktor yanukovich

and that project is the one that he would point to because it was the one that that he was most personally invested in.

He spent almost 10 years working in Kiev.

With his other clients, he was always working for multiple dictators, let's say, at any given moment.

But starting in 2004, after the Orange Revolution, when he first landed in Kiev, his client list shrunk very, very quickly.

to essentially this guy, Viktor Yanukovych, and the clique of oligarchs who surrounded him.

And it was also, I think, the political project that he was most invested in personally because he took a political party and a figure who had been discredited.

In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych rigged an election for the presidency of Ukraine.

And then there was a revolution aimed at undoing that election, which was the Orange Revolution.

And in that campaign, if you'll remember, his primary political opponent was poisoned with dioxin.

So he'd rigged an election, he'd poisoned an opponent, and a revolution had risen up against him, and he was sent into self-imposed exile.

And Manafort was able to take this ball of muck and reshape it as a plausible political figure.

And he got paid gobs of money, tens of millions of dollars to do it.

And it worked.

He was able to get this guy to return from the political dead to become president of Ukraine in 2010.

I want to come to the point in this story where Manafort meets Trump, that fateful moment, at least for Manafort, that fateful moment.

But I'm still confused by something about Manafort.

How could someone who's so good at his job be so bad at his job?

Not making a moral observation about this, but this is a guy who could take a ball of muck or however you just called it and turn him into a winning candidate.

Why has his life come to this point?

Well, first of all, when you're driven by desperation, you oftentimes are unable to understand your own political calculus.

Now, tell me about it.

I live that here.

I know, I noticed, I noticed, I noticed, I noticed.

So

in 2015, Paul Manafort's life was a mess.

And so financially, it was a mess because he'd lost his primary client, this president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, because he was swept out in a revolution.

And so Manafort didn't have,

he tumbled very far, very fast professionally.

He lost his status.

His ego had taken a hit.

As I said, financially, he'd taken a hit so much so that

his cash became tight.

He had to take out all sorts of absurd loans from banks where he was actually lying to the banks in order to get more money from them.

He had a very expensive lifestyle, which became very difficult to finance.

His own daughter's wedding was something that he struggled to pay and eliminated the experience.

After being a multi-multimillionaire.

Yeah, after being a multi-multimillionaire.

And then his personal life collapsed because he had been having an affair and he got caught in the affair.

He continued with the affair and then got caught again.

And so his marriage was in a state of distress.

His kids hated him.

And he was essentially forced to check himself into a clinic in Arizona to recover from his breakdown.

So the guy who experiences that many gut punches, who makes that many mistakes, who's really, who has reasons to doubt himself and his worth in the world is not going to be the person who's going to manage their own image in an expert sort of way.

And so he was desperate when he came to the Trump campaign and he took risks that he wouldn't have taken under normal circumstances.

And I imagine if the part of the reputation that you're creating is your willingness to transgress boundaries that others might shy away from, then creating that type of a reputation is at odds with creating a sort of public image of being a sterling man of character and decency.

Totally.

That's right.

And there's this one other part of the Manafort persona, which is that one of the reason he was attracted to these dictators and to these foreign assignments and loved traveling around the world is that he had this buccaneering sense of adventurousness.

And he also had a sense, as you're describing, of

immunity from the laws of gravity.

And so nobody had ever busted him ever before, really in a meaningful sort of way for

the transgressive acts that he'd committed.

Okay, nobody's ever, nobody busted him, but acknowledging that the Trump campaign was non-traditional from the start,

still, this guy washes up, suggested as the campaign chairman.

Nobody said, wait a second, I just heard that his life has completely gone to hell.

And all of the things that you report,

you're a great reporter, but these things are, you could find out these things.

Well, you actually couldn't because

he's in some ways a reserved and introspective figure.

It's hard to imagine him that way because if he knew for a job, you would call all of your mutual friends and say,

What do you think of Paul?

Somebody would have said things are kind of sideways.

No, but if you have a facade of success and you're able to maintain that facade of success with your house and the Hamptons and Palm Beach and the cars and all these things, it's not necessarily easy to see the signs of decay.

And especially not since he'd been in Ukraine for 10 years.

And so people kind of lost track of him.

And so even his close friends didn't really fully understand what was happening in his life.

And you write in the piece, quote, The sad truth is that all of the damning information contained within Special Counsel Bob Miller's indictment would have remained submerged if Manafort had withstood the temptation to seek out a role in Trump's campaign.

even if his record had become known, it would have felt unexceptional.

Manafort's misdeed in our current era would not have seemed so inconsistent with the run of global play.

So there's a way in which the

ascending to the top of the Trump campaign was itself something of an undoing.

Manafort is Icarus and Trump is the son.

That's right.

And Trump kind of proves the point, too, right?

Which is that he lives in a world where he's gotten away with a lot of things over the course of his career and never really paid a political price for them.

And I mean, Trump's sins are a lot more surface than I think some of Manafort's sins were.

That Manafort was a mercenary, and everybody knew that he was a mercenary.

They knew that he'd worked for terrible people.

They knew that he'd pushed the bounds of influence peddling.

But that's kind of Washington, right?

Washington is a place filled with mercenaries.

Well, go to this large point because one of the great aspects of this

piece that's out on our cover now is that it's not just about Paul Manafort.

It's about a city and a culture that rewarded a person with the character and behavior of Paul Manafort.

Was it always true that, to borrow the phrase, that this place is a swamp?

Or have we just gradually normalized to worse and worse behavior?

I think we've gradually, I think both are true, that the place has always been a swamp.

There have always been seedy creatures here.

There have always been people who've bought influence.

There have always been businesses that have been successful in buying influence.

But I think that there was this period that began with the progressive era and extended up through the 70s and early 80s, where business, which had kind of you had the emergence of these corporations who thought of themselves as being efficient, scientific.

There was this political culture that had emerged in Washington over time that tried to view

the practice of policy and government as something that should be immune from the the interests and from lobbying.

And so you head into the post-war period, lobbying was a fairly non-existent business in Washington.

There were corporations who had offices in D.C., and a lot of times they'd hire former congressmen to look after their concerns in Washington, but you didn't have this highly professionalized mercenary system, which is the system that Manafort in a lot of ways helped create in the 1980s.

And so you have a breakdown, again, to go back to our norm core theme,

that

you had norms and those norms started to collapse.

Business had to actually be persuaded that it was in their interest to ramp up in Washington.

Business came to conclude that being in Washington wasn't contrary to the national interest.

And it wasn't even a defensive move, that the government represented a business opportunity, that they could exploit the state in order to enhance their profits.

And Manafort, again, was one of these figures who helped persuade business

that that was the proper thing to do.

So make that concrete for me for a second, Frank.

It's the mid-80s.

Yeah.

You are working for Black Manafort and Stone.

And I walk in.

I've got a pot of money and I want you to help me.

What can your firm do for me?

The Prime Minister of Podkastistan.

I'm the Prime Minister of what will become one day

the Empire of Podkastistan.

And I've done some misdeeds, perhaps.

We won't talk about them.

But you have some services to offer.

What can you do for me that all these other firms lining K-Street won't?

Well, first of all, because of my connections to the Reagan administration, my ample connections to the Reagan administration, I can help you with whatever issue you have with the U.S.

government.

If there's any issue with your entourage getting into this country, they need visas.

We can take care of that in a second.

I know that you want a new batch of arms in order to crush the insurgency in your country.

Awesome.

Well, as it happens, I have all these friends in the capital who I ran their campaigns.

I know all the intimate details of their lives because I vetted them.

They owe me.

And so we can get you arms.

No big deal.

Now, I think it would be really helpful to improve your image in Washington.

I think that'll help that'll help get you even to get you those tanks that you were looking for.

And maybe even we can get you some foreign assistance so that you can build some clinics that you can name after yourself.

And I think if I could get you an interview with Ted Coppel on Nightline, that would be really helpful.

We can coach you for that.

We can make sure that you get the best suits, that you get the best manicure.

And then also, you know what I think would be really helpful to your reputation is if we had an election.

We know, of course, you're going to win the election,

but let's have an election.

I think it'll look really good with the administration back here on Capitol Hill.

And you're going to win the election, we know.

But it'll also be a chance to run some advertisements for you back at home to remind your people all the amazing things that you've done for them.

You make a good case, Podcast.

$10 million, please.

Wow.

It's an impressive sales pitch.

I come back to the same question, though.

This is going on not with countries that are natural allies of the United States.

some are allies of the united states they might be non-democratic allies but they're allies but some are just

plain old bad countries why didn't the system and this is what i think of i think of washington as having a a compromised immune system where was the immune system that said to a paul manafort that's disgusting what are you doing you're operating on behalf of a foreign power george washington himself said no foreign entanglements and look what you're doing you're entangling uh well there was a the the famous essay about dictatorships and double standards We developed some of our own double standards, right?

Right, which is great.

Yeah.

And so on the eve of the Reagan administration, Gene Kirkpatrick wrote an article, an essay in Commentary Magazine that was kind of the blueprint for the Reagan administration about dictatorships and double standards.

That in fighting the Cold War, sometimes we had to embrace countries whose values didn't really resemble ours, but they were our friends in the Cold War, and winning the Cold War was the most important thing.

And one of the gifts that Manafort had was that he understood the mind of the conservative movement.

And so he could take somebody like the president for life of Podkastistan, who doesn't really care about the Cold War, doesn't really care about capitalism, doesn't really care about democracy.

But Manafort knew how to dress you up in just the right sorts of ways where we could set up the right meetings with the people

at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank.

We could have you deliver a speech about the horrors of communism.

And so, in my image making, on behalf of Podcastistan,

I could take you and make you look like the Thomas Jefferson of your country.

Nice job.

It seems like what you're saying, I mean, part of your outrage about this is that it just seems alien in so many ways to how we kind of wish Washington were.

It's just one of the more ostentatious examples of people who've come to Washington,

some of whom have come to do good, end up doing well, but end up doing well in ways that actually goes against the best interest of the United States.

It is not in the interest of the United States to support certain kinds of dictators.

And yet, people who were, and Manafort,

obviously we can't, it's hard to think of him now as an esteemed figure, but he was a guy, he was connected.

He was Mr.

Inside.

That was one of the attractions to the Trump campaign of Paul Manafort, was that he was Mr.

Inside.

And it's just amazing to me that over time, our

immune system was our moral immune system was compromised to the point where this kind of behavior would be seen as normal.

It's lying on behalf of dictators.

But just to step back, I mean,

there is predicate there,

which is that

he was lying in some ways on behalf of corporations, or that there was in kind of a widespread sort of way.

You had a lot of people.

Well, lying on the corporations allow those corporations to get into these countries and do all that.

No, I'm I'm just saying that

there's, let's say there's an energy company that needs representation in Washington in order to combat some environmental policy.

They play higher bar.

They substitute.

No, I get it's a continuum.

I'm just saying when you're dealing with an actual foreign power, it's an important thing.

It should be a different thing.

Sure.

The fact that Donald Trump's campaign would hire a guy who's working on behalf of some very dubious Ukrainian politicians is...

says enough.

Sometimes the scandal, sometimes the Russia scandal is the stuff that's right in front of your face the whole time.

Totally.

I asked you for a positive reference on Paul Manafort, but I'm curious, if I were to call up Oleg Daraposka and ask him for a reference on Paul Manafort, what would he tell me?

So Oleg Daraposka is Russia's aluminum magnate.

He obtained his fortune in the 1990s in the so-called aluminum wars, which were really the most bloody of the struggles to seize control of the newly privatized assets of the old Soviet state.

And in that struggle, there's this long line of dead bodies and Daripaska is the guy who triumphed.

And so Manafort met Daripaska in the early 2000s and Daripaska became a client of Manafort's.

And Manafort would travel to Moscow, sit in Daripaska's office, and eventually Daripaska invested money with Paul Manafort.

Money that was meant to be invested in Ukraine, Russia, Eastern Europe as private equity.

And for Deripaska, the money that he was investing with Manafort was actually relatively trivial because on the eve of the financial crash in 2008, Deripaska was worth $28 billion.

So to invest $100 million with Manafort, say, would be nothing.

But then the financial crash happens.

Deripasca needs to get bailed out by Putin, which happens in this totally humiliating scene where Putin travels to Daripaska's factory and forces,

gives him a loan, forces Daripaska to reopen his factories, which had been shuttered, makes him sign a paper promising to pay back the Russian state.

And then after Daripaska signs a paper, Putin turns to him on TV and says, give me back my pen.

Ouch.

So he humiliates the guy.

And so at this stage, Daripaska says, you know what?

That money I invested with Paul Manafort might not have been worth anything to me before, but I need it now.

And Deripasca is not the type of guy to overlook a debt.

And so Manafort agrees to sell this one company that he invested in on behalf of Daripasca.

And time passes.

Manafort talks about struggling to sell the company.

He promises Daripasca an audit.

And then at some point, Manafort stops returning Daripasca's calls, stops responding to him.

And this continues through the present.

Only last month, Daripaska sued Manafort in New York asking for his money back.

And at this stage, Daripaska believes that Manafort never really invested the money in the first place.

So Manafort, according to this Russian oligarch, was willing to steal $20 million from him, which is a pretty incredible thing.

And then it has relevance to the Robert Mueller investigation because Manafort, as soon as he became part of the Trump campaign, turned to Deripaska and started to promise him access into the Trump campaign with the hopes, it seems like, of getting made quote-unquote whole with Deripasca.

Now, we don't know a lot about this, it should be said.

We don't know if Deripaska ever responded to Manafort or if he even got the messages in the first place, but it does show you Manafort's frame of mind.

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I want us to talk about the Russia scandal specifically, and I want to get there through this quote from your story, Frank.

Quote, conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C.

corrupt all the idealists, naifes, and ingenus who settle there.

But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards?

What if if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp?

That question is an interesting one, given the insider-outsider dimensions of politics today.

I think Washington, the Washington that you depict through the life of Paul Manafort and the career of Paul Manafort, is one that I think in its most cartoonish versions, Americans stereotype DC as being now.

It's one big cafe Milano.

And I think what's surprising about your story is the inversion almost.

That, you know, this was a kind of sleepy, even the profession of Washington,

sorry, even the profession of lobbying was something somewhat sleepy before this guy came around and showed this town of fuddy-duty dressing folks how the Europeans dressed and what it looked like to really light the world on fire.

Bring us to today.

What is Paul Manafort's legacy and what might be his impact on the White House now?

Well, so the legacy is the one that we've been describing, which is that in this narrative of corruption, where you need somebody like Manafort who's brash, who just keeps pushing and testing the limits.

And that's his contribution to American life, is that he just knocked down limit after limit, making something that had been beyond the pale normal and acceptable.

And as we've said, we live in this world where if you were to go to Davos, the seat of global conventional wisdom, you have a lot of people running around that conference who 10 years ago would have been beyond the pale.

They would have been gangsters, they would have been thieves, they would have been dictators.

But it takes people like Paul Manafort to render those people culturally acceptable.

And that's what he did.

Do you think the fact that Manafort has been indicted and that all of these details are spilling out into the public record, does that revert the norms perhaps back to some sort of humanly recognizable decent mean?

Good luck with that.

Yeah, I mean, so to say something for that thesis, there has been

a rush to the foreign agent registration office where lobbyists who have been working in the shadows on behalf of clients suddenly see somebody getting punished for failing to disclose their work.

And so it's had some almost immediate palpable impact in that sort of way.

And you know what?

For deterrence purposes, it does take having somebody like Paul Manafort being made an example of.

And it's not just Paul Manafort.

His tendrils expanded in different directions.

He worked with Tony Podesta, who was the biggest lobbyist in Washington.

And actually, Tony Podesta, because of this scandal and because of his work with Paul Manafort, has taken a big fall.

So

that's actually a big deal.

You have heavy hitters who've been knocked down a peg.

But does that change the culture of Washington?

Aaron Powell, there's another aspect of this that's material to your story.

You mentioned the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers as being these big exposures, these leaks that have made visible and public a lot of transactions that have previously been kept under the rug.

Some of the details in your story derive from a leak of Paul Manafort's texts.

And tell us a little bit about the process that you went through in figuring out responsible ways to fold that information into your story.

Right.

So there were millions of words of text messages that a Ukrainian hacktivist collective had purloined from Paul Manafort

daughter's cell phone.

They expanded over years.

And some of that information had been kind of cherry-picked and prepackaged for Western reporters.

And there was primarily one quote where she was talking to her sister about their dad's fortunes and she bemoaned the fact that they were essentially living off of blood money.

It was a really, really compelling quote, a really stirring, bracing quote.

And it appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post and all sorts of other media organizations.

But people didn't really burrow much deeper than that into the rest of the text messages.

And

for my purposes, constructing a portrait of this guy, there were really compelling psychological reasons to look at those text messages.

And it's a very, very intimate portrait of a family's life.

And

in a lot of ways, I struggled with using these messages because I don't want to live in a world where people's phones are hacked by political enemies and that information becomes weaponized.

And so I tried to approach this information both as a journalist, where I was looking for information that served clear public purpose and that really helped prove a thesis and an argument that I thought was important and shed light on a guy who's at the center of the biggest scandal of our times.

And also, I tried to approach that material in as sensitive a way as possible because these are human beings.

And if there were instances where there was unnecessary scar tissue that would be left on people who

are basically bystanders in this scandal, then I think

we discussed that a lot here, and we tried to be as responsible as possible with that information.

Do you all think that in the medium or long term,

this moment that we're living in when information, it might be private conversations in one case, it might be offshore tax havens in another,

this information can be suddenly put on the record.

And we're in a moment where

things that had been previously easy to keep confidential are suddenly tumbling out into public view at a pretty dramatic clip.

Who do you think will ultimately benefit most from that power?

Is it the formerly powerless or is it the currently powerful?

No, it's just chaos.

The truth is not going to win.

I don't think the release of this kind of information, generally speaking, is going to lead to a flourishing of accurate reporting and truth-telling.

I worry about it.

I mean, you know, it's a complicated thing, Frank is talking about, because as journalists, Pentagon Papers

on up, I mean, before the Pentagon Papers as well, if information finds its way into the public domain, you use the information to tell the stories.

But

I

was just thinking about the term Ukrainian Hacktivist Collective.

And

as an intern, maybe I'll get an internship.

Work on their newsletter.

The level of chaos that basically anarchists can create, and more to the point, foreign governments with nefarious intentions can create, has made me be a more circumspect emailer, that's for sure.

I see two competing considerations.

So what we're talking about are secrets and the ways and so sometimes closed doors, secrecy,

these are covers for terrible behavior.

And so the impulse to try to expose is important and powerful.

It's a primary journalistic impulse.

But on the other hand, I kind of don't want to live in a world where there are no secrets because part of secrecy is having the space to have

conversations with yourself, conversations with intimates.

And in that space is where we kick around ideas, where we vent their important intellectual and emotional reasons to have spaces that nobody can see.

Because in that space, we're able to formulate our sense of self.

And so I would hate for there to be a world where everything was transparent.

Yeah.

I guess what we're, we've been cycling around.

And I think one of the themes that your story does a really nice job of walking us along is this question of of corruption, where it fester, and in that sweep of Paul Manafort's experience specifically, from the 70s leading the young Republicans to now,

are we

at a moment when the circumstances that foster corruption are more potent and more common?

We are now at a moment when an outsider has come to Washington

promising to drain the swamp.

Or are they now less effective?

I mean, to me, Donald Trump represents, in a way, the culmination of our era.

That here's this guy who's, in some ways, has built his business empire in ways that

you could kind of broadly lump in with corruption, that he used political influence in order to profit.

He believes in cronyism.

And I do think that corruption now is kind of more rampant than it's ever been, and that there's

so much of respectable society now profits from corruption that big law firms, big PR firms, big banks all have tremendous revenue streams that come from taking ill-gotten fortunes and

help make them legitimate.

The whole idea of tax evasion.

which is its own form of corruption.

Every company has armies of accountants and lawyers that help them find ways to broker deals in these havens around the world where they kind of try to go beyond the reach of the American government to operate in this kind of parallel moral and ethical universe.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It is funny, just as a general commentary on the swamp.

And this was true before the Trump era.

It's true in Obama, Bush, before that.

We worry about, and we have laws against all kinds of petty corruptions.

But in Washington, it is perfectly legal for a presidential administration to sell ambassadorships to the highest bidder.

That's a major crime.

It's not a minor crime.

That's a major,

but it's just, it's, I mean, one of the great utilities of Frank's story is that it's

a bracing explication of how bad

it's all gotten without us knowing.

I mean, it's not true, and everybody who works at the Atlantic knows that frogs don't actually let themselves get boiled slowly to death because Jim Fallows has been on a campaign to make us not use that.

But if frogs did actually stay in the pot, we would be those

frogs.

Frogs are actually talking about Washingtonians.

Something makes me think that.

As look, you know, as the people say, Washington politicians, often they just stay in the boiling pot.

Something makes me think that Fallows is not smiling on this use of the metaphor.

No, as long as you acknowledge that the metaphor doesn't work, it's okay to use the metaphor.

Frank, what went through your mind as the journalist who spent probably the most time with Paul Manafort's record and his words in many cases?

What went through your mind when Bob Mueller announced the indictment?

To me, it was.

Hurry up with the story.

No, no, no, no.

That's what went through your mind.

I'm sorry.

That was my mind.

That was my mind.

First of all, it was incredibly, I mean, I found it to be gratifying because there was this record that I could see.

And I think part of the problem with corruption sometimes

is that it's sitting out there.

Nobody seems to to care about it.

Prosecutors aren't going after it.

And so you start to kind of have to ask yourself, am I seeing something that doesn't exist?

And so it's a form of vindication to have Robert Mueller spell it all out in technicolor detail.

And in some ways, it was much worse than I expected when Mueller described all the accounts in Cyprus and the Grenadians.

I had an inkling about tens of millions, but I didn't know it was 75 million.

And I didn't know how much he was spending on the suits.

And I didn't know, and it was, it was kind of, it was a portrait of, a portrait of this guy's Rube Goldberg-esque financial contraption that he'd set up.

And so I actually was enlightened by the Mueller indictment.

Paul Manafort, is there a soul in there?

I was looking pretty hard for one.

And I do think

you get some glimpses of it.

And it's one of the value of the text messages is that you can see that in some ways

he's a loving father, a loving husband, a loving son.

And so

I could see the human being there.

I could see that he could be charming and that he's smart, that he reads books, that he enjoys the finer things in

life.

He's not.

Mephistopheles.

He's still a flesh and blood human being.

So, listeners, if you want an uncomfortably detailed but scintillatingly written account of power and corruption and greed and wealth and

DC and the world and how they've changed over the past several decades, make sure to check out Frank's March 2018 cover story, The Plot Against America.

On newsstands now, ish.

With that, let us turn from corruption to the things that we want to keep Keepers.

Our closing segment, in which I ask you, what are the things that you've heard, read, listened to, watched, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

So I'll go first this week.

My Keeper this week is a two-part keeper, possibly even three parts, depending on how you count it.

The first of those three parts is the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire.

You may have encountered this show.

Not many people seem to have done so, but a lot of folks were turned off by the first season, and understandably so.

It

almost transparently feels like AMC grasping at the greatness of Mad Men.

They've got a kind of Dawn Draper-ish character that kind of animates the first season.

But after that, there are hints of the show's greatness in that first season.

And then in the subsequent seasons, especially in season three and season four, it turns into an ensemble-led show with two women at its center.

And their relationship and their collaboration, the company that they create and the journey that they go through becomes such an amazing story of creativity collaboration leadership management innovation what it means to innovate in an industry that is changing incredibly dramatically.

The show takes place, it begins in the mid-80s and it takes place in the computer industry at the time and goes through the mid-90s.

And so you follow this band, this ensemble, as they leap from innovation to innovation, technology to technology, as hardware and software start to tumble onto each other, eventually becoming the internet.

And they develop a string of companies as individuals, sometimes together, that show us something of what it's like to be in that churning maelstrom of invention at that moment.

And finishing the show was

wonderful.

Mackenzie Davis, one of the two women who ultimately kind of takes the centerpiece of the show, gave this tremendous interview to E.

Alex Jung at Vulture about some of the dimensions behind the scenes of the show, including being an actress who at first was paid less than her two male co-stars for her work, but went into the fourth season with AMC having equalized the pay between the women and the men who were leading the ensemble.

The interview is is revelatory.

The show is revelatory.

And as a companion, I might recommend the book, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning classic from the 70s.

The two are wonderful compliments to each other, and I can't recommend both of them highly enough.

Halt and Catch Fire, Mackenzie Davis interview with Alex Jung, and The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

Jeff, how about you go next?

What is your keeper this week?

It's pretty simple compared to you.

I saw Springsteen on Broadway.

It was my 80th, approximately 80th time seeing him.

It's better.

So you're like a middling Springsteen fan, frontline.

Middling.

Come on.

That's pretty good.

I saw his manager after John Landau after, and he said at 100,

it's 100 is when he's impressed, but I'm impressed with myself.

But this is a fantastic show, and it proves it's the narrative, the book.

Some of it is lifted right from the book, but it's beautifully done.

And if you ever needed more proof that he is the child of James Brown and Bob Dylan, this show will be all the proof you need.

And I don't want to have any arguments about

the statement that I just made

because that's not something that's open for discussion.

No, no, just to unpack it a little bit further.

I mean, for you, if you were to identify Springsteen's greatness, especially to say somebody who's not in the cult of Springsteen, if you were trying to make a persuasive case to them, what would be the one-paragraph case?

It's not even a paragraph.

He's the great interpreter of the American dream.

He himself recognizes that his music,

much of his music falls in the space between American reality and the American dream, but he's actually a huge idealist.

And at this moment in American history, I think we need people like Bruce Springsteen more than ever.

And also,

the music is really, really good.

He's a great poet and he's a great performer.

I actually think he has a great voice as well.

I think he's the total package.

And I've been, you know, I've been going since high school.

So, you know, I guess it's also partially nostalgic at this point.

Right.

Yeah.

No doubt.

So you'll read my 90,000-word essay on Bruce Springsteen, the man and the legend, the mythopoetic.

X9 issues of the Advantage.

Has anyone ever collected all of the, I mean, the Diehard Springsteen fans that follow him around the world?

Has anyone ever collected like their Springsteen stories into some sort of a thing?

What a great idea for a podcast.

Just curious.

Because I have several in my life.

Yeah,

I've done a little of that myself.

Frank, what is your keeper?

So this is a book that came out 10 years ago that

I was sick last week and was on my shelf and I read and really enjoyed, which is

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford, who is a philosopher who runs a motorcycle shop in Richmond.

And the book is about kind of the almost existential

moral

If I could even say it, ontological reasons why we should mess around with stuff, why we've become alienated from our hands, alienated from our machines.

We have all these things in our lives.

We have our phones, we have our computers.

And if you look at your iPhone or your Mac, they're essentially sealed off.

They're inaccessible to you.

There's no way for you to understand even the inner workings of these things.

And he makes this case about why we're better off kind of being

people who

who understand our things who use our hands and

there's a plea for for kind of the cognitive powers of being say a plumber which is something that people tend to look down on and we we we we we tend to dismiss the trades and the crafts what do you mean we what do we mean we who's we um i'd say

one

no it's it's as a society

no no but it's it's actually so just to answer your question in an earnest sort of way in terms of policy say there's this kind of assumption that we need to move people like that on to kind of places where they're office workers everybody should go to college they should be skilled workers of some sort in a way in which skilled worker implies cognitively skilled as opposed to skilled with your hands and his case is that you know if if you're actually able to understand a system like plumbing you're not just able to use your hands, that

there is this constant cognitive challenge that comes with being confronted with a problem and having to understand that problem, master it, solve it.

But genius can be in the hands, too.

Yeah.

I mean, absolutely.

Yeah.

And I love that it's a pun on

the George Will book, State Craft as Soulcraft.

Thank you very much for that.

And with it, we have come to the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Jeff, thanks as always.

Thank you.

Frank, first of money.

You know, when I describe this as an honor at the beginning, that was actually a faux Washington statement.

It was actually a Washington statement, completely insincere, but it's been validated.

And now I express it with greater than the same.

Your insincerity has been invalidated?

No, no, no, no, no, no.

The honor has been validated.

Sincerely validated insincerity.

That's the most sincere form of insincere validation.

Exactly.

Thanks.

Thanks.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and Diana Douglas.

Thanks as always to my co-host Jeffrey Goldberg and thanks to our colleague Franklin Ford for joining us.

Alex Wagner will be back with us again next week.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your thoughts on the episode at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Don't miss the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, please rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May all your secrets be sweet ones and may they be kept.

We'll see you next week.