https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/11/russian-collusion
Paul Manafort may or may not have violated tax and banking laws in 2010. Given the twisted and arcane nature of those laws, who knows?
What we do know is that Manafort first was investigated for breaking those laws in that year by Robert Mueller’s FBI. A discretionary decision was made not to prosecute. It wasn’t a priority of the Obama Administration to indict consultants over how they reported income from foreign governments. If that were a priority, a lot of big shots in Washington would have gone down.
There is insufficient concern that what is broadly called “election tampering” really means efforts to influence voters by legitimate means. It was unnervingly Orwellian when Congress cudgeled Facebook’s founder for selling ads to the highest bidder without first assessing the worthiness of the content. Manafort’s real crime is not that he chose to book certain income as loans from offshore shell companies, because a lot of people do that.
No, Manafort’s crime is the same as Facebook’s: he failed to measure the orthodoxy of his political client’s message and, because of that, he now faces an inquisition.
In 2010, pro-Russia candidate Viktor Yanukovych was elected as president of Ukraine. Manafort provided extensive consulting services for Yanukovych’s campaign. Politico has called it “a political love connection.” Vladimir Putin was pleased. His strategic endgame has been to create a united Eurasia that is nationalistic, Christian, and steeped in local culture and history, that would compete with Europe for regional hegemony.
This was an early inkling of the zeitgeist that would later lead to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Manafort was one of its architects.