But advancing Putin’s interests and greatly benefiting his government proved very difficult for Ketchum, not because he was evil and trying to destroy America, but because he and his liaisons to Ketchum were stubborn and Ketchum’s advice fell on deaf ears. In the end, one of the Americans working in Moscow on the project quit and told me he was going to go lobby on behalf of the insurance industry in the States. This was at the height of the fierce battles over Obamacare in Obama’s first term, but he joked that it would be a vacation after trying to get the Putin government to take his advice seriously. (By 2015, Putin dumped Ketchum, his spokesman citing a wave of anti-Russian “hysteria” after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.)

That Ketchum rep had discovered what he and Ketchum—and Manafort—had been all along to the Russians: fancy window dressing meant to signal to the West that the Russians were legit and on par with the countries of the West. It was the analogue of buying a Chanel purse or a Tesla to signal one’s arrival in a certain segment in society. And Ketchum and Manafort weren’t alone in this. White-shoe British and American law firms, and auditing companies like Price Waterhouse Coopers, were also providing window dressing, and behind those windows were absurd levels of corruption. PwC, for instance, spent years signing off on audits of TransNeft, a state-controlled oil transport company, while it was allegedly funneling tens of millions of dollars to members of the Russian analogue of the Secret Service under the guise of corporate charity projects. (PwC has denied wrongdoing.) One Western lawyer I knew in Moscow who was working for a white-shoe Western law firm privately railed at the projects the law firm was doing for Russian banks and friends of Putin, who boosted their financial credentials by doing things like putting six quarters in one fiscal year. Other Western companies got caught up in this, too. In 2010, Daimler Chrysler was charged by the SEC for global bribery, including paying kickbacks to the Kremlin in exchange for supplying its garages with black Mercedes. (They eventually settled.)

All of this is to say that if Manafort’s contract did indeed “greatly benefit the Putin Government,” it was nothing out of the ordinary. The problem isn’t that he might have done the work for Putin. The problem is that the ordinary when it comes to Westerners doing business with the Russians—as well as other non-democratic governments—is a murky universe, where American actors are not always on the right side of the law and Western ideas of morality. The problem is that Manafort was running a campaign that hammered Clinton and her family foundation for doing much of what Manafort himself had done for decades, and that he was arguably as corrupt as his candidate said Clinton was. The problem is that the government in question had, according to 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, been actively hacking the Clinton campaign and aiding the Trump one. The problem is that Manafort and the Trump administration have repeatedly lied about Manafort’s work. There would’ve been a problem had they come clean early on—it’s not a good look for a populist, drain-the-swamp, America First candidate—but the problem is so much bigger now that the lies are now compounded, magnified by the truth. And this is classic Trump: dissemble and deny as long as you can, and even after you can. And it’s classic Manafort: It’s not clear how much he did to “greatly benefit the Putin Government,” but he certainly did no favors for the Trump Government.

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