Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Like most sharks before him, former Trump campaign director Paul Manafort kept two sets of books. As the tax and fraud case against him playing out in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., this week under the direction of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III demonstrates, Manafort bookkeeper Heather Washkuhn followed the scruples of her profession in producing an accurate tally of Manafort’s financial condition, one that he appreciated.

“He was very detail-oriented,” Washkuhn said of Manafort. “He approved every penny of everything we paid.”


Navigating from his bookkeeper’s honest ledger, Manafort invented new numbers that set a course for fraud, prosecutors argued. The genuine numbers showed Manafort’s consulting firm, Davis Manafort Partners International, entering financial freefall starting in 2014 when he lost pro-Putin Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych as a client. In response, Manafort cooked documents that would vouch for the bank loans he sought to maintain his bling-happy lifestyle. Thus did $388,542 in real 2015 Davis Manafort income soar to a fraudulent $4.5 million in a loan application.

Meanwhile, Manafort was concealing millions in offshore holdings from accountants, prosecutors said. One Manafort accountant testifying under immunity admitted to having falsified tax returns at Manafort’s behest to both lower taxes and conceal foreign accounts and income from the Internal Revenue Service. Manafort is believed to have collected more than $60 million from his Russian-backed Ukrainian clients before 2015. Where did Manafort blow his money? This interactive CNBC chart shows him spending millions on home improvement, art, antiques and other rich-guy sundries like clothing and cars. Having scrapped his fortune and licked it clean by the spring of 2016, Manafort was rescued by Trump, who hired him (but then dumped him in mid-August after news reports of his connections to powerful Russians made him political poison in America).

This ability to hold two quarreling ledgers in the mind at once, to know the truth but to live a convincing lie, seems to be a common attribute among the members of the Trump fellowship. For instance, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen claimed to have paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 of his own money in return for keeping quiet about her affair with Donald Trump. Actually, he was reimbursed for it by Trump. Michael Flynn, Trump’s short-tenured national security adviser who has already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with special counsel Mueller's investigation, famously kept two sets of ethical books during the campaign as he collected $530,000 to represent the Turkish government in a dispute with the United States while at the same time advising Trump.

The quest for easy money infected others associated with the Trump campaign—and more often than not the deals had a Russian cast to them. Flynn accepted $45,000 for a speech from RT, the Kremlin mouthpiece. Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser who was targeted by Russian intelligence for recruitment, hoped to ride the Russia influence-rocket to quick riches. In addition to lining up lucrative consulting contracts with a firm tied to Russian Oligarch Viktor Vekselberg and major corporations, Cohen kept his eye on bigger money. As the Wall Street Journal reported this week, he struck a $10 million consulting deal with a Trump campaign contributor earlier this year to help arrange $5 billion in federal financing for a nuclear project. Alas, for Cohen, he never collected.

Trump has long embraced the Russian payday. He started selling Trump Tower condos to dubious Russians in the mid-1980s and made his first trip to Moscow in 1987 to prospect real estate deals. He returned in 1996, still prospecting for a Trump Tower Moscow. In the mid-2000s, Russians were among the leading customers in a 841-unit condo tower he built in Florida. In 2013, Trump began tweeting at Vladimir Putin in hope that the Russian leader would visit his Miss Universe pageant, which was held in Moscow that fall. In 2015, Trump was still dreaming the Moscow dream, assigning Cohen and Russia-born convict Felix Sater to the development of Trump World Tower Moscow, something he didn’t give up on until he became president.

A believer in borrowing money for business empire building whenever possible, Trump inexplicably shifted tracks and started using cash for his purchases nine years before he ran for president, according to a May Washington Post piece. He’s spent about $400 million on properties and renovations. So where did the cash come from? Trump’s son Eric told the Post it wasn’t outside investors, but in a famous interview 10 years ago, Donald Trump Jr. famously said, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Maybe Trump Organization financial wizard Allen Weisselberg, subpoenaed to testify in the Cohen investigation, will be persuaded to enlighten us.

Questions are still being asked about what happened to all the money—$107 million—Trump raised for his inauguration festivities. Tax filings show $26 million of it went to an event planning committee launched the month before the inauguration by a friend of Melania Trump’s. “They had a third of the staff and a quarter of the events and they raise at least twice as much as we did,” the operator of George W. Bush’s 2005 second inaugural committee told ProPublica. “So there’s the obvious question: Where did it go? I don’t know.” According to ProPublica, some of the donations are almost impossible to trace. (See this crowdsourced spreadsheet for where the known money came from.) Rick Gates—Manafort’s partner who has pleaded guilty to tax and fraud charges and is providing evidence against him—helped organize the event. CNN reported in the spring that the special counsel was investigating whether Russians, who attended the event in profusion, or Gulf potentates used straw donors to fund the inaugural.

Trump has drawn suspicion in even small-stakes games. The investigations of Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold and others into the Donald J. Trump Foundation resulted in civil charges by the state of New York against the group. Trump appears to have used the foundation for self-dealing. The foundation collected $2.8 million at one televised charity event before the Iowa caucuses, “then essentially turned it over to the campaign to decide how it should be disbursed,” Paul Waldman wrote recently in the Washington Post. In 2015, the foundation collected a $150,000 donation from a Ukrainian billionaire in return for his 20-minute appearance at a Kiev conference via video. It’s only natural that Cohen solicited the “donation,” as the New York Times recorded.

No evidence has been revealed yet that proves that anyone in the Trump gang crossed the line from financial opportunism to betrayal of the United States. But for those who have grown accustomed to keeping multiple sets of books, it wouldn’t be that much of a leap, would it?

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Send contradictory findings to [email protected]. My email alerts keep two sets of books: One for my Twitter feed and another for my RSS feed. One set of books is kept in the National Archives, the other in a buried vault in Moscow alongside the Myakinino metro station.

