AP Photo Law And Order Paul Manafort’s Dirty Secret: He’s a Terrible Propagandist If bad editing’s a crime, lock him up.

Blake Hounshell is the editor in chief of POLITICO Magazine.

Paul Manafort got a rap on the knuckles on Monday from a federal judge, who ripped the former Trump campaign chief for violating a gag order that bars him from trying to shape public opinion about his case.

At issue: Manafort’s shadow editing of an op-ed published last week in an English-language newspaper in Ukraine, the Kyiv Post. The article’s ostensible author was Oleg Voloshin, who flacked for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs back when it was run by a pro-Russian party that was paying Manafort as a consultant.


Federal investigators caught wind of Manafort’s communications with his former deputy in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik, and alerted the team working for Special Counsel Bob Mueller, who in turn informed U.S. District Court Judge Amy Jackson. In its filing to Jackson, Mueller’s team characterized Kilimnik, who was acting as a go-between with Voloshin, as having “ties to a Russian intelligence service,” leading to alarming headlines that made it sound like Manafort was up to some serious skulduggery.

In reality, Manafort was simply polishing up what reads like a pretty sad effort to sanitize his image. Perhaps recognizing that the offense here is relatively minor, the judge let him go with a warning rather than finding him in contempt of court. “I’m inclined to view such conduct in the future to be an effort to circumvent and evade the requirements of my order as it’s been clarified this morning,” Jackson said.

What the judge should have done is convict Manafort, who over the years has been paid millions for his supposedly savvy political work, of being a lousy editor. We know this because Mueller’s team published a copy of the edits Manafort made to Voloshin’s draft, and they are decidedly unimpressive.

We must first indict Manafort for letting Voloshin’s proposed headline stand. Typically, authors don’t write their own, but sometimes an editor will accept a suggestion out of sheer inertia or a lack of creativity. (It’s fine to offer a good one when you file your draft—just don’t insist on it or editors will consider you gauche and difficult to work with.) In this case, Voloshin had come up with a real stinker: “European integration unknown soldier.” A bad headline can be fatal even to a good piece of writing. Manafort should have proposed his own.

In this age of social media-fueled narcissism, it’s usually best to go with a first-person headline when you have the opportunity. I might have suggested something a bit more web-friendly, such as, “I Know Paul Manafort. He’s No Russian Stooge.” Or, if that’s too much, go with the tried and true “curiosity gap” approach favored by the best practitioners of Facebook dark arts, which leaves out a crucial piece of information and thus produces an insatiable urge to click. Maybe: “Paul Manafort’s Not-So-Dirty Secret.” Either way, you’re going to want Manafort’s name in the headline for search optimization purposes. (The Kyiv Post changed Manafort and Voloshin’s proposed headline to “Paul Manafort, European integration’s unknown soldier for Ukraine.”)

Next, he allows a couple of grammatical errors in the lede to slip through—a dropped definite article and a split compound verb: “EU-Ukraine Association Agreement might have never appeared but for a person now falsely accused of lobbying Russian interests.” The folks at the Kyiv Post caught the first mistake, and helpfully spelled out “European Union,” but the bigger issue is that the lede assumes knowledge the reader might not have (what the hell is this agreement and what did it mean?). If the aim is to reach an audience beyond English-speaking Ukrainian political insiders, Manafort has already failed.

In fact, our ghost editor hardly touches Voloshin’s torturous prose until paragraphs four and five. (Fine—Voloshin is not a native English speaker, and maybe Manafort figured the Kyiv Post’s copy desk would catch the small stuff.) Here, he wants to underscore a more substantive point: that by making Brussels, the EU’s administrative capital, his first foreign trip, Manafort’s former client—ex-president Viktor Yanukovych—was signaling that he wanted to orient Ukraine toward the West, not Russia. And since Manafort had recommended the Brussels visit, how could he be a Russian stooge?

Manafort does rip out Voloshin’s irrelevant discussion of his insistence on using modern polling and social science techniques—which also implied that Yanukovych’s attempted pivot toward Europe was based on raw political calculation, not conviction—and directs him to focus instead on how Yanukovych had “changed a Soviet based legal economic framework to a western one.” Given how history played out, this is a dubious gambit, but at least Manafort pushes Voloshin to provide specific examples of Yanukovych’s reforms and their apparent speed, and then punches up the payoff line: “This pace shocked Moscow.” (In an email released on Monday, Manfort tells Kilimnik he’s taken out “pieces that would not be good to mention.”)

And he makes sure to sharpen the line giving himself credit, while making clear that it wasn’t easy: “Following the European track created multiple challenges that would never had been solved by a Ukrainian Government except for the consistent promotion of what had to be done by Paul Manafort.” (Though he adds another split compound verb, a typo and a needless capitalization of the word “government.”)

Curiously, both Manafort and the Kyiv Post passed up the opportunity to straighten out the mess that serves as Voloshin’s conclusion. “All listed here facts can be easily verified,” he writes. “If only one pursues the truth, not ends to twist the reality in line with his or her conviction that the dubious goal of undermining Trump’s presidency, justifies most dishonest means.”

What’s shocking about Manafort’s edits, however, is not their lazy, drive-by quality. It’s how, for a supposed expert in manipulating public opinion, this seems to be the best he can do.

The other day, I scoffed online at a former Clinton adviser’s worry that by posting Voloshin’s piece, the media were doing Russia’s bidding and “publishing weaponized info.”

If this sorry op-ed constitutes “weaponized info,” consider me unconcerned. And if Manafort truly were the evil genius behind a pro-Moscow conspiracy to tilt the U.S. election toward Trump, as some allege, then clearly it doesn’t take a master wordsmith to manipulate the American electorate.

Judge Jackson, in admonishing Manafort to holster his apparently dangerous copy of Microsoft Word, said she worried about “the power of retweeting.”

Please. Nobody was going to share this 791-word piece of garbage.