Yay, another of Donald Trump’s pals has registered as a foreign agent! Two down, only eleventy fifteen to go! Paul Manafort, the foreign agent who ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign before he suddenly fired himself for (maybe illegally) taking ALL THESE MILLION DOLLA BILLS from a pro-Putin political party in Ukraine, suddenly remembered on Tuesday for some reason that he should probably retroactively register as a foreign agent, just because he took ALL THESE MILLION DOLLA BILLS from a pro-Putin political party in Ukraine. Now, technically, when you are a foreign agent who does agent work for foreigns, you are supposed to file that paperwork with the United States government, like, when you’re doing it, but pfffft, details. The most important thing is that Paul Manafort is now telling the truth about his foreign agent work that ended (allegedly) in 2014:
A consulting firm led by Paul Manafort, who chaired Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for several months last year, retroactively filed forms Tuesday showing that his firm received $17.1 million over two years from a political party that dominated Ukraine before its leader fled to Russia in 2014.
Manafort disclosed the total payments his firm received between 2012 and 2014 in a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing late Tuesday that was submitted to the U.S. Justice Department.
In doing this, Manafort is making good on the promise he made in April, to register as a dirty nasty foreign agent from foreign town. As the Washington Post points out, special counsel Robert Mueller has had Manafort on his radar, along with pretty much every other person who’s ever shared breathing space with Donald Trump, for a little while now. And as we’ve noted, Mueller very much is following the money in his investigation, just to see how many crimes turn up. So we’re going to guess Manafort went ahead and filed his paperwork just to cross his T’s and dot his I’s, for the 17 crisp million dollar bills his firm earned in Ukraine, which may be some of what his daughter Andrea referred to as “blood money” in a text to her sister Jessica.
But that’s IT. This is the only way Paul Manafort is a foreign agent, and all the other creepy things we’ve heard about him are FAKE NEWS, especially that thing from years ago when he was secretly earning $10 million per year from a Russian billionaire, in order to “benefit the Putin government.” It is also different from the SECRET PAYMENTS he got in 2007 and 2009 from that pro-Putin Ukrainian political party, which were “listed in [a] so-called Black Ledger” in Ukraine. When the New York Times reported on that Black Ledger back in August of 2016, Manafort’s lawyer was like “No Black Ledger. No Black Ledger. YOU ARE THE BLACK LEDGER.” But when the Associated Press discovered Manafort was full of shit about that, he was like “Oh you meant THOSE payments, I didn’t know you were talking about THOSE payments, yes I received THOSE payments, but THOSE payments were totally legal, so you just take a hike!”
The point is that Paul Manafort is registering as a foreign agent from foreign town, and if you are confused about which millions of dollars Paul Manafort received from which Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians, don’t worry, we are too. We just trust that Robert Mueller has a handle on the situation and has this all diagrammed out on a series of Glenn Beck white boards in his office.
Who will be the next Trumper to register as a foreign agent? We just don’t know yet! You will have to tune in to next week’s episode of America’s most yoogely rated reality TV program, “Fuck All These Un-American Fucks, Hope They Like Prison!”
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