“…right-to-try is nothing more than another weapon in the arsenal of right wing groups opposed on principle to government regulation…”

Link: https://respectfulinsolence.com/2018/06/01/right-to-try-bait-switch-that-will-not-help-terminally-ill-patients/

On Wednesday afternoon, I happened to stop at the doctors’ lounge at my hospital to have lunch. There are lots of snacks there to supplement a sandwich, as well as coffee, soda, water, to go along with it. Unfortunately, there is also a TV there as well, and even more unfortunately, it was tuned to something I didn’t want to have to watch, namely the signing ceremony for the Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act of 2017. It was quite nauseating to watch. President Donald Trump preened and made ridiculous claims for this right-to-try law like this:

Each year, thousands of terminally ill patients suffer while waiting for new and experimental drugs to receive final FDA approval. It takes a long time, and the time is coming down. While we were streamlining and doing a lot of streamlining, the current FDA approval process can take, as Scott just said, many years — many, many years. And for countless patients, time, it’s not what they have. They don’t have an abundance of time.

With the Right to Try law I’m signing today, patients with life-threatening illnesses will finally have access to experimental treatments that could improve or even cure their conditions. These are experimental treatments and products that have shown great promise, and we weren’t able to use them before. Now we can use them. And oftentimes they’re going to be very successful. It’s an incredible thing.

The Right to Try also offers new hope for those who either don’t qualify for clinical trials or who have exhausted all available treatment options. There were no options, but now you have hope. You really have hope.

As I’ve discussed many times before, the basic idea behind “right-to-try” is that the FDA is killing people (or letting people die) through its bureaucratic delays in approving drugs, lives that, if you believe right-to-try advocates, could be saved by cutting the FDA out of the decision between drug companies with experimental therapeutics and terminally ill patients who want to try them. It’s nonsense, of course. In actuality, the FDA is not unduly slow approving new drugs, in particular as compared to Europe, and, more importantly, there is an expanded access program that approves >99% of requests. True, the paperwork to access drugs through expanded access programs was once onerous, but the FDA has made great strides towards reducing that burden. Oddly enough, right-to-try advocates often mischaracterize an expanded access program in France as being a success story of right-to-try when it is not. (They also like to conflate cases of compassionate use or fast-track approval with right-to-try.) In other words, Trump’s speech is a total distortion of the true situation, as has been the case with so much that “right-to-try” proponents have said over the years that they have been promoting this law and the 40 or so state-level laws before it. As I have also discussed so many times before in the context of right-to-try going back to 2014, right-to-try provides no new right and no new access to experimental therapeutics that weren’t available before through FDA expanded/compassionate use programs. What it does do is to strip away important patient protections, leaving the most vulnerable, terminally ill patients, in essence on their own. It’s a bait and switch, the bait being the promise to help terminally ill patients, the switch being a major step in the process of dismantling the FDA.

Right-to-try: Never meant to help patients
I’ve been saying all along since 2014 that the goal of right-to-try laws was never to help terminally ill patients, but rather to weaken the FDA. Examined from a broader standpoint, right-to-try is nothing more than another weapon in the arsenal of right wing groups opposed on principle to government regulation, the target in this case being the FDA. Indeed, ditching the FDA has long been a fever dream goal in more ardent libertarian circles. Don’t believe me? Here’s one summary of libertarian arguments for dismantling the FDA. Basically, the arguments run the gamut from “opening the FDA up to competition” by “private inspection agencies.” Let’s just say I find this argument…unpersuasive. Libertarians will fall all over themselves to deny that such companies would have an inherent incentive to make getting their stamp of approval easy and more inexpensive (free market!), but their counterarguments tend to come down to strong laws against this (yeah, right) and “trust the free market.” As Aaron Brown put it:

You seem to think that eliminating the Food and Drug Administration is among the more radical libertarian positions. In fact, it’s one of the easiest. It’s very hard to imagine any libertarian supporting the FDA.

And:

Thus was born a hugely profitable and powerful combination of doctors, drug and medical device makers and regulators, which over the years has been a constant source of scandals. It delays innovation, drives up costs and—make no mistake—kills more people every year than mass shooters.

Although libertarians are a diverse group and value independent thinking, nearly all libertarians have to hate the theory of the FDA. A few of them might dispute the empirical evidence. I think fewer of them would dispute the historical record, because this kind of regulatory empire building and capture is very common and a major complaint of most libertarians.

Again, this libertarian trope about the FDA killing more people than it saves is utter bullshit, but it’s an article of faith among anti-regulation conservatives and libertarians.

Right-to-try strikes back against Scott Gottleib
Whenever I point out that right-to-try is a tool, a step if you will, towards the ultimate dismantling of the FDA, inevitably someone will take umbrage and insist that, no, that’s not the purpose of right-to-try at all. They also accuse me of a lack of compassion, as though compassion for the terminally ill requires that I buy their arguments. Now that right-to-try is law, however, the mask is coming off. One of the architects of the federal right-to-try law that President Trump signed on Wednesday, Sen. Ron Johnson, rebuked FDA Commissioner Scott Gottleib yesterday, setting him straight on the true purpose of right-to-try. I found this out in a STAT News article, ‘Right-to-try’ law intended to weaken the FDA, measure’s sponsor says in blunt remarks, which reported on a letter written by Sen. Johnson to Dr. Gottleib in response to remarks that Gottleib had made about right-to-try two weeks ago entitled Johnson to FDA: Agency Should Comply with Right to Try Law. First, he lays out the “offense” by Gottleib that riled him up:

In a recent article about right to try, you appeared to suggest that the FDA would need to issue regulations to balance the law’s requirement against “patient protections.” The article quoted you as saying:

“In terms of making sure that it balances [access to experimental drugs] against appropriate patient protections . . . with [S. 204], we’d have to do a little bit more . . . in guidance and perhaps in regulation to achieve some of those goals.”
“We felt that there were certain aspects of [S. 204] that could be modified to build in additional patient protections, but if you weren’t able to do that legislatively, that there [was] a pathway by which you do that administratively and still remain consistent with the letter and the spirit of this law.”
You later tweeted: “I stand ready to implement

in a way that achieves Congress’ intent to promote access and protect patients; and build on #FDA’s longstanding commitment to these important goals.”

Silly Dr. Gottleib. He actually thought that right-to-try was about expanding access to experimental therapies to terminally ill patients. Gottleib, as I’ve discussed, was the “least bad” choice Trump could have made for FDA Commissioner. Sure, he’s all for “streamlining” drug approval processes (translation: making them easier and less rigorous), but he still exists within a continuum of “normal” among FDA Commissioners, albeit on the conservative end. He’s not a hyper-libertarian Peter Theil crony who thinks the free market will take care of drug safety, nor does he think that online rating systems, a “Yelp for drugs” if you will, would be effective at assuring drug safety. Gottleib is, in contrast, the sort of FDA Commissioner that any Republican administration might have appointed. He actually believes in the mission of the FDA, as he showed when under his leadership the FDA started cracking down on quack stem cell clinics.

Because Gottleib believes in the mission of the FDA, he understands how bad this new law is, how it will cut the FDA out of the process, leaving terminally ill patients unprotected by institutional review boards (IRBs)—or much of anything else, for that matter. So he tried to say how FDA would work to implement the law, including trying to do what the FDA is supposed to do and protect patients accessing right-to-try medications. It’s what any responsible FDA Commissioner would do.

Sen. Johnson wasted no time in setting Dr. Gottleib straight on that score:

As I made clear to my colleagues in the Senate and the House before each body voted on S. 204, this legislation is fundamentally about empowering patients to make decisions in cooperation with their doctors and the developers of potentially life-saving therapies. This law intends to diminish the FDA’s power over people’s lives, not increase it.

I told you so. In the name of patient “empowerment” right-to-try is really about cutting the FDA out of the process of drug companies marketing their wares to desperate patients. Johnson makes that very explicitly clear in no uncertain terms:

It is designed to work within existing FDA regulations, definitions, and approval processes. It is not meant to grant FDA more power or enable the FDA to write new guidance, rules, or regulations that would limit the ability of an individual facing a life-threatening disease from accessing treatments. Under this law, the FDA’s oversight with respect to patient safety within a Phase I trial remains unchanged; the current thresholds for successful completion of such a trial phase remains unchanged.

That last bit about phase I trial requirements is a red herring. No one is claiming that right-to-try changes phase I clinical trial requirements. What right-to-try does do is something incredibly dangerous. It makes any drug that has passed phase I trials and has an active investigational new drug (IND) application and is in ongoing clinical trials eligible for right-to-try. As I’ve repeated more times than I can remember but still feel obligated to repeat any time I discuss right-to-try, it is deceptive as hell to call drugs that have passed phase I “safe,” as I’ve seen right-to-try advocates do more times than I can remember. Phase I trials generally only involve less than 30 patients and are not designed to verify drug safety. Rather, they are designed to detect the worst toxicities and make sure that the drug isn’t too toxic or hazardous to continue to test in phase II and III clinical trials. (There’s a big difference.) Phase I trials also do not demonstrate efficacy. They are not designed to do that, either. Basically, think of phase I trials as a screening test to make sure an experimental drug isn’t too dangerous and might have activity, enough to justify further clinical trials. Only around 10-15% of drugs that pass phase I go on to be approved by the FDA.

Ironically, Sen. Johnson is not entirely wrong in one thing that he asserts. It is true that right-to-try does not provide any new rights that patients didn’t already have before under expanded use programs. It also certainly doesn’t do anything to increase FDA power. After all, the bill’s primary sponsor just told Scott Gottleib that that the very purpose of the bill was to weaken his agency and that he should, basically, stay out of right-to-try cases.

If that’s not clear enough, Johnson drives home the point. First, he wants as many patients as possible to be eligible for right-to-try:

S. 204, as originally introduced, applied to patients “with a terminal illness,” as defined by state law. I rejected the FDA’s proposed definition—“immediately life-threatening disease or condition”— because it would exclude patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an illness that I explicitly intended to be covered by the legislation. As enacted, S. 204 defines terminal illness as “life-threatening disease or condition,” a definition that exists in current federal regulation. The FDA confirmed that this definition would include patients diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

Of course, state right-to-try laws generally define a “terminal illness” as one that is likely to cause death within six months, although the definition varies somewhat and some states don’t even necessarily require a “terminal” illness. Be that as it may, Sen. Johnson makes it very clear: Right-to-try should victimize apply to as many patients as possible.

Next up, don’t harsh me, bro, with any outcomes that might reflect badly on the experimental drug:

S. 204 requires that the Secretary of Health and Human Services may not use a clinical outcome associated with the use of an eligible investigational drug to delay or adversely affect the drug’s review or approval, unless use of that clinical outcome is critical to determining safety. This language is not intended to enable the FDA to expand the scope of existing safety determinations about investigational drugs.

No one ever said that it did, least of all Scott Gottleib, at least as far as I can tell. As I’ve discussed multiple times, the language in the federal right-to-try law bends over backwards to make sure there are no consequences for companies agreeing to provide experimental medications to patients under the law. Indeed, the first version of Sen. Johnson’s right-to-try bill explicitly banned the FDA from using outcomes from patients using an experimental drug under right-to-try in its consideration. Seriously, I mean this. The original version of Sen. Johnson’s bill would have banned the FDA from even considering outcomes of patients who access right-to-try in its considerations over whether to approve a drug. At least the version that passed allows such consideration, although it requires jumping through some hoops. For example, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (or his designee, which can be the FDA Commissioner) must publicly justify using outcomes in this way. Basically, S. 204 as passed states that the FDA can’t use a clinical outcome or adverse event associated with the use of a right-to-try drug in its determination of licensure for sale unless the Secretary of Health and Human Services (or his designee) decides that the use of these outcomes is critical to determining the safety of the drug or the applicant wants them used. Rather than what the default should be (that all outcome data should be considered when examining a drug for FDA approval), this forces the HHS Secretary or a high level delegate to justify including right-to-try outcomes in the deliberations over whether the drug under consideration should receive FDA approval for marketing. In other words, the burden of proof is on the FDA, not the company seeking approval for its drug, as to why right-to-try outcomes should be included.

The FDA surrenders
Sadly, the FDA appears to have thrown in the towel, although I don’t know that there’s anything else it could have done:

In a separate email to staff Wednesday, Janet Woodcock, who directs the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, told staff to direct any inquiries about the new law to drug companies.

“We believe that sponsors are in the best position to provide information on the development status of their products,” Woodcock wrote.

In other words, if Congress is going to cut the FDA out of right-to-try decisions and regulation, screw it all. Patients, don’t call us. Congress has eliminated our authority to deal with this. Call the company that makes the drug you’re interested. Congress cut us out; we can no longer interfere. You’re on your own.

Of course, that’s the entire idea behind right-to-try. I can’t even say that I blame Woodcock. What else is the FDA to do? After all, right-to-try isn’t even really a “right.” All it is is the right to ask companies making experimental drugs if they’ll let them try the drug. The companies are under no obligation to provide the drug and can basically charge whatever they want if they do decide to provide the drug.

Let’s take a trip back in time, back to 2014, back when right-to-try laws first started passing in state legislatures. Those state laws were (and continue to be) all based on a legislative template promulgated by the libertarian Goldwater Institute. This template had several elements in common:

Anyone with a terminal illness is eligible for right-to-try.
Any drug that’s passed phase I trials, has an IND, and is still under clinical trials is eligible for right-to-try.
There is no liability for doctors or companies participating in right-to-try.
Insurance doesn’t have to pay for right-to-try drugs. (This provision can also be reasonably interpreted as saying that insurance companies also don’t have to pay for the treatment of complications that occur because of the use of right-to-try drugs.)
Patients wanting right-to-try drugs are on their own when it comes to cost.
Drug companies don’t have to provide their experimental drug.
Yes, right-to-try is a libertarian wet dream. That’s not surprising, given its source. Again, right-to-try is a product of the Goldwater Institute, which tries to paint itself as a libertarian “think tank,” but has never been a true think tank. Rather, it has always been a far right-wing advocacy organization, so much so that before he died Barry Goldwater actually wanted his name removed from the group, but backed off because the Institute was dear to his brother. Unfortunately, the press treats the Goldwater Institute as a real think tank when it really isn’t. Rather, it’s part of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded bill mill. That’s why, before there was right-to-try at the state level in 2014, there was a Goldwater Institute-written legislative template, a pre-written bill that could be (and was) modified as needed by states to fit into their existing regulatory framework. It’s why all state-level right-to-try laws contain the same elements listed above, including libertarian tropes like elimination of liability for companies and doctors participating in right-to-try, and provisions that basically leave terminally ill patients on their own if things go south. It’s why the Koch brothers’ threw their weight behind right-to-try and started lying about it, virtually guaranteeing that its Republican toadies, sycophants, and lackeys in Congress would find a way—any way—to pass something they could call “right-to-try.” That’s what happened.

Right-to-try: The Burzynski of “compassionate use”
It can’t be repeated too many times. Right-to-try has never been about helping terminally ill patients, at least not primarily. It’s always been about dismantling the FDA, neutering it, reducing its power to regulate drugs. As a side effect, it will also facilitate preying upon terminally ill patients by quacks. As I like to say, it’s legalized cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski’s entire business model.Think about it. His antineoplastons have passed phase I trials. He’s maintained a plethora of phase II trials registered with the FDA that he’s been using as a marketing tool to bring patients to the Burzynski Clinic for 20 years. He charges huge fees to patients to be on his “clinical trials.” Thanks to right-to-try, after having beaten the Texas Medical Board for the umpteenth time, he now no longer has to worry about the FDA any more. He’s free to prey on patients via right-to-try to his black heart’s content. Janet Woodcock basically said so by instructing FDA staff to tell patients making right-to-try inquiries just to call the company making the drug they want. I can’t wait to see what quack stem cell clinics do under this law. Certainly, Burzynski started using the Texas right-to-try law almost as soon as it was passed.

Yes, the quackery potential behind right-to-try, I’m afraid, will be the subject of a future post, either here or at my not-so-super-secret other blog. In the meantime, I guess we’ll see what happens when the government abandons its responsibility to protect its citizens against drug companies. And don’t even get me started on the utter failure of medical professional organizations like the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) to speak out against state right-to-try bills. I was in contact with activists and legislators. They were begging professional medical organizations to give them ammunition against right-to-try bills and were met with silence, mainly because, as we opponents of right-to-try bills promoted by the Goldwater Institute found out, right to try is easy to demagogue. Its opponents are inevitably attacked as unsympathetic, uncaring, and wanting to prevent terminally ill patients from accessing their last chance at survival. In essence, opposition to right-to-try is painted as being akin to opposition to freedom and wanting to see terminally ill patients die horrible deaths. By the time ASCO actually spoke out last year, three years into the Goldwater Institute’s long game, it was way too little and way, way too late. More recently, ASCO issued a pretty close to useless FAQ for physicians to discuss right-to-try with their patients. ASCO failed. Big time.

Of course, it’s hard not to understand why ASCO, academic medical centers, and other medical organizations were reluctant to speak out. After all, the Goldwater Institute borrowed a page from the Burzynski playbook and used terminally ill patients as shields against criticism and weapons against critics. Criticizing right-to-try, no matter how dispassionately, let one be painted as attacking these patients. Burzynski knew about the compassion all of us have for terminally ill patients and how it would make critics reluctant to attack his quackery too harshly. The Goldwater Institute knows it too. This demagoguery has been very effective. After all, right-to-try is the law in 40 states and a federal version just became law this week.

We’ll see what happens next. Certainly, I will be watching. And reporting.

Denver Broncos’ defense poised to keep dominating opponents

Bucky Brooks

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000556485/article/denver-broncos-defense-poised-to-keep-dominating-opponents

Defense wins championships.

Every game, all season

That mantra is frequently uttered in meeting rooms around the NFL, but in the past, the Denver Broncos have leaned on a high-powered offense to fuel their title runs. However, the arrival of coordinator Wade Phillips has coincided with the emergence of the Orange Crush, 2.0, with the Broncos ranked first in yards allowed and second in points allowed per game. Gary Kubiak’s troops are looking like a blue-collar squad capable of hoisting the Lombardi Trophy on the strength of a defense creating splash plays at an alarming rate.

Given some time to dig into the All-22 Coaches Film, I’ve come up with three reasons to think Denver’s D will continue suffocating foes in 2015:

1) Wade Phillips’ attack-style scheme is built around his pass rushers.
The pass-happy nature of the NFL has forced defensive coordinators to design schemes to disrupt the timing and rhythm of the passing game. Phillips has spent the bulk of his coaching career crafting tactics that enable pass rushers to enjoy free runs to the quarterback. Under his direction, the likes of Bruce Smith in Buffalo, Reggie White in Philadelphia, Shawne Merriman in San Diego, DeMarcus Ware in Dallas and J.J. Watt and Mario Williams in Houston have terrorized opponents off the edges and made life miserable for quarterbacks in the pocket.

A staunch proponent of the 3-4, Phillips builds his defense around the talents of his edge players (outside linebackers) or the “five-technique” (3-4 DE) in his scheme. He believes in an aggressive “one-gap” system that encourages players to urgently run through their gaps on the way to the quarterback instead of patiently “reading and reacting” as two-gap players. This allows athletic players to fully utilize their speed, quickness and burst to blow through gaps at the point of attack.

On passing downs, Phillips will use a variety of defensive fronts and personnel packages to put his best rushers in prime position to get after the quarterback. From traditional four-man fronts to unique “Okie” looks, Phillips isn’t afraid to vary his defensive alignments or personnel groupings to create opportunities for his best pass rushers to hunt quarterbacks from every angle.

In Denver, Phillips not only inherited a pair of dominant pass rushers in Ware and Von Miller, but he added a young disruptor in Shane Ray on draft day to complete an edge-rush rotation that clearly ranks as the best in the NFL. In Jack Del Rio’s conservative 4-3 scheme last season, Miller and Ware combined for the second-most sacks by a pass-rushing tandem with 24 (Terrell Suggs and Elvis Dumervil led the NFL with 29). This season, Phillips has unleashed them off the edges as the designated rushers on a defense that is on pace to challenge the Chicago Bears’ all-time NFL sack record of 72 set in 1984.

Miller is an absolute wrecking ball off the edge, exhibiting explosive speed, quickness and agility on rush attempts. He has the quickest first step of any rusher in the NFL, but he also displays the balance, body control and strength to win with finesse or power off the edge. Miller’s “dip-and-rip” maneuver is nearly indefensible when he anticipates the snap and blows past offensive tackles on speed rushes. Moreover, the electric speed rush sets the table for Miller to attack blockers with power maneuvers (bull rush and butt-and-jerk moves) to keep offensive tackles on their heels.

Studying the All-22 Coaches Film, I noticed Phillips aligns Miller as a strong-side linebacker in his scheme. Given the right-handed tendencies of most NFL teams (because most quarterbacks are right-handed, teams frequently align the offensive formation to the right to make throws easier for the quarterback), the deployment typically puts Miller on the right tackle, who is typically the inferior pass protector of the two offensive tackles.

Ware is the perfect complement to Miller on the back side as an electric weak-side linebacker. Despite nearing the twilight of his career, the 11th-year veteran still possesses outstanding first-step quickness and flashes the agility to win with a variety of finesse maneuvers off the edge. Considering his strong hand-to-hand combat skills, Ware has been a destructive force for Phillips in Denver. Under Phillips’ direction in Dallas from 2007 to 2010, Ware amassed 60.5 sacks as the designated pass rusher. In Denver this season, the veteran has been a complementary rusher — but still, he’s been spectacular.

Phillips has increasingly used Ware as a movable chess piece along the defensive front on passing downs to take advantage of inferior blockers or create confusion at the point of attack. From aligning Ware at his traditional edge-rusher position to placing him in the A-gaps as a stand-up linebacker, Phillips is using the veteran to wreak havoc on opponents with aggressive blitzes.

Ray has been a wild-card rusher for the Broncos as a rotational player. He has started to find his groove as a playmaker the past few games, registering a sack in back-to-back contests. Studying Ray’s game at Missouri, I was impressed with his relentless energy and non-stop motor. He wears down opponents with fanatical effort and flashes a quick arm-over to win on inside maneuvers. For the Broncos, Ray has been a nice addition as a complementary playmaker in their sub-package/base defense. With Ware expected to miss the next two weeks while nursing a back injury, Ray could add a spark to the unit with his energy and ferocity off the edge.

One of the rarely discussed parts of the Broncos’ pass rush has been the clever utilization of second-level defenders on bltizes. Phillips has aggressively attacked quarterbacks with five- and six-man pressures featuring linebackers or safeties rushing from unique alignments. This has resulted in 11 different players registering at least one sack for the unit.

After studying All-22 Coaches Film to determine which second-level players could have a bigger pass-rushing role down the line, I’ve come to believe T.J. Ward is the guy to watch. The Pro Bowl safety is a big hitter with a natural feel for finding creases on blitz pressures. Ward’s combination of timing, athleticism and ferocity could make him a destructive force when coming off the edges on safety blitzes from the slot or the box area.

With a plethora of pass-rushing options at his disposal, Phillips is dialing up the pressure at a rapid rate and suffocating opponents with a defense that creates chaos at every turn.

2) A star-studded secondary is suffocating WR1s on the perimeter.

For all of the accolades and attention the Broncos’ pass rush receives for dominating opponents at the line of scrimmage, the defense’s success has been largely driven by the stifling coverage of its secondary. Aqib Talib, Chris Harris Jr. and Bradley Roby comprise one of the most talented collection of cornerbacks in the NFL. Each player brings a unique skill set to the table that allows the Broncos to neutralize premier pass catchers on the perimeter. Most importantly, they provide Phillips with the flexibility to match up with any WR1.

Talib is the Broncos’ designated CB1, with a dynamic set of skills that allows him to neutralize big, athletic receivers. The eighth-year pro is a long, rangy playmaker with the ability to utilize press or “off” technique. Talib’s athleticism and technique versatility has always made him one of the elite cover corners in the NFL, but he has become a more diligent student of the game, which is reflected in his stellar play. Talib’s interception against Kansas City in Denver’s Week 2 win — shown in the video clip to the right — is the result of the veteran jumping a hitch route after keying the three-step on Alex Smith’s drop. The combination of preparation and instincts leads to a critical pick for the Broncos. Moreover, it showcases Talib’s abilities as a ball-hawking playmaker on the perimeter.

Harris could rival Talib as the Broncos’ CB1, but there is no disputing his spot as the top nickel corner in the game. He is an instinctive playmaker with outstanding awareness, savvy and diagnostic skills. Harris has a great understanding of concepts and uses his wits to outsmart receivers at the breakpoint to contest pass attempts at short and intermediate range.

Roby doesn’t receive headlines like his compatriots, but the second-year pro is thriving as the CB3. He has gotten his hands on a number of balls (three passes defensed, one interception and a fumble recovery), showing a propensity for being in the right place at the right time. In coverage, Roby remains a work in progress, but his athleticism, length and ball skills make him an ideal fit as a CB3. He challenges receivers at the line of scrimmage and doesn’t blink when quarterbacks target receivers in his area. With Talib and Harris blanketing receivers with tremendous success, Roby’s ability to hold up against a barrage of throws is a critical part of the Broncos’ defensive equation.

Phillips takes advantage of his cornerbacks’ unique skills by routinely placing them in Cover 0-type tactics with six- and seven-man pressures. The blitz-heavy schemes force the ball to come out quickly, allowing the Broncos’ cover corners to squat on routes and make plays on the ball. With the combination of pressure and coverage limiting big-play opportunities, the Broncos haven’t allowed a 100-yard receiver in eight games, the longest active streak in the NFL.

Given the importance of slowing down WR1s in today’s NFL, the Broncos’ trio gives Phillips the ability to suffocate the most explosive offenses in the league.

3) The underrated ILBs are tackling machines between the hashes.

Danny Trevathan and Brandon Marshall are rarely cited as key contributors to the Broncos’ defensive dominance, but the dynamic duo controls the middle of the field as “run and chase” playmakers on the second level. Marshall is an instinctive defender with a knack for hunting down running backs between the tackles. He flies to the ball with reckless abandon, exhibiting outstanding range and burst on “sideline-to-sideline” pursuits. Marshall’s ability to patrol the middle allows Phillips to mix in base and sub-package groupings without concern. Most importantly, Marshall’s presence in the middle allows Phillips to use a variety of inside-linebacker blitzes to keep the heat on the quarterback.

Trevathan lacks ideal physical dimensions, but he brings the kind of effort, energy and burst coaches covet in “hash-to-hash” playmakers. He plays in a scheme designed to allow him to run and chase unobstructed to the ball. Trevathan slithers through cracks at the point of attack to routinely nail runners in the hole. The fourth-year pro is a “knock-back” player with the explosive strength and power to stop runners in their tracks. On a defense that forces runners to stutter-step and pitter-pat with its collective speed and quickness, Trevathan’s presence as an attack defender has helped the Broncos hold opponents to just 85.2 rushing yards per game and just 3.7 rushing yards per attempt.

With the Broncos’ defense fueling a championship run, Marshall and Trevathan could finally receive recognition for their efforts as blue-collar members of a stellar defense.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/04/15/id-offer-sanity-quiz-all-nevertrump-conservatives

Published on Sunday, April 15, 2018
by Esquire
I’d Like to Offer This Sanity Quiz to All #NeverTrump Conservatives
Nicolle Wallace, David Frum, Joe Scarborough, Bill Kristol: Step right up.

by Charles P. Pierce

I am told regularly by people I admire and respect to hold my cynical tongue about all the career conservatives and television flotsam from the late and unlamented Avignon Presidency who now are all over the airwaves deploring the terrible things being done to the Republic by the president* and his dwindling band of loyalists down at Camp Runamuck. Be nice, I am told. These are valuable allies.

Try not to say so loudly that, as soon as the Republican Party casts off the First Millstone, these people all will be right back to promoting the ideas and the policies that made him possible in the first place—voodoo economics, wars of choice based on deceit, ticking-bomb excuses for torture, and night sweats over the impending rise of the liberal power elite. Keep that stuff to yourself, they say.

I am nothing if not coachable, so I’ve laid off as best I can. But, on Thursday night, kindly Doc Maddow hosted Nicolle Wallace to talk about the Comey book and other symptoms of our current attack of virulent political botulism. Wallace has proved to be a great—not, good, but great—TV host qua TV host. She’s smart and she’s personable and she comes across wonderfully on camera.

That said, on Friday night, if I had a firearm, I’d have Elvis-ed my electric teevee screen over something Wallace said to KDM concerning the Trump camp’s attacks on good ol’ James Comey, Man of Immutable Integritude. To wit:

WALLACE: Look, I just think it’s another illustration of the complete decimation of the Republican Party’s standing for anything that it was supposed to stand for. And I know you’ve never been a fan, but I’m a former practicing member of the party, and it never stood for character assassination of a man like Jim Comey, who served Republican presidents. And you may disagree with every single policy that George W. Bush advanced, but Jim Comey was a faithful and loyal servant in the George W. Bush Justice Department. So to have today’s RNC crafting a plan and staff a war room to smear him is a disgrace.

Bold face mine, indicating the exact point in the show when I had a stroke.

Instead of venting my anger, and in my usual attempt to calm the roiling political sea, I offer the following test questions to all the Republican Penitents currently d/b/a Never Trumpers. These questions are based on Wallace’s remarkable assertion above as to what Republicanism is and is not, and what it has been and has not been, over the course of my life of political observation.

So, Nicolle, and Steve Schmidt, and Michael Steele, and Rick Wilson, and Joe Scarborough, and Butcher’s Bill Kristol, and Andrew Sullivan, and David Frum, and the rest of you. Please take out your No. 2 pencils, open your test booklets and begin. We start with an easy one.

1) Many of you have expressed your dismay at how Sinclair Broadcasting forced its local anchors to read a canned statement about the curse of “fake news,” divining, correctly, that this was the company’s way of delegitimizing serious coverage of the many and varied corruptions of the current administration*. In 2004, when Sinclair forced its local stations to run a meretricious fake documentary slandering John Kerry’s service in Vietnam, were you as offended as you are today? Were you public with your disapproval? Did you take your concerns to upper echelons in the Bush campaign and the Bush White House? To whom did you take them?

2) Please provide an example of how you pushed back against the entire Swift Boating of Kerry? Did any of you upbraid the people who were peddling Purple Heart Band-Aids at the 2004 Republican Convention?

3) Please explain in detail how you, because of your deep concern for political civility and an open marketplace of ideas, pushed back against the vicious attacks by Bush administration officials, and conservative journalists, who were critical of Americans who doubted the phony case for the invasion of Iraq. Please explain Andrew Sullivan’s famous “Fifth Column” essay in light of how Donald Trump talks about his political opponents. Bonus Question: Please discuss the Bush Administration’s assaults on the UN weapons inspectors in the context of the Trump Administration’s assaults on the credibility of the FBI?

4) In one sentence or less, please describe the political style and impact on the nation of the following: Newt Gingrich, Lee Atwater, Karl Rove, Richard Mellon Scaife, the Mercer family, the Koch Family, the Bradley Family. Please include details of the positive contributions of each of these to the political life of the nation.

5) True or False: Ronald Reagan was correct in referring to Michael Dukakis as a “mental patient” from a White House podium.

6) Please explain, in detail, all efforts you made within the Republican Party during election seasons, to counter the influence of radical conservative splinter Protestantism on the party’s policies toward the following: reproductive rights, public schools, the rights of LGBTQ citizens. Bonus Question: Please write in detail the complaints you made when gay marriage bans were specifically targeted.

7) In 1983, Ronald Reagan told Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir that he personally had been part of a film crew at the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe. In 2018, Donald Trump said he wished he’d have been in Parkland, Florida so he could have rushed school shooter Nikolas Cruz. Compare and contrast.

8) Ronald Reagan once said that, “Trees cause more pollution than humans do.” Donald Trump once tweeted that, during a cold snap, the “East Coast could use a little of that global warming.” Compare and Contrast.

9) Given your concern about ratfcking in political campaigns, please explain all the steps you took to fight the Republican party’s voter-suppression campaign in Florida in 2000.

10) Please explain how close you came to resigning from the party when George W. Bush’s campaign slandered John McCain’s child during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.

11) Please explain in detail how you pushed back against the lies and half-truths lobbed at Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign. Please define the salience to the 2000 campaign of the following phrases: Love Canal, Internet, Fairfax Hotel, Love Story.

12) True Or False: Bill Clinton ran drugs out of a small airport in rural Arkansas.

13) True or False: Bill Clinton had two teenagers murdered along a set of railroad tracks in rural Arkansas.

14) True or False: White House counsel Vince Foster’s death was “mysterious.”

And, finally, write a 500-word essay on one of the following topics:

1) Donald Trump’s attempted politicization of the Justice Department is different than Karl Rove’s attempted politicization of the Justice Department.

2) Donald Trump’s corrupt Cabinet is different than Ronald Reagan’s corrupt Cabinet.

3) Michael Cohen is a thug while Karl Rove is a visionary political philosophe.

You have two hours.

Begin.

© 2018 Esquire

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2017/11/22/at-yale-we-conducted-an-experiment-to-turn-conservatives-into-liberals-the-results-say-a-lot-about-our-political-divisions/?utm_term=.f48b3cc2ddda

At Yale, we conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals. The results say a lot about our political divisions.

By John Bargh November 22, 2017

When my daughter was growing up, she often wanted to rush off to do fun things with her friends — get into the water at the beach, ride off on her bike — without taking the proper safety precautions first. I’d have to stop her in her tracks to first put on the sunscreen, or her bike helmet and knee pads, with her standing there impatiently. “Safety first, fun second,” was my mantra.

Keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe from harm is perhaps our strongest human motivation, deeply embedded in our very DNA. It is so deep and important that it influences much of what we think and do, maybe more than we might expect. For example, over a decade now of research in political psychology consistently shows that how physically threatened or fearful a person feels is a key factor — although clearly not the only one — in whether he or she holds conservative or liberal attitudes.

Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course). But no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals.

Until we did.

In a new study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S. residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social change in general. The group was two-thirds female, about three-quarters white, with an average age of 35. Thirty-percent of the participants self-identified as Republican, and the rest as Democrat.

But before they answered the survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise. They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to be able to fly, under one’s own power. For the other half, it was to be completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general.

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

In both instances, we had manipulated a deeper underlying reason for political attitudes, the strength of the basic motivation of safety and survival. The boiling water of our social and political attitudes, it seems, can be turned up or down by changing how physically safe we feel.

This is why it makes sense that liberal politicians intuitively portray danger as manageable — recall FDR’s famous Great Depression era reassurance of “nothing to fear but fear itself,” echoed decades later in Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address — and why President Trump and other Republican politicians are instead likely to emphasize the dangers of terrorism and immigration, relying on fear as a motivator to gain votes.

In fact, anti-immigration attitudes are also linked directly to the underlying basic drive for physical safety. For centuries, arch-conservative leaders have often referred to scapegoated minority groups as “germs” or “bacteria” that seek to invade and destroy their country from within. President Trump is an acknowledged germaphobe, and he has a penchant for describing people — not only immigrants but political opponents and former Miss Universe contestants — as “disgusting.”

“Immigrants are like viruses” is a powerful metaphor, because in comparing immigrants entering a country to germs entering a human body, it speaks directly to our powerful innate motivation to avoid contamination and disease. Until very recently in human history, not only did we not have antibiotics, we did not even know how infections occurred or diseases transmitted, and cuts and open wounds were quite dangerous. (In the American Civil War, for example, 60 out of every 1,000 soldiers died not by bullets or bayonets, but by infections.)

Therefore, we reasoned, making people feel safer about a dangerous flu virus should serve to calm their fears about immigrants — and making them feel more threatened by the flu virus should cause them to be more against immigration than they were before. In a 2011 study, my colleagues and I showed just that. First, we reminded our nationwide sample of liberals and conservatives about the threat of the flu virus (during the H1N1 epidemic), and then measured their attitudes toward immigration. Afterward we simply asked them if they’d already gotten their flu shot or not. It turned out that those who had not gotten a flu shot (feeling threatened) expressed more negative attitudes toward immigration, while those who had received the vaccination (feeling safe) had more positive attitudes about immigration.

In another study, using hand sanitizer after being warned about the flu virus had the same effect on immigration attitudes as had being vaccinated. A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the dangerous virus, and this made them feel socially safe from immigrants as well.

Our study findings may have a silver lining. Here’s how:

All of us believe that our social and political attitudes are based on good reasons and reflect our important values. But we also need to recognize how much they can be influenced subconsciously by our most basic, powerful motivations for safety and survival. Politicians on both sides of the aisle know this already and attempt to manipulate our votes and party allegiances by appealing to these potent feelings of fear and of safety.

Instead of allowing our strings to be pulled so easily by others, we can become more conscious of what drives us and work harder to base our opinions on factual knowledge about the issues, including information from outside our media echo chambers. Yes, our views can harden given the right environment, but our work shows that they are actually easier to change than we might think.

John Bargh is a professor of social psychology at Yale University and the author of “Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do”

Aqib Talib Is One of a Kind

ROBERT KLEMKO

https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/03/09/aqib-talib-trade-broncos-rams-crabtree-chain-marcus-peters?utm_campaign=sinow&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&xid=socialflow_twitter_si

It was the first and only time I ever saw Aqib Talib outside of the practice facility in Englewood, Colo., or the stadium in Denver. We were at Blackstone Country Club in Aurora, in mid-July 2016 for a teammate’s charity golf tournament. A little more than a month earlier, Talib had been shot in the leg while leaving a Dallas nightclub, telling police he’d been so intoxicated he couldn’t recall any details.

On that day at the country club, Talib told the Denver Post he expected to be ready for training camp in a few days, and the leg was healing nicely. I was sitting in the restaurant area waiting to interview another member of the reigning Super Bowl champions when Talib stumbled to the bar, crashing against a stool. After a few drinks, he crossed his arms on the bar, rested his head atop his forearms and went to sleep at 4:30 in the afternoon. That’s Aqib Talib.

Another story, second-hand this time: Talib got wind of a Broncos rookie having been late to the facility. He stormed into a meeting attended by all the rookies on the roster and took the offender to task. This is not how you do it. This is not how you be a pro. That’s also Aqib Talib.

Talib never fit into a nice little box. He’d rip a chain off Michael Crabtree’s neck, just because, then mentor a young player on proper film study the next day. He was a respected member of the player leadership, someone you could expect to hold the rest of the secondary accountable, yet he was a nightmare for the brass in the offseason. I’m using the past tense here, because he was a Bronco for four seasons, until Thursday night. Now he’s a Ram after a trade that sends a 2018 fifth-round pick Denver’s way. Los Angeles is the fourth stop in the colorful career of a modern football mercenary.

It’s rare that a single trade speaks such volumes about the direction of two franchises. For Denver, Talib’s signing in 2014 represented one of the final pieces of the puzzle. There was Peyton Manning, DeMarcus Ware, and Talib—three expensive free agents who would help Denver to a Super Bowl 50 victory.

Trading Talib is a tacit admission on the part of John Elway that the search for a quarterback could get expensive in free agency, or cost a high draft pick. In the case of the former, the 32-year-old Talib’s contract ate up too much cap space. In the case of the latter, Talib is too impatient. After all, it was Talib who shouted down offensive tackle Russell Okung following a 16-3 loss to the Patriots in December 2016, setting off an offense vs. defense shouting match, the root of the conflict being the offense’s struggles with Trevor Siemian at quarterback.

For the Rams, adding Talib signals loud and clear the belief they are one Pro Bowler away from winning a Super Bowl, and are willing to take on a handful of mercurial personalities to reach that goal. Head coach Sean McVay’s and defensive coordinator Wade Phillips’ jobs just got easier, but Rams public relations boss Artis Twyman’s job just got harder. Talib isn’t just unpredictable on the field and at home in Texas, he’s a wild card in the locker room during media sessions. You never know what you’ll get, but you know it will be the truth. One day he might share a little too much about his own injury status. Or he might share the source of his admiration for Bill Belichick, his former coach (Bill didn’t mind if players wore slippers in meetings). After that Super Bowl thrashing of the Panthers, I headed down to the Denver locker room at Levi’s Stadium and pulled up the video of Cam Newton hesitating to dive on a fumble with the game on the line. The first person I showed was Talib. “He didn’t want it,” he said of Newton between swigs of Cognac from the bottle.

Talib is one of those rare athletes who’s such an open book, the reporters who cover him actually get to know him beyond the 30-second sound bite. NFL Network reporter and Denverite James Palmer soon realized he could go to Talib for some prophetic NFL takes based on Talib’s meticulous film study.

“I think what is overlooked is his football IQ,” Palmer says. “People look at the off-the-field mistakes or the chain-snatching and jump to a certain conclusion. But all he does is study film, and other corners. During [2016] training camp he told me A.J. Bouye was going to have a breakout season with the Texans. No one had heard of Bouye. Bouye balled, and was the top free agent corner after the season.”

Talib also told Palmer two years ago he could tell Kansas City Chiefs cornerback Marcus Peters wasn’t watching film properly, and he believed Peters had the potential to be the best corner in football with the right guidance. Broncos cornerback Bradley Roby got a heavy dose of that guidance during their four years together in Denver—ironically, it’s Roby’s emergence as a quality NFL starter that lessens the blow of Talib’s departure. Now, since the Rams traded for Peters (who has his own off-field baggage), Talib can tutor Peters full time. It’s a match made in football heaven, probably.

Here’s what I know: Hire Aqib Talib if you’d like to win a championship, now. Hire Aqib Talib if there are chains that need snatching. Hire Aqib Talib if there are young corners who need molding. But for God’s sake, only hire Aqib Talib if you’re sure you can handle the drama.

The Plot Against America
Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-manafort-american-hustler/550925/?utm_source=fbb

I. The Wisdom of Friends

the clinic permitted paul manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.

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His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.

FROM OUR MARCH 2018 ISSUE

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Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. But in his Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands.

Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to run for their lives. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. Andrea noted her father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. For her “wedding weekend kick off” party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice.

He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his offshore accounts; an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in Ukraine had begun not long after Yanukovych’s fall. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska had been after Manafort to explain what had happened to an $18.9 million investment in a Ukrainian company that Manafort had claimed to have made on his behalf.

Manafort had been dodging Deripaska. The Russian oligarch wanted to know what had become of his money.
Manafort had known Deripaska for years, so he surely understood the oligarch’s history. Deripaska had won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called aluminum wars of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry. In 2006, the U.S. State Department had revoked Deripaska’s visa, reportedly out of concern over his ties to organized crime (which he has denied). Despite Deripaska’s reputation, or perhaps because of it, Manafort had been dodging the oligarch’s attempts to contact him. As Deripaska’s lawyers informed a court in 2014 while attempting to claw back their client’s money, “It appears that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates have simply disappeared.”

Nine months after the Ukrainian revolution, Manafort’s family life also went into crisis. The nature of his home life can be observed in detail because Andrea’s text messages were obtained last year by a “hacktivist collective”—most likely Ukrainians furious with Manafort’s meddling in their country—which posted the purloined material on the dark web. The texts extend over four years (2012–16) and 6 million words. Manafort has previously confirmed that his daughter’s phone was hacked and acknowledged the authenticity of some texts quoted by Politico and The New York Times. Manafort and Andrea both declined to comment on this article. Jessica could not be reached for comment.

Collectively, the texts show a sometimes fraught series of relationships, by turns loving and manipulative. Manafort was generous with his family financially—he’d invested millions in Jessica’s film projects, and millions more in her now-ex-husband’s real-estate ventures. But when he called home in tears or threatened suicide in the spring of 2015, he was pleading for his marriage. The previous November, as the cache of texts shows, his daughters had caught him in an affair with a woman more than 30 years his junior. It was an expensive relationship. According to the text messages, Manafort had rented his mistress a $9,000-a-month apartment in Manhattan and a house in the Hamptons, not far from his own. He had handed her an American Express card, which she’d used to good effect. “I only go to luxury restaurants,” she once declared on a friend’s fledgling podcast, speaking expansively about her photo posts on social media: caviar, lobster, haute cuisine.

The affair had been an unexpected revelation. Manafort had nursed his wife after a horseback-riding accident had nearly killed her in 1997. “I always marveled at how patient and devoted he was with her during that time,” an old friend of Manafort’s told me. But after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters. Manafort had committed to couples therapy but, the texts reveal, that hadn’t prevented him from continuing his affair. Because he clumsily obscured his infidelity—and because his mistress posted about their travels on Instagram—his family caught him again, six months later. He entered the clinic in Arizona soon after, according to Andrea’s texts. “My dad,” she wrote, “is in the middle of a massive emotional breakdown.”

By the early months of 2016, Manafort was back in greater Washington, his main residence and the place where he’d begun his career as a political consultant and lobbyist. But his attempts at rehabilitation—of his family life, his career, his sense of self-worth—continued. He began to make a different set of calls. As he watched the U.S. presidential campaign take an unlikely turn, he saw an opportunity, and he badly wanted in. He wrote Donald Trump a crisp memo listing all the reasons he would be an ideal campaign consigliere—and then implored mutual friends to tout his skills to the ascendant candidate.

Shortly before the announcement of his job inside Trump’s campaign, Manafort touched base with former colleagues to let them know of his professional return. He exuded his characteristic confidence, but they surprised him with doubts and worries. Throughout his long career, Manafort had advised powerful men—U.S. senators and foreign supreme commanders, imposing generals and presidents-for-life. He’d learned how to soothe them, how to bend their intransigent wills with his calmly delivered, diligently researched arguments. But Manafort simply couldn’t accept the wisdom of his friends, advice that he surely would have dispensed to anyone with a history like his own—the imperative to shy away from unnecessary attention.

His friends, like all Republican political operatives of a certain age, could recite the legend of Paul Manafort, which they did with fascination, envy, and occasional disdain. When Manafort had arrived in Washington in the 1970s, the place reveled in its shabby glories, most notably a self-satisfied sense of high duty. Wealth came in the form of Georgetown mansions, with their antique imperfections and worn rugs projecting power so certain of itself, it needn’t shout. But that old boarding-school establishment wasn’t Manafort’s style. As he made a name for himself, he began to dress differently than the Brooks Brothers crowd on K Street, more European, with funky, colorful blazers and collarless shirts. If he entertained the notion, say, of moving his backyard swimming pool a few feet, nothing stopped him from the expense. Colleagues, amused by his sartorial quirks and his cosmopolitan lifestyle, referred to him as “the Count of Monte Cristo.”

His acts of rebellion were not merely aesthetic. Manafort rewrote the rules of his adopted city. In the early ’80s, he created a consulting firm that ignored the conventions that had previously governed lobbying. When it came to taking on new clients, he was uninhibited by moral limits. In 2016, his friends might not have known the specifics of his Cyprus accounts, all the alleged off-the-books payments to him captured in Cyrillic ledgers in Kiev. But they knew enough to believe that he could never sustain the exposure that comes with running a presidential campaign in the age of opposition research and aggressive media. “The risks couldn’t have been more obvious,” one friend who attempted to dissuade him from the job told me. But in his frayed state, these warnings failed to register.

When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures didn’t just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the character of a man who would very likely commandeer the campaign to serve his own interests, with little concern for the collective consequences.

Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.

II. The Young Man and His Machine

in the spring of 1977, a 28-year-old Paul Manafort sat at a folding table in a hotel suite in Memphis. Photos from that time show him with a Tom Selleck mustache and meaningful sideburns. He was surrounded by phones that he’d specially installed for the weekend. The desk held his copious binders, which he called “whip books.” Eight hundred delegates had gathered to elect a new leader of the Young Republicans organization, and Manafort, a budding kingmaker, had compiled a dossier on each one. Those whip books provided the basis for deal making. To wheedle and cajole delegates, it helped to have an idea of what job they wanted in return for their support.

Control over the Young Republicans—a political and social network for professionals ages 18 to 40—was a genuine prize in those days. Presidential hopefuls sought to harness the group. This was still the era of brokered presidential conventions, and Young Republicans could descend in numbers sufficient to dominate the state meetings that selected delegates. In 1964, the group’s efforts had arguably secured Barry Goldwater the GOP nomination; by the ’70s every Republican aspirant understood its potency. The attention paid by party elders yielded opportunities for Young Republican leaders. Patronage flowed in their direction. To seize the organization was to come into possession of a baby Tammany.

In Memphis, Manafort was working on behalf of his friend Roger Stone, now best known as a pioneer in opposition research and a promiscuous purveyor of conspiracy theories. He managed Stone’s candidacy for chairman of the group. Stone, then 24, reveled in the fact that he’d received his political education during Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972; he even admitted to playing dirty tricks to benefit his idol. Stone and Manafort had met through College Republicans. They shared a home state, an affection for finely tailored power suits, and a deeper love of power itself. Together, they campaigned with gleeful ruthlessness.

Even at this early stage in his career, Manafort had acquired a remarkable skill for managing a gathering of great size. He knew how to command an army of loyalists, who took his orders via walkie-talkie. And he knew how to put on a show. In Memphis that year, he rented a Mississippi River paddleboat for a booze cruise and dispatched his whips to work over wavering delegates within its floating confines. To the Young Republican elite, the faction Manafort controlled carried a name that conveyed his expectation of unfailing loyalty: the Team. And in the face of the Team’s prowess, Stone’s rival eventually quit the race, mid-convention. “It’s all been scripted in the back room,” he complained.

Manafort had been bred for politics. While he was in high school, his father, Paul Manafort Sr., became the mayor of New Britain, Connecticut, and Manafort Jr. gravitated toward the action—joining a mock city council, campaigning for the gubernatorial candidate Thomas Meskill as part of his Kiddie Corps. For college and law school, he chose Georgetown University, a taxi ride from the big time.

In the ’70s, the big time was embodied by James A. Baker III, the shrewdest Republican insider of his generation. During the epic Republican National Convention of 1976, Manafort holed up with Baker in a trailer outside the Kemper Arena, in Kansas City, Missouri. They attempted to protect Gerald Ford’s renomination bid in the face of Ronald Reagan’s energetic challenge; Manafort wrangled delegates on Baker’s behalf. From Baker, he learned the art of ostentatious humility, how to use the knife to butter up and then stab in the back. “He was studying at the feet of the master,” Jeff Bell, a Reagan campaign aide, remembers.

By the late ’70s, Manafort and Stone could foresee Ronald Reagan’s ascendance, and both intended to become players in his 1980 campaign. For Manafort, this was an audacious volte-face. By flipping his allegiance from the former Ford faction, he provoked suspicion among conservatives, who viewed him as a rank opportunist. There was little denying that the Young Republicans made an ideal vehicle for his ambitions.

Manafort, Stone, and Atwater in 1985
Paul Manafort (left), Roger Stone (center), and Lee Atwater (right) in 1985. Their efforts helped transform how Washington works. (Harry Naltchayan / The Washington Post / Getty)
These ambitions left a trail of damage, including an Alabama lawyer named Neal Acker. During the Memphis convention, Acker had served as a loyal foot soldier on the Team, organizing the southern delegates on Stone’s behalf. In return, Manafort and Stone had promised to throw the Team behind Acker’s campaign to replace Stone as the head of the Young Republicans two years later, in 1979. Manafort would manage the campaign himself.

But as the moment of Acker’s coronation approached, Manafort suddenly conditioned his plan. If Acker wanted the job, he had to swear loyalty to Reagan. When Acker ultimately balked—he wanted to stay neutral—Manafort turned on him with fury, “an unprecedented 11th-hour move,” the Associated Press reported. In the week leading up to the 1979 Young Republicans convention, Manafort and Stone set out to destroy Acker’s candidacy. At Manafort’s urging, the delegates who were pledged to Acker bolted—and Manafort took over his opponent’s campaign. In a bravura projection of power that no one in the Reagan campaign could miss, Manafort swung the vote sharply against Acker, 465 to 180. “It was one of the great fuck jobs,” a Manafort whip told me recently.

Not long after that, Stone and Manafort won the crucial positions in the Reagan operation that they’d coveted. Stone directed the campaign in the Northeast, Manafort in the South. The campaign had its share of infighting; both men survived factional schisms and purges. “They were known as the Young Republican whizzes,” Jeff Bell told me. Their performance positioned them for inner-sanctum jobs in the Reagan administration, but they had even grander plans.

III. The Firm


during the years that followed world war ii, Washington’s most effective lobbyists transcended the transactional nature of their profession. Men such as Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, Bryce Harlow, and Thomas Corcoran were known not as grubby mercenaries but as elegant avatars of a permanent establishment, lauded as “wise men.” Lobbying hardly carried a stigma, because there was so little of it. When the legendary lawyer Tommy Boggs registered himself as a lobbyist, in 1967, his name was only 64th on the active list. Businesses simply didn’t consider lobbying a necessity. Three leading political scientists had studied the profession in 1963 and concluded: “When we look at the typical lobby, we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, and its typical problem not the influencing of Congressional votes but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all.”

On the cusp of the Reagan era, Republican lobbyists were particularly enfeebled. Generations of Democratic majorities in Congress had been terrible for business. The scant tribe of Republican lobbyists working the cloakrooms included alumni of the Nixon and Ford administrations; operating under the shame-inducing cloud of Watergate, they were disinclined toward either ambition or aggression.

This was the world that brash novices like Manafort and Stone quickly came to dominate. The Reagan administration represented a break with the old Republican establishment. After the long expansion of the regulatory state, business finally had a political partner eager to dismantle it—which generated unprecedented demand for lobbyists. Manafort could convincingly claim to know the new administration better than anyone. During its transition to power, he was the personnel coordinator in the Office of Executive Management, which meant that he’d stacked the incoming government with his people.* Along with Stone and Charlie Black, another veteran of the Young Republican wars, he set up a firm, Black, Manafort and Stone, which soon compiled an imposing client list: Bethlehem Steel, the Tobacco Institute, Johnson & Johnson, Trans World Airlines.

Whereas other firms had operated in specialized niches—lobbying, consulting, public relations—Black, Manafort and Stone bundled all those services under one roof, a deceptively simple move that would eventually help transform Washington. Time magazine deemed the operation “the ultimate supermarket of influence peddling.” Fred Wertheimer, a good-government advocate, described this expansive approach as “institutionalized conflict of interest.”

The linkage of lobbying to political consulting—the creation of what’s now known as a double-breasted operation—was the real breakthrough. Manafort’s was the first lobbying firm to also house political consultants. (Legally, the two practices were divided into different companies, but they shared the same founding partners and the same office space.) One venture would run campaigns; the other would turn around and lobby the politicians whom their colleagues had helped elect. The consulting side hired the hard-edged operative Lee Atwater, notorious for pioneering race-baiting tactics on behalf of Strom Thurmond. “We’re getting into servicing what we sell,” Atwater told his friends. Just as imagined, the firm’s political clients (Jesse Helms, Phil Gramm, Arlen Specter) became reliable warhorses when the firm needed them to promote the agendas of its corporate clients. With this evolution of the profession, the effectiveness and influence of lobbying grew in tandem.

In 1984, the firm reached across the aisle. It made a partner of Peter Kelly, a former finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who had earned the loyalty of lawmakers by raising millions for their campaigns. Some members of the firm worked for Democratic Senate candidates in Louisiana, Vermont, and Florida, even as operatives down the hall worked for their Republican foes. “People said, ‘It’s un-American,’ ” Kelly told me. “ ‘They can’t lose. They have both sides.’ I kept saying, ‘How is it un-American to win?’ ” This sense of invincibility permeated the lobbying operation too. When Congress passed tax-reform legislation in 1986, the firm managed to get one special rule inserted that saved Chrysler-Mitsubishi $58 million; it wrangled another clause that reaped Johnson & Johnson $38 million in savings. Newsweek pronounced the firm “the hottest shop in town.”

Manafort’s lobbying firm exuded the decadent spirit of the ’80s. “Excess Is Best” was the theme of one annual gathering.
Demand for its services rose to such heights that the firm engineered a virtual lock on the 1988 Republican primary. Atwater became the chief strategist for George H. W. Bush; Black worked with Bob Dole; Stone advised Jack Kemp. A congressional staffer joked to Time, “Why have primaries for the nomination? Why not have the candidates go over to Black, Manafort and Stone and argue it out?” Manafort cultivated this perception. In response to a questionnaire in The Washington Times, he declared Machiavelli the person he would most like to meet.

Despite his young age, Manafort projected the sort of confidence that inspires others to have confidence, a demeanor often likened to that of a news anchor. “He is authoritative, and you never see a chink in the armor,” one of his longtime deputies, Philip Griffin, told me. Manafort wrote well, especially in proposals to prospective clients, and excelled at thinking strategically. Name-dropping never substituted for concrete steps that would bolster a client. “If politics has done anything, it’s taught us to treat everything as a campaign,” he once declared. He toiled for clients with unflagging intensity. His wife once quipped, according to the text messages, that Andrea was conceived between conference calls. He “hung up the phone, looked at his watch, and said, ‘Okay, we have 20 minutes until the next one,’ ” Andrea wrote to her then-fiancé.

The firm exuded the decadent spirit of the 1980s. Each year, it hosted a golf outing called Boodles, after the gin brand. “It would have to move almost every year, because we weren’t invited back,” John Donaldson, an old friend of Manafort’s who worked at the firm, says. “A couple of women in the firm complained that they weren’t ever invited. I told them they didn’t want to be.” As the head of the firm’s “social committee,” Manafort would supply a theme for the annual gatherings. His masterwork was a three-year progression: “Excess,” followed by “Exceed Excess,” capped by “Excess Is Best.”

Partners at the firm let it be known to The Washington Post that they each intended to take home at least $450,000 in 1986 (a little more than $1 million today). “All of a sudden they came into a lot of money, and I don’t think any of them were used to earning the money that we were earning,” Kelly said. Senior partners were given luxury cars and a membership to the country club of their choosing. Manafort would fly the Concorde to Europe and back as if it were the Acela to New York. “I must confess,” Atwater swooned to The Washington Post, “after four years on a government payroll, I’m delighted with my new life style.”

Manafort with the Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole at the 1996 GOP convention, which Manafort managed (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times / Getty)
The firm hired kids straight out of college—“wheel men” in the office vernacular—to drive the partners around town. When Roger Stone’s old hero, Richard Nixon, came to Washington, the wheel men would shuttle him about.

Many of these young associates would eventually climb the firm’s ladder, and were often dispatched to manage campaigns on the firm’s behalf. Climbing the ladder, however, in most cases required passing what came to be known as Manafort’s “loyalty tests”—challenging tasks that strayed outside the boundaries of standard professional commitment and demonstrated the control that Manafort expected to exert over the associates’ lives. At the last minute, he might ask a staffer to entertain his visiting law-school buddies, never mind that the staffer had never met them before. For one Saint Patrick’s Day party, he gave two junior staffers 24 hours to track down a plausible impersonator of Billy Barty, the 3-foot-9-inch actor who made movies with Mickey Rooney and Chevy Chase—which they did. “This was in the days before the internet,” one of them told me. “Can you imagine how hard that was?”

IV. Man of the World

by the 1990s, the double-digit list of registered lobbyists that Tommy Boggs had joined back in 1967 had swelled to more than 10,000. Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly had greatly abetted that transformation, and stood to profit from the rising flood of corporate money into the capital. But by then, domestic politics had begun to feel a little small, a bit too unexotic, for Paul Manafort, whom Charlie Black described to me as a self-styled “adventurer.”

Manafort had long befriended ambitious young diplomats at the trailhead to power, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington. When Bandar attended the 1984 Republican National Convention, Manafort dedicated a small group of advance men to smooth his way. Manafort arranged for Bandar to arrive at the presidential entrance, then had him whisked to seats in the vice-presidential box.

Foreign lobbying had certainly existed before the ’80s, but it was limited in scale and operated under a penumbra of suspicion. Just before World War II, Congress had passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, largely in response to the campaigns orchestrated by Ivy Lee, an American publicist hired by the German Dye Trust to soften the image of the Third Reich. Congress hadn’t outlawed influence peddling on behalf of foreign interests, but the practice sat on the far fringes of K Street.

Paul Manafort helped change that. The Reagan administration had remade the contours of the Cold War, stepping up the fight against communism worldwide by funding and training guerrilla armies and right-wing military forces, such as the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahideen. This strategy of military outsourcing—the Reagan Doctrine—aimed to overload the Soviet Union with confrontations that it couldn’t sustain.

All of the money Congress began spending on anti-communist proxies represented a vast opportunity. Iron-fisted dictators and scruffy commandants around the world hoped for a share of the largesse. To get it, they needed help refining their image, so that Congress wouldn’t look too hard at their less-than-liberal tendencies. Other lobbyists sought out authoritarian clients, but none did so with the focused intensity of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. The firm would arrange for image-buffing interviews on American news programs; it would enlist allies in Congress to unleash money. Back home, it would help regimes acquire the whiff of democratic legitimacy that would bolster their standing in Washington.

The firm won clients because it adeptly marketed its ties to the Reagan administration, and then the George H. W. Bush administration after that. In one proposal, reported in The New York Times in 1988, the firm advertised its “personal relationships” with officials and promised to “upgrade” back channels “in the economic and foreign policy spheres.” No doubt it helped to have a friend in James Baker, especially after he became the secretary of state under Bush. “Baker would send the firm clients,” Kelly remembered. “He wanted us to help lead these guys in a better direction.”

But moral improvement never really figured into Manafort’s calculus. “Generally speaking, I would focus on how to bring the client in sync with western European or American values,” Kelly told me. “Paul took the opposite approach.” (Kelly and Manafort have not spoken in recent years; the former supported Hillary Clinton in the last presidential campaign.) In her memoir, Riva Levinson, a managing director at the firm from 1985 to 1995, wrote that when she protested to her boss that she needed to believe in what she was doing, Manafort told her that it would “be my downfall in this business.” The firm’s client base grew to include dictatorial governments in Nigeria, Kenya, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia, and Somalia, among others. Manafort’s firm was a primary subject of scorn in a 1992 report issued by the Center for Public Integrity called “The Torturers’ Lobby.”

The firm’s international business accelerated when the Philippines became a client, in 1985. President Ferdinand Marcos desperately needed a patina of legitimacy: The 1983 assassination of the chief opposition leader, Benigno Aquino Jr., had imperiled U.S. congressional support for his regime. Marcos hired Manafort to lift his image; his wife, Imelda, personally delivered an initial payment of $60,000 to the firm while on a trip to the States. When Marcos called a snap election to prove his democratic bona fides in 1986, Manafort told Time, “What we’ve tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico’s.” The quip was honest, if unintentionally so. In the American political lexicon, Chicago-style elections were generally synonymous with mass voter fraud. The late pollster Warren Mitofsky traveled to the Philippines with CBS News to set up and conduct an exit poll for the election. When he returned, he told the political scientist Sam Popkin the story of how a representative of Manafort’s firm had asked him, “What sort of margin might make a Marcos victory legitimate?” The implication was clear, Popkin told me: “How do we rig this thing and still satisfy the Americans?”

The firm’s most successful right-wing makeover was of the Angolan guerrilla leader Jonas Savimbi, a Maoist turned anti-communist insurgent, whose army committed atrocities against children and conscripted women into sexual slavery. During the general’s 1986 trip to New York and Washington, Manafort and his associates created what one magazine called “Savimbi Chic.” Dressed in a Nehru suit, Savimbi was driven around in a stretch limousine and housed in the Waldorf-Astoria and the Grand Hotel, projecting an image of refinement. The firm had assiduously prepared him for the mission, sending him monthly reports on the political climate in Washington. According to The Washington Post, “He was meticulously coached on everything from how to answer his critics to how to compliment his patrons.” Savimbi emerged from his tour as a much-championed “freedom fighter.” When the neoconservative icon Jeane Kirkpatrick introduced Savimbi at the American Enterprise Institute, she declared that he was a “linguist, philosopher, poet, politician, warrior … one of the few authentic heroes of our time.”

This was a racket—Savimbi paid the firm $600,000 in 1985 alone—that Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly did its best to keep alive; the firm’s own business was tied to Savimbi’s continued rebellion against Angola’s leftist regime. As the country stood on the brink of peace talks in the late ’80s, after nearly 15 years of bloody civil war, the firm helped secure fresh batches of arms for its client, emboldening Savimbi to push forward with his military campaign. Former Senator Bill Bradley wrote in his memoir, “When Gorbachev pulled the plug on Soviet aid to the Angolan government, we had absolutely no reason to persist in aiding Savimbi. But by then he had hired an effective Washington lobbying firm.” The war continued for more than a decade, killing hundreds of thousands of Angolans.

V. The Family Business

“paul’s not especially ideological,” his former partner Charlie Black told me recently. Many of Manafort’s colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly professed to believe in the conservative catechism. Words like freedom and liberty flowed through their everyday musings. But Manafort seldom spoke of first principles or political ideals. He descends from a different kind of political lineage, and in his formative experience one can see the makings of his worldview.

Back in the ’60s, Manafort’s hometown, New Britain, Connecticut, was known as Hardware City. It housed the factory that turned out Stanley tools and was a tangle of ethnic enclaves—Poles, Italians, Irish, Ukrainians. Nancy Johnson, who served New Britain in Congress, told me that when she arrived in the city during those years, she couldn’t believe how little it interacted with the outside world. “It was a small city and very ingrown. When my kids were in high school, the number of their classmates who hadn’t been to Hartford was stunning.” Hartford, the state capital, is a 15-minute drive from New Britain.

In 1919, not long after the Manaforts emigrated from Naples, the family founded a demolition company, New Britain House Wrecking, which eventually became Manafort Brothers, a force in local construction. When Manafort’s father, Paul Sr., ran for mayor in 1965, he was a lonely Republican attempting to seize a blue bastion. But he had the schmoozing gene, as well as an unmistakable fierceness. Paul Carver, a former New Britain City Council member and a protégé of the old man, told me, “It was like going to the bar with your grandfather. He would stick his hand out and buy a round of drinks. He knew almost everybody in town.” Paul Jr., known as P.J. to his friends, idolized his dad, plunging himself into the campaign, whose success he would decades later describe as “magic.” Over the years, he would remain a devoted son. All the partners in his firm came to know his father, running into him at parties that P.J. hosted in his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home. “He was dedicated to him,” Nancy Johnson told me.

The elder Manafort’s outsize capacity for charm made him the sort of figure whose blemishes tend to be wiped from public memory. But in 1981, he was charged with perjury for testimony that he had provided in a municipal corruption investigation. New Britain police had been accused of casting a blind eye toward illegal gambling in the city—and of tampering with evidence to protect Joseph “Pippi” Guerriero, a member of the DeCavalcante crime family.

Several investigations into the tampering drilled through New Britain’s rotten government. The most devastating report came from Palmer McGee, a Hartford lawyer hired by New Britain to sort through its muck. In his findings, he pointed a finger straight at Manafort Sr., calling him the person “most at fault.” According to the testimony of a whistle-blower, Manafort had flatly announced that he wanted to hire someone “flexible” to manage his personnel office, a place that would “not [be] 100 percent by the rules.” The whistle-blower also testified that he had delivered an envelope to Manafort’s home containing the answers to the exam that aspiring police officers had to pass—and that Manafort had given it to two candidates via a relative. Manafort never denied receiving the envelope but insisted that he’d merely asked for “boning-up materials.”

A statute of limitations precluded prosecutors from filing charges against Manafort for the alleged crime of test-fixing—and ultimately he was never convicted of perjury. But his arrest caused the Hartford Courant to compile a list of dealings that reflected badly on him: “Throughout his more than twenty years in public life, he has been the focus of controversy, and several accusations of wrongdoing.” The litany includes a complaint with the Department of Housing and Urban Development accusing him of steering contracts to Manafort Brothers, whose stock he still owned while mayor. When investors from Florida built a jai alai arena in Bridgeport—using the Teamsters’ pension fund to finance the project—Manafort had “improperly” finagled its environmental permit. His family business had then inflated the fees for its work on the arena so that cash could be kicked back to the Teamsters. (The business admitted to inflating its fees, but a grand jury declined to issue an indictment.) Even before this scandal broke, a former mayor of New Britain blasted Manafort for behavior that “violates the very essence of morality.”

Conventional wisdom suggests that the temptations of Washington, D.C., corrupt all the idealists, naïfs, and ingenues who settle there. But what if that formulation gets the causation backwards? What if it took an outsider to debase the capital and create the so-called swamp? When Paul Manafort Jr. broke the rules, when he operated outside of a moral code, he was really following the example he knew best. As he later said of his work with his father in an interview with a local Connecticut paper, “Some of the skills that I learned there I still use today … That’s where I cut my teeth.”

VI. Al Assir

by the late 1980s, Manafort had a new friend from abroad, whom he mentioned to his partners more than any other, an arms dealer from Lebanon named Abdul Rahman Al Assir. “His name kept popping up,” Peter Kelly remembered. While Al Assir never rated much attention in the American press, he had a familial connection who did. He was, for a time, the brother-in-law of the Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the middleman used in the arms-for-hostages scheme that became the Iran-Contra scandal. In the early ’80s, Khashoggi was worth $4 billion; his biography, published in 1986, was titled The Richest Man in the World. At the height of his wealth, Khashoggi spent $250,000 a day to maintain his lifestyle—which reportedly included a dozen houses, 1,000 suits, a $70 million yacht, and a customized airplane, which has been described as a “flying Las Vegas discotheque.”

Al Assir was the Khashoggi empire’s representative in Spain and a broker of big weapons sales to African armies. He’d ensconced himself among the rich and famous, the set that skied in Gstaad, Switzerland, and summered in the south of France. The London-based Arabic-language magazine Sourakia wrote, “The miracle of Al Assir is that he will have lunch with Don Juan Carlos [the king of Spain], dinner with Hassan II [the king of Morocco], and breakfast the next day with Felipe González [the prime minister of Spain].”

Manafort suggested to his partners that Al Assir might help connect the firm to clients around the world. He wanted to increase the firm’s global reach. Manafort’s exploration of the outermost moral frontiers of the influence business had already exposed him to kleptocrats, thugs, and other dubious characters. But none of these relationships imprinted themselves more deeply than his friendship and entrepreneurial partnership with Al Assir. By the ’90s, the two had begun to put together big deals. One of the more noteworthy was an arms sale they helped broker between France and Pakistan, lubricated by bribes and kickbacks involving high-level officials in both countries, that eventually led to murder allegations.

The arms dealer Al Assir introduced Manafort to an aristocratic world that exceeded anything he had ever known.
It all arguably began with a 1993 dinner hosted by Manafort in his Virginia home and attended by Pakistan’s prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. Bhutto had just returned to power after three years in the opposition, and Manafort badly wanted her business. She knew of him as a skilled manipulator of public opinion, and throughout the meal, Manafort displayed his most strategic, most charming self. One former Pakistani official who attended the dinner told me that Bhutto came away determined to make use of his services. She suggested that Manafort work with the Pakistani intelligence service. Spooks in Islamabad had observed the international rush to hire Washington lobbyists, and they had been clamoring for one of their own.

At about that same time, Pakistan was looking to upgrade its submarine fleet, and European arms contractors raced to hawk their wares. In the end, France’s state-owned manufacturer won the contract—and Al Assir was added as an intermediary at the last minute. An ensuing scandal that is still unfolding, some 20 years later, would entangle both Al Assir and Manafort. It entailed alleged kickbacks into the 1995 presidential campaign of Édouard Balladur, apparently arranged by the French defense minister. Al Assir seems to have been a key conduit of the kickbacks. Years later, in 2002, a car bomb went off in Karachi, killing 11 French naval engineers in transit to the shipyard where the submarines were being assembled, along with three Pakistanis. One theory, fervently supported by some of the engineers’ families, holds that the bombing was orchestrated by Pakistani officials who were disgruntled that the bribes promised to them as part of the deal had never arrived.

Manafort was not a central figure in this scandal, and was never charged with any wrongdoing. But as the former Pakistani official told me, “He was an introducer—and he received a fee for his part.” Documents show that Manafort earned at least $272,000 as a consultant to the Balladur campaign, although, as Manafort later conceded to French investigators, it was Al Assir who actually paid him. (Balladur has denied any wrongdoing and doesn’t recall Manafort working for him. Al Assir could not be reached for comment on this story.)

Manafort and Al Assir were more than business partners. “They were very brotherly,” one mutual acquaintance of theirs told me. Manafort took Al Assir as his guest to George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, in 1989. When Al Assir and his second wife had a child, Manafort became the godfather. Their families vacationed together near Cannes. Al Assir introduced Manafort to an aristocratic world that exceeded anything he had ever known. “There’s money, and there’s really big money,” a friend of Manafort’s told me. “Paul became aware of the difference between making $300,000 and $5 million. He discovered the south of France. Al Assir would show him how to live that life.”

Colleagues at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly noticed changes that accompanied the flowering of the friendship. Manafort’s sartorial style began to pay homage to Al Assir, with flourishes of the European dandy. Suddenly he started wearing unconventional shirts and suede loafers without socks. In the firm’s early years, Manafort had been a fixture of the office, a general presiding over his headquarters. But now he frequently flew off to France or Spain, collaborating with Al Assir on projects that remained a mystery to his subordinates, and even to his partners. “Paul went off on different foreign things that none of us knew about,” Peter Kelly told me.

Manafort’s lifestyle came to feature opulent touches that stood out amid the relative fustiness of Washington. When Andrea expressed an interest in horseback riding, Manafort bought a farm near Palm Beach, then stocked it with specially bred horses imported from Ireland, which required a full-time staff to tend. John Donaldson, Manafort’s friend, recalls, “He was competing with the Al Assirs of the world—and he wanted to live in that lifestyle.”

Manafort’s Hamptons estate includes a putting green and a basketball court. He believed only “suckers stay out of debt,” a former colleague says. (Google Maps)
There were always suspicions among Manafort’s colleagues in the firm that he was making money for himself without regard for his partners. Al Assir’s occasional appearance in the international press lent these suspicions weight. One deal brokered by Al Assir helped crash a private bank in Lisbon. In 2002, he and Manafort persuaded the bank to invest 57 million euros in a Puerto Rican biometrics company. According to reporting by the Portuguese newspaper Observador, Manafort was the lead American investor in the company; his involvement helped justify the bank’s investment, despite evidence of the company’s faulty products and lax accounting. Al Assir is alleged to have extracted bloated commissions from the deal and to have pocketed some of the bank’s loans. Manafort reportedly made $1.5 million selling his shares of the biometrics firm before the company eventually came tumbling down.

Stories about Manafort’s slipperiness have acquired mythic status. In the summer of 2016, Politico’s Kenneth Vogel, now with The New York Times, wrote a rigorous exegesis of a long-standing rumor: Manafort was said to have walked away with $10 million in cash from Ferdinand Marcos, money he promised he would deliver to Ronald Reagan’s reelection campaign (which itself would have been illegal). Vogel relied in part on the 1996 memoir of Ed Rollins, a Republican consultant and Reagan’s reelection-campaign director. In the book, Rollins recounted a dinner-party conversation with a member of the Filipino congress who claimed to have personally given a suitcase of cash to a “well-known Washington power lobbyist” involved in the Marcos campaign. Rollins would neither confirm nor deny that the lobbyist was Manafort, though his description doesn’t leave much uncertainty, and he conceded in an email that “it’s a pretty good guess.” Rollins admits in his book to being “stunned” by what he heard—“not in a state of total disbelief, though, because I knew the lobbyist well and I had no doubt the money was now in some offshore bank.” This irked Rollins greatly: “I ran the [Reagan] campaign for $75,000 a year, and this guy got $10 million in cash.”

Manafort has always denied Rollins’s insinuation—“old stuff that never had any legs,” he told Vogel. And as a practical matter, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could stuff $10 million in a suitcase. Still, Vogel found a raft of circumstantial evidence that suggested the plausibility of the tale. When I asked Manafort’s former colleagues about the apocrypha, they couldn’t confirm the story. But some didn’t struggle to imagine it might be true, either. Even though John Donaldson doubts the veracity of the tale, he told me that it persists because it reflects Manafort’s ethics. “I know how Paul would view it. Paul would sit there and say, ‘These guys can’t get access to Reagan. I can get them access to Reagan. They want to give $10 million to Reagan. Reagan can’t take $10 million. I’ll take the $10 million. They think they’ll be getting their influence. Everybody’s happy.’ ”

Another alumnus of Manafort’s firm answered my questions about the Marcos money with an anecdote. After the election of George H. W. Bush, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly agreed to help organize the inauguration festivities. The firm commissioned a company from Rhode Island to sell memorabilia on the parade route—T-shirts, buttons, and the like. After crews had taken down the reviewing stand and swept up the debris, the alumnus recalled, a vendor showed up in the office with a bag full of cash. To the disbelief of his colleague, Manafort had arranged to take his own cut. “It was a Paul tax,” the former employee told me. “I guess he needed a new deck. But this was classic: Somebody else does the work, and he walks away with the bag of cash.”

Having spent so much time in the company of oligarchs, Manafort decided to become one himself.
Colleagues suspected the worst about Manafort because they had observed his growing mania for accumulating property, how he’d bought second, third, and fourth homes. “He would buy a house without ever seeing it,” one former colleague told me. His Hamptons estate came with a putting green, a basketball court, a pool, and gardens. “He believed that suckers stay out of debt,” the colleague told me. His unrestrained spending and pile of debt required a perpetual search for bigger paydays and riskier ventures.

In 1991, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly was purchased by the mega public-affairs firm Burson-Marsteller, the second-largest agency in the world. It was a moment of consolidation in the industry, where the biggest players came to understand how much money could be made from the model that Manafort had created. But nearly as soon as Burson acquired the firm, Tom Bell, the head of its Washington office, began to notice the ways in which Manafort hadn’t played by the rules. He’d been operating as a freelancer, working on projects that never went to the bottom line. In 1995, Manafort left Burson. Taking a handful of colleagues with him, he started a new firm—Davis, Manafort and Freedman—and a new chapter, one that would see him enter the sphere of the Kremlin.

VII. The Master of Kiev

during the 1980s and ’90s, an arms dealer had stood at the pinnacle of global wealth. In the new century, post-Soviet oligarchs climbed closer to that position. Manafort’s ambitions trailed that shift. His new firm found its way to a fresh set of titans, with the help of an heir to an ancient fortune.

In 2003, Rick Davis, a partner in Manafort’s new firm, was invited to the office of a hedge fund in Midtown Manhattan. The summons didn’t reveal the name of the man requesting his presence. When Davis arrived, he found himself pumping the hand of the Honorable Nathaniel Philip Victor James Rothschild, the British-born financier known as Nat. Throughout his young career, Nat had fascinated the London press with his love interests, his residences, and his shrewd investments. For his 40th birthday, he threw himself a legendary party in the Balkan state of Montenegro, which reportedly cost well over $1 million—a three-day festival of hedonism, with palm trees imported from Uruguay.

Russian oligarchs were drawn to Rothschild, whose name connoted power—and he to them. “He likes this wild world,” Anders Åslund, a friend of Rothschild’s, told me. Rothschild invested heavily in post-communist economies and became a primary adviser (and a friend) to the young Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.

Rothschild and Deripaska fed off each other’s grand ambitions. Like a pair of old imperialists, they imagined new, sympathetic governments across eastern Europe that would accommodate and protect their investments. Their project required the type of expertise that Manafort had spent years accumulating. In 2004, Rothschild hired Manafort’s new firm to resurrect the influence of an exiled Georgian politician, a former KGB operative and friend of Deripaska’s then living in Moscow. This made for a heavy lift because the operative had recently been accused in court as a central plotter in a conspiracy to assassinate the country’s president, Eduard Shevardnadze. (He denied involvement.) The rehabilitation scheme never fully developed, but a few years later, Rick Davis triumphantly managed a referendum campaign that resulted in the independence of Montenegro—an effort that Deripaska funded with the hope of capturing the country’s aluminum industry.

Deripaska’s interests were not only financial. He was always looking to curry favor with the Russian state. An August 2007 email sent by Lauren Goodrich, an analyst for the global intelligence firm Stratfor, and subsequently posted on WikiLeaks, described Deripaska boasting to her about how he had set himself up “to be indispensable to Putin and the Kremlin.” This made good business sense, since he had witnessed the Kremlin expropriate the vast empires of oligarchs such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky who’d dared to challenge Putin. In fact, the Kremlin came to consider Deripaska an essential proxy. When the United States denied Deripaska a visa, the Russians handed him a diplomatic passport, which permitted him to make his way to Washington and New York.

Manafort understood how highly Deripaska valued his symbiotic relationship with the Kremlin. According to the Associated Press, he pitched a contract in 2005, proposing that Deripaska finance an effort to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet Republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” (Deripaska says he never took Manafort up on this proposal.)

The Kremlin’s grip on its old Soviet sphere was especially precarious in the early aughts. President George W. Bush’s democratic agenda espoused an almost messianic sense of how the United States could unleash a new age of freedom. The grandiloquent American rhetoric posed an existential threat to entrenched rulers of the region who were friendly to Russia, and who had become rich by plundering state resources. Suddenly, the threat of democratic revolution no longer felt theoretical.

The risks of popular uprising were very much on Rothschild’s and Deripaska’s minds during the last months of 2004, when they handed Manafort a specific task. Ukraine had descended into political crisis, one that jeopardized business interests they’d already developed in the country (Rothschild had various private-equity investments; Deripaska had an aluminum smelter). They sent Manafort to Kiev to understand how they might minimize the dangers.

Of all Paul Manafort’s foreign adventures, Ukraine most sustained his attention, ultimately to the exclusion of his other business. The country’s politics are hardly as simple as commonly portrayed; corruption extends its tentacles into all the major parties. Still, the narrative of Manafort’s time in Ukraine isn’t terribly complicated. He worked on behalf of a clique of former gangsters from the country’s east, oligarchs who felt linguistic and cultural affinity to Russia, and who wanted political control of the entire nation. When Manafort arrived, the candidate of this clique, Viktor Yanukovych, was facing allegations that he had tried to rig the 2004 presidential election with fraud and intimidation, and possibly by poisoning his opponent with dioxin. He lost the election anyway, despite having imported a slew of consultants from Moscow. After that humiliating defeat, Yanukovych and the oligarchs who’d supported him were desperate for a new guru.

Ferdinand Marcos (left), Viktor Yanukovych (center), and Jonas Savimbi (right) are among the many strongmen whom Manafort has advised and assisted. (AP; Dmitry Azarov / Kommersant Photo; Selwyn Tait / Getty)
By the time Manafort first entertained the possibility of working with Yanukovych, the defeated candidate had just returned to Kiev following a brief self-imposed exile at a Czech resort. They met at an old movie palace that had been converted into the headquarters for his political organization, the Party of Regions. When Manafort entered the grandiose building, the place was a mausoleum and Yanukovych a pariah. “People avoided him,” Philip Griffin said. “He was radioactive.”

Manafort groomed Yanukovych to resemble, well, himself. Åslund, who had advised the Ukrainian government on economic policy, told me, “Yanukovych and Manafort are almost exactly the same size. So they are big, tall men. He got Yanukovych to wear the same suits as he did and to comb the hair backwards as he does.” Yanukovych had been wooden in public and in private, but “Manafort taught him how to smile and how to do small talk.” And he did it all quietly, “from a back seat. He did it very elegantly.”

He also directed Yanukovych’s party to harp on a single theme each week—say, the sorry condition of pensioners. These were not the most-sophisticated techniques, but they had never been deployed in Ukraine. Yanukovych was proud of his American turn. After he hired Manafort, he invited U.S. Ambassador John Herbst to his office, placed a binder containing Manafort’s strategy in front of him, and announced, “I’m going with Washington.”

Manafort often justified his work in Ukraine by arguing that he hoped to guide the country toward Europe and the West. But his polling data suggested that Yanukovych should accentuate cultural divisions in the country, playing to the sense of victimization felt by Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine. And sure enough, his clients railed against nato expansion. When a U.S. diplomat discovered a rabidly anti-American speech on the Party of Regions’ website, Manafort told him, “But it isn’t on the English version.”

Yanukovych’s party succeeded in the parliamentary elections beyond all expectations, and the oligarchs who’d funded it came to regard Manafort with immense respect. As a result, Manafort began spending longer spans of time in Ukraine. One of his greatest gifts as a businessman was his audacity, and his Ukrainian benefactors had amassed enormous fortunes. The outrageous amounts that Manafort billed, sums far greater than any he had previously received, seemed perfectly normal. An associate of Manafort’s described the system this way: “Paul would ask for a big sum,” Yanukovych would approve it, and then his chief of staff “would go to the other oligarchs and ask them to kick in. ‘Hey, you need to pay a million.’ They would complain, but Yanukovych asked, so they would give.”

When Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010, he gave Manafort “walk in” privileges, allowing him to stroll into the inner sanctum of the presidential offices at any time. Yanukovych could be bullheaded, and as his presidency progressed, he increasingly cut himself off from advisers. Manafort, however, knew how to change Yanukovych’s mind, using polling and political arguments to make his case. Oleg Voloshyn, a former spokesman in the foreign-affairs ministry, told me that his own boss, the foreign minister, eventually turned to Manafort to carry messages and make arguments regarding foreign-policy priorities on his behalf. “Yanukovych would listen to him,” Voloshyn told me, “when our arguments were ignored.”

VIII. A Reversal of Fortune

before everything exploded in ukraine, Manafort saw the country as his golden land, the greatest of his opportunities. But his role as adviser, as powerful as it was, never quite matched his own buccaneering sense of self. After spending so much time in the company of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, he set out to become an oligarch himself. Rick Davis declared their firm to be mostly “in the deal business,” according to James Harding’s 2008 book, Alpha Dogs: The Americans Who Turned Political Spin Into a Global Business. “The thing I love,” Davis said, “is that the political elites and the economic elites in every other country but the United States of America are the same.” The elected officials and the people “running the elections are the richest people in the country, who own all the assets.”

In 2006, Rick Gates, who’d begun as a wheel man at the old firm, arrived in Kiev. (Gates did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article.) Manafort placed him at the helm of a new private-equity firm he’d created called Pericles. He intended to raise $200 million to bankroll investments in Ukraine and Russia. “It was a virgin market in virtually any industry you wanted to pick up,” Philip Griffin told me.

Manafort had always intended to rely on financing from Oleg Deripaska to fund Pericles. In 2007, Manafort persuaded him to commit $100 million to the project, a sum that would have hardly made a dent in the oligarch’s fortune. On the eve of the 2008 global financial crisis, he was worth $28 billion.

Deripaska handed his money to Paul Manafort because he trusted him. Manafort repeatedly traveled to the oligarch’s Moscow office, where they would sit for hours and tour the business and political horizon of the former Eastern Bloc. Deripaska had become a billionaire in his 30s, and acquired the noisy pretensions of young wealth. He wanted to become the global face of Russia, he said. But that would require overcoming the reputation that stalked him, and Manafort could help. In 2001, before Manafort and Deripaska met, the World Economic Forum in Davos had withdrawn its invitation to the oligarch, as a court examined his alleged misdeeds in the course of erecting his empire. (The case was eventually dismissed.) Five years after the Davos rejection, Rick Davis shepherded Deripaska around the elite confab, taking him to a party brimming with U.S. senators, including John McCain.

For Pericles’s first deal, Manafort used Deripaska’s money to buy a telecommunications firm in Odessa called Chorne More (“Black Seas,” in English) at a cost of $18.9 million. He also charged a staggering $7.35 million in management fees for overseeing the venture.

But months after the Chorne More purchase, the 2008 financial crisis hit, gutting Deripaska’s net worth. It plummeted so far that he needed a $4.5 billion bailout from the Russian state bank to survive. The loan included an interest payment in the form of abject humiliation: Putin traveled to one of Deripaska’s factories and berated him on television.

As Deripaska’s world came crashing down, his representatives asked Manafort to liquidate Pericles and give him back his fair share. Manafort had little choice but to agree. But that promise never translated to action. An audit of Chorne More that Rick Gates said was under way likewise never materialized. Then, in 2011, Manafort stopped responding to Deripaska’s investment team altogether.

Deripaska wouldn’t let go of the notion that Manafort owed him money. In 2015, his lawyers filed a motion in a Virginia court. They wanted the authority to track down more information on the deal, even though the initial papers for it had been filed in the Cayman Islands. The lawyers had already managed to get their hands on some of the documentation surrounding the deal, and they had extracted a belated explanation of what had happened from Gates. According to a spokeswoman for Deripaska, Gates said that Chorne More had defaulted on a $1 million loan that it had taken out to pay for capital expenditures, allegedly forfeiting the partnership’s entire investment in the process. This explanation struck Deripaska’s lawyers as wildly implausible. Deripaska began to publicly doubt whether Manafort had even bought the telecommunications company in the first place. “At present it seems that the Partnership never acquired any of the Chorne More entities,” his lawyers argued.

All of the papers for the initial deal had included Rick Davis’s name. They suggested that he would serve as Manafort’s partner, and that shares would be divided evenly between the two. But Davis knew nothing of the Chorne More deal. While Manafort had been putting together Pericles, Davis had been on leave from Davis, Manafort and Freedman, running John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. Because Davis’s connections to Manafort and Deripaska had caused him a public-relations headache at the outset of the campaign, he’d kept a healthy distance from both men. When Deripaska’s lawyers asked him about the money he supposedly owed their client, Davis was gobsmacked. He soon discovered that Manafort had also registered a new company—Davis Manafort International—to continue trading on the old firm’s name, while cutting him out of consulting fees. Upon returning from the campaign, and witnessing the extent to which Manafort had abused his trust, Davis left the firm they had created together.

Paul Manafort
Mark Peterson / Redux
Deripaska’s attorneys had leveled a serious allegation—and true to his pattern, Manafort never filed a response. Those who have known Manafort the longest suggest that this reflects his tendency to run away from personal crises: “He’ll get on a jet and fly off to Hawaii—and will come back when everything blows over,” an old colleague told me, recalling Manafort’s response to a scandal in the late ’80s. But it was one thing to hide from reporters; it was another to hide from Oleg Deripaska. Though no longer the ninth-richest man in the world, he was still extremely powerful.

The fact is that by then, Manafort’s options were tightly limited: Despite all the riches he had collected in Ukraine, it is unlikely that he could have paid Deripaska back. For years, according to his indictment, Manafort had found clever ways to transfer money that he’d stashed in foreign havens to the U.S. He’d used it to buy real estate, antique rugs, and fancy suits—all relatively safe vehicles for repatriating cash without paying taxes or declaring the manner in which it had been earned.

But in the summer of 2014, in the wake of the revolution that deposed Viktor Yanukovych, the FBI began scrutinizing the strongman’s finances. Manafort had stuck with Yanukovych as the president had initiated criminal investigations of his political opponents, opened the government’s coffers to his cronies, and turned his country away from Europe and toward Russia. He’d stuck with him to the gruesome end, amid growing popular unrest—right up to the slaughter of more than 100 protesters by government forces on the Maidan. He’d remained faithful to Yanukovych while large swathes of the strongman’s circle abandoned him. Perhaps living so long in moral gray zones had eroded Manafort’s capacity to appreciate the kind of ruler Yanukovych was, or the lines he had crossed. (He is now being tried in absentia in Ukraine for high treason, although he has denied any culpability from his perch in Moscow.) The previous December, as protesters had gathered on the Maidan, Manafort had texted his daughter Andrea, “Obama’s approval ratings are lower than [Yanukovych’s] and you don’t see him being ousted.”

The FBI investigation into Yanukovych’s finances came to cover Manafort’s own dealings. Soon after the feds took an interest, interviewing Manafort in July 2014, the repatriations ceased. Meanwhile, Manafort struggled to collect the money owed him by Yanukovych’s cronies. To finance his expensive life, he began taking out loans against his real estate—some $15 million over two years, his indictment says. This is not an uncommon tactic among money launderers—a bank loan allows the launderer to extract clean cash from property purchased with dirty money. But according to the indictment, some of Manafort’s loans were made on the basis of false information supplied to the bank in order to inflate the sums available to him, suggesting the severity of his cash-flow problems. All of these loans would need to be paid back, of course. And one way or another, he would need to settle Deripaska’s bill.

IX. The Prize

“i really need to get to” trump, Manafort told an old friend, the real-estate magnate Tom Barrack, in the early months of 2016. Barrack, a confidante of Trump for some 40 years, had known Manafort even longer. When Manafort asked for Barrack’s help grabbing Trump’s attention, he readily supplied it.

Manafort’s spell in the Arizona clinic had ended. It hadn’t been a comfortable stay. After having acquired so many properties of his own, he had been forced to share a room with another patient, according to Andrea’s texts. Despite his reticence about his private life, he’d spent his days in group therapy—and he claimed that it had changed him. “I have a real self awareness of why I broke down,” he texted her.

Still, most of the proximate causes of his breakdown remained in place. Once an indispensable man, he had not been missed in professional circles. He was without a big-paying client, and held heavy debts. His attempts to prove his entrepreneurial skills had ended as expensive busts. Because of his biggest bust of all, Deripaska was looking for him. “He has too many skeletons,” Andrea had written her sister soon after he had entered the clinic, noting that his work in Ukraine was legally dubious. “Don’t fool yourself,” she had texted Jessica a few months before. “That money we have is blood money.”

She had not forgiven him for his affair. She complained to a cousin about her father’s treatment of her mother. “We keep showing up and eating the lobster,” she wrote. “Nothing changes.” But Manafort’s ability to provide lavishly for his family—a role he had always played, whatever his other failings—had in fact changed. The millions he’d invested in Jessica’s films were gone; so, too, were the millions he’d blown on her then-husband’s real-estate ventures.

With the arrival of Donald Trump, Manafort smelled an opportunity to regain his losses, and to return to relevance. It was, in some ways, perfect: The campaign was a shambolic masterpiece of improvisation that required an infusion of technical knowledge and establishment credibility.

Barrack forwarded to Trump’s team a memo Manafort had written about why he was the ideal match for the ascendant candidate. Old colleagues describe Manafort as a master pitchman with a preternatural ability to read his audience. He told Trump that he had “avoided the political establishment in Washington since 2005,” and described himself as a lifelong enemy of Karl Rove, who represented the entrenched party chieftains conspiring to dynamite Trump’s nomination. In other words, to get back on the inside, Manafort presented himself as the ultimate outsider—a strained case that would strike Trump, and perhaps only Trump, as compelling.

Manafort reached out to Deripaska almost immediately upon securing a post with the Trump campaign.
Manafort could write such a calibrated pitch because he had observed Trump over the decades. Back in the ’80s, his firm had represented Trump when the mogul wanted to reroute planes flying over Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach. Since 2006, Manafort had kept a pied-à-terre in Trump Tower, where he and Trump had occasionally seen each other and made small talk. This exposure yielded perhaps another crucial insight: Trump’s parsimony. When Manafort offered Trump his services, he resisted his tendency to slap a big price tag on them; he would provide his counsel, he said, free of charge. To his family, Manafort described this decision as a matter of strategy: If Trump viewed him as wealthy, then he would treat him as a near-equal, not as a campaign parasite.

But Manafort must have also believed that money would eventually come, just as it always had, from the influence he would wield in the campaign, and exponentially more so if Trump won. So might other favors and dispensations. These notions were very likely what led him to reach out to Oleg Deripaska almost immediately upon securing a post within the campaign, after having evaded him for years. Through one of his old deputies, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik, he sent along press clippings that highlighted his new job. “How do we use to get whole,” Manafort emailed Kilimnik. “Has OVD operation seen?” Manafort’s spokesman has acknowledged that the initials refer to Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska. In the course of the exchanges, Kilimnik expressed optimism that “we will get back to the original relationship” with the oligarch.

All of Manafort’s hopes, of course, proved to be pure fantasy. Instead of becoming the biggest player in Donald Trump’s Washington, he has emerged as a central villain in its central scandal. An ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence suggests that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian efforts to turn the 2016 presidential election in its favor. Given Manafort’s long relationship with close Kremlin allies including Yanukovych and Deripaska, and in particular his indebtedness to the latter, it is hard to imagine him as either a naive or passive actor in such a scheme—although Deripaska denies knowledge of any plan by Manafort to get back into his good graces. Manafort was in the room with Donald Trump Jr. when a Russian lawyer and lobbyist descended on Trump Tower in the summer of 2016, promising incriminating material on Hillary Clinton. That same summer, the Trump campaign, with Manafort as its manager, successfully changed the GOP’s platform, watering down support for Ukraine’s pro-Western, post-Yanukovych government, a change welcomed by Russia and previously anathema to Republicans. When the Department of Justice indicted Paul Manafort in October—for failing to register as a foreign agent, for hiding money abroad—its portrait of the man depicted both avarice and desperation, someone who traffics in dark money and dark causes. It seems inevitable, in retrospect, that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, would treat Manafort’s banking practices while in Ukraine as his first subject of public scrutiny, the obvious starting point for his investigation. The sad truth is that all of the damning information contained within the Mueller indictment would have remained submerged if Manafort had withstood the temptation to seek out a role in Trump’s campaign. Even if his record had become known, it would have felt unexceptional: Manafort’s misdeeds, in our current era, would not have seemed so inconsistent with the run of global play.

From both the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, vast disclosures illuminating previously hidden offshore accounts of the rich and powerful worldwide, we can see the full extent to which corruption has become the master narrative of our times. We live in a world of smash-and-grab fortunes, amassed through political connections and outright theft. Paul Manafort, over the course of his career, was a great normalizer of corruption. The firm he created in the 1980s obliterated traditional concerns about conflicts of interest. It imported the ethos of the permanent campaign into lobbying and, therefore, into the construction of public policy.

And while Manafort is alleged to have laundered cash for his own benefit, his long history of laundering reputations is what truly sets him apart. He helped persuade the American political elite to look past the atrocities and heists of kleptocrats and goons. He took figures who should have never been permitted influence in Washington and softened their image just enough to guide them past the moral barriers to entry. He weakened the capital’s ethical immune system.

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The Tax Havens at the Heart of the Manafort Indictment
Helping elect Donald Trump, in so many ways, represents the culmination of Paul Manafort’s work. The president bears some likeness to the oligarchs Manafort long served: a businessman with a portfolio of shady deals, who benefited from a cozy relationship to government; a man whose urge to dominate, and to enrich himself, overwhelms any higher ideal. It wasn’t so long ago that Trump would have been decisively rejected as an alien incursion into the realm of public service. And while the cynicism about government that enabled Trump’s rise results from many causes, one of them is the slow transformation of Washington, D.C., into something more like the New Britain, Connecticut, of Paul Manafort’s youth.

Last year, a group of Manafort’s longtime friends, led by an old Republican hand named Bill Greener, tried to organize a cadre of surrogates to defend Manafort from the allegations against him, including the worst one: that he collaborated with a hostile foreign power to subvert the American democratic process. Manafort’s old partner Charlie Black even showed up for a meeting, though the two had largely fallen out of touch. A few of the wheel men from the old firm wanted to help too. Yet, when volunteers were needed to go on TV as character witnesses, nobody raised his hand. “There wasn’t a lot to work with,” one person contacted by this group told me. “And nobody could be sure that Paul didn’t do it.” In fact, everything about the man and the life he chose suggests that he did.

What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns
They weren’t the first victims of a mass shooting the Florida radiologist had seen—but their wounds were radically different.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-saw-treating-the-victims-from-parkland-should-change-the-debate-on-guns/553937/?utm_source=fbb

As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the nation for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.

In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

A year ago, when a gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, hitting 11 people in 90 seconds, I was also on call. It was not until I had diagnosed the third of the six victims who were transported to the trauma center that I realized something out-of-the-ordinary must have happened. The gunshot wounds were the same low velocity handgun injuries as those I diagnose every day; only their rapid succession set them apart. And all six of the victims who arrived at the hospital that day survived.

Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and they do not bleed to death before being transported to our care at a trauma center, chances are, we can save the victim. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different; they travel at higher velocity and are far more lethal. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than, and imparting more than three times the energy of, a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.

I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. I saw one from a man shot in the back by a SWAT team years ago. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat travelling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.

With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to a trauma center to receive our care.

One of my ER colleagues was waiting nervously for his own children outside the school. While the shooting was still in progress, the first responders were gathering up victims whenever they could and carrying them outside the building. Even as a physician trained in trauma situations, though, there was nothing he could do at the scene to help to save the victims who had been shot with an AR-15. Most of them died on the spot, with no fighting chance at life.

As a doctor, I feel I have a duty to inform the public of what I have learned as I have observed these wounds and cared for these patients. It’s clear to me that AR-15 or other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilian’s gun cabinet. I have friends who own AR-15 rifles; they enjoy shooting them at target practice for sport, and fervently defend their right to own them. But I cannot accept that their right to enjoy their hobby supersedes my right to send my own children to school, to a movie theater, or to a concert and to know that they are safe. Can the answer really be to subject our school children to active shooter drills—to learn to hide under desks, turn off the lights, lock the door and be silent—instead of addressing the root cause of the problem and passing legislation to take AR-15-style weapons out of the hands of civilians?

But in the aftermath of this shooting, in the face of specific questioning, our government leaders did not want to discuss gun control even when asked directly about these issues. Florida Senator Marco Rubio warned not to “jump to conclusions that there’s some law we could have passed that could have prevented it.” A reporter asked House Speaker Paul Ryan about gun control, and he replied, “As you know, mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies.” And on Tuesday, Florida’s state legislature voted against considering a ban on AR-15-type rifles, 71 to 36.

If politicians want to back comprehensive mental-health reform, I am all for it. As a medical doctor, I’ve witnessed firsthand the toll that mental-health issues take on families and the individuals themselves who have no access to satisfactory long-term mental-health care. But the president and Congress should not use this issue as an excuse to deliberately overlook the fact that the use of AR-15 rifles is the common denominator in many mass shootings.

A medical professor taught me about the dangers of drawing incorrect conclusions from data with the example of gum chewing, smokers, and lung cancer. He said smokers may be more likely to chew gum to cover bad breath, but that one cannot look at the data and decide that gum chewing causes lung cancer. It is the same type of erroneous logic that focuses on mental health after mass shootings, when banning the sale of semi-automatic rifles would be a far more effective means of preventing them.

Banning the AR-15 should not be a partisan issue. While there may be no consensus on many questions of gun control, there seems to be broad support for removing high-velocity, lethal weaponry and high-capacity magazines from the market, which would drastically reduce the incidence of mass murders. Every constitutionally guaranteed right that we are blessed to enjoy comes with responsibilities. Even our right to free speech is not limitless. Second Amendment gun rights must respect the same boundaries.

The CDC is the appropriate agency to review the potential impact of banning AR-15 style rifles and high-capacity magazines on the incidence of mass shootings. The agency was effectively barred from studying gun violence as a public-health issue in 1996 by a statutory provision known as the Dickey amendment. This provision needs to be repealed so that the CDC can study this issue and make sensible gun-policy recommendations to Congress.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) of 1994 included language which prohibited semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15, and also large-capacity magazines with the ability to hold more than 10 rounds. The ban was allowed to expire after 10 years on September 13, 2004. The mass murders that followed the ban’s lapse make clear that it must be reinstated.

On Wednesday night, Rubio said at a town-hall event hosted by CNN that it is impossible to create effective gun regulations because there are too many “loopholes” and that a “plastic grip” can make the difference between a gun that is legal and illegal. But if we can see the different impacts of high- and low-velocity rounds clinically, then the government can also draw such distinctions.

As a radiologist, I have now seen high velocity AR-15 gunshot wounds firsthand, an experience that most radiologists in our country will never have. I pray that these are the last such wounds I have to see, and that AR-15-style weapons and high-capacity magazines are banned for use by civilians in the United States, once and for all.

Orthopedic surgeon: Carson Wentz might be brace-dependent for rest of his career
Penn Medicine’s Dr. John Kelly thinks Wentz’s late-season ACL tear is an “RG3 equivalent”

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/orthopedic-surgeon-carson-wentz-might-be-brace-dependent-for-rest-of-his-career/

The consensus timetable for the return of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz, who suffered a torn ACL in Week 14, has the MVP candidate on track for a potential Week One appearance in 2018.
One orthopedic surgeon, however, thinks an Opening Day return is “very, very optimistic” and that Philadelphia has reason to worry about its quarterback’s knee.
Joining Angelo Cataldi on SportsRadio 94 WIP this week, Dr. John Kelly, a professor of clinical orthopaedic surgery at Penn Medicine (University of Pennsylvania), said Wentz’s injury is actually “an RG3 equivalent” — a reference to the battered former Washington Redskins quarterback, Robert Griffin III, whose career lasted all of five seasons.
“This is an ACL, plus at least two ligaments,” Kelly said. “This is an RG3 equivalent, folks. This is worrisome … That’s a long rehab. And if it were my patient, it would take nine, 10, 11 months.”
The surgeon then went on to say, at least from his perspective, that it’s “absolutely” too optimistic to expect Wentz back on the field for the Eagles’ Sept. 6 opener. In his eyes, the two-year veteran would need a minimum of nine months of rehabilitation to start playing — with a knee brace, no less. And that kind of time frame suggests Wentz wouldn’t be available until mid- to late-September at the earliest.
Kelly’s comments, while prominent, were also sandwiched between jokes — the 94 WIP team even openly identified the doctor as a “stand-up comedian” during the discussion. And the surgeon, who specializes in shoulder operations at Penn Medicine, often followed his opinions, formed from the same video of Wentz’s injury that’s available to the public, by deferring to Dr. James Bradley, the man behind Wentz’s ACL surgery.
If anything’s clear from his comments, however, it’s this: No one truly knows just when Carson Wentz will be ready.

What MSU knew: 14 were warned of Nassar abuse

8 WOMEN REPORTED ABUSE CLAIMS, AT LEAST ONE OF WHICH REACHED PRESIDENT

Kim Kozlowski, The Detroit News

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/tech/2018/01/18/msu-president-told-nassar-complaint-2014/1042071001/

Reports of sexual misconduct by Dr. Larry Nassar reached at least 14 Michigan State University representatives in the two decades before his arrest, with no fewer than eight women reporting his actions, a Detroit News investigation has found.

Among those notified was MSU President Lou Anna Simon, who was informed in 2014 that a Title IX complaint and a police report had been filed against an unnamed physician, she told The News on Wednesday.

“I was informed that a sports medicine doctor was under investigation,” said Simon, who made the brief comments after appearing in court Wednesday to observe a sentencing hearing for Nassar. “I told people to play it straight up, and I did not receive a copy of the report. That’s the truth.”

Among the others who were aware of alleged abuse were athletic trainers, assistant coaches, a university police detective and an official who is now MSU’s assistant general counsel, according to university records and accounts of victims who spoke to The News.

Collectively, the accounts show MSU missed multiple opportunities over two decades to stop Nassar, a graduate of its osteopathic medical school who became a renowned doctor but went on to molest scores of girls and women under the guise of treating them for pain.

Nassar, 54, pleaded guilty to assaulting nine girls in Ingham County but faces more than 150 civil suits that also involve MSU and others. Already sentenced to 60 years in prison for child pornography in federal court, Nassar will be in Ingham County Circuit Court on Thursday for the third day of his sentencing hearing for seven counts of criminal sexual conduct.

Asked about the women who said they tried to alert MSU to Nassar’s misconduct, Simon declined to comment.

“Those issues are points of dispute and part of civil litigation and I am not going to comment on,” she said. “What I can tell you is what I knew, straight up. My standard response is to tell people to play things straight up and I did not receive a copy of the report.”

Nassar’s case has drawn comparisons to that of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was found guilty in 2012 of molesting boys on campus. Three university officials, including president Graham Spanier, were sentenced to prison for failing to report Sandusky to authorities.

Former gymnast Rachael Denhollander, who in September 2016 became the first to publicly accuse Nassar of molesting her, says MSU officials should be held accountable for Nassar’s crimes.

“A monster was stopped last year, after decades of being allowed to prey on women and little girls, and he wasn’t stopped by a single person who could have, and should have stopped him at least 20 years ago,” Denhollander told The News last week. “He was stopped by the victims, who had to fight through being silenced, being threatened, being mocked, by the officials at MSU who they appealed to for help.

“And now the very people who should have been protecting us all along … have thumbed their nose at any semblance of accountability.”

Two candidates for statewide office have called for Simon’s resignation, despite claims that the university’s legal defense team found no evidence that anyone other than Nassar knew of his criminal conduct.

In a response to a request for information from Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, former federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who led an internal MSU inquiry into the Nassar case, wrote: “While many in the community today wish that they had identified Nassar as a predator, we believe the evidence in this case will show that no one else at MSU knew that Nassar engaged in criminal behavior.”

Six women with ties to the university, however, each told The News that they complained to at least one person at MSU when they believed Nassar’s conduct crossed from medical to sexual, and a seventh woman outlined her report to MSU during sentencing. The eighth woman complained to the Meridian Township Police.

Andrea Bitely, a spokeswoman for Schuette, declined to comment on whether his office is investigating who knew what at MSU.

MSU spokesman Jason Cody said the school responded vigorously once Nassar’s crimes came to light in 2016. He said campus police took 135 reports of criminal sexual conduct and executed a search warrant that contributed to Nassar’s convictions. MSU also established a $10 million counseling fund last month.

He said it was “not appropriate” to compare the Nassar case with that of Penn State, where leaders discussed “and illegally ignored” allegations against Sandusky.

“We want to reiterate again that we are truly sorry for the abuse Nassar’s victims suffered, the pain it caused and the pain it continues to cause,” he said. “As the president said at the December board meeting, this situation also reinforces the importance of taking a hard look at ourselves and learning from what happened — because it should never happen again.”

When the complaints began

Nassar was a respected osteopathic sports doctor at MSU and USA Gymnastics who treated some of the nation’s most prominent Olympic athletes. Coaches and others referred competitors to him for pain relief that many understood to involve osteopathic manipulation near the breasts and vagina.

But Nassar admitted to sexually assaulting young women during treatment by touching their breasts or buttocks or inserting his fingers inside them for his own gratification without gloves or lubricant.

Some victims testified he assaulted them while their parents were present while others said he showed signs of sexual arousal during exams.

One of the more than 150 civil lawsuits filed against Nassar, MSU and others alleges his earliest known assault was in 1992 as he was earning his osteopathic medical degree at MSU.

The victim, who is not named in court records, said Nassar assaulted her when she was 12 to 14. He asked her to his apartment for a study on manipulation treatments and paid her with a full body massage, during which he digitally penetrated her vaginally and anally, according to filings in the suit.

That victim did not alert anyone at MSU, according to her attorney, Okemos-based Mick Grewal.

When a similar thing happened to her, Larissa Boyce did.

Boyce — the first person who is believed to have told someone at MSU about Nassar — reported him in 1997, almost 20 years before he was fired and prosecuted.

A 16-year-old high school student in Williamston, east of Lansing, Boyce began seeing Nassar after hurting her back in a youth gymnastics program at MSU.

Nassar put his fingers inside Boyce during weekly visits with him at his university office, and in a room near where the gymnasts practiced at Jenison Field House.

After a long appointment with Nassar at Jenison, a coach asked Boyce what was happening during that time. Boyce told the coach, who insisted that Boyce tell MSU’s then-head gymnastics coach, Kathie Klages.

Boyce doesn’t remember the name of the female coach who approached her. But she still remembers the green carpet in Klages’ office and telling her Nassar had been “fingering” her during visits.

“She just couldn’t believe that was happening,” said Boyce, now 37. “She said I must be misunderstanding what was going on.”

Klages, who was MSU women’s gymnastics coach for 27 seasons, brought several of Boyce’s fellow youth program gymnasts into her office and asked them if Nassar did the same to them.

One of them said he had. That woman, who spoke to The News on condition of anonymity, was 14 then, and remembers knowing before the meeting they would be talking about Nassar.

“I remember feeling — finally a female would be an advocate for me, and tell my dad and my mom and I won’t have to tell them about this awkward thing,” said the woman, now 35, who has filed a civil lawsuit against Nassar and MSU. “Finally we’re going to get help, something will change and we won’t have to go back to him. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, I felt very shamed.”

Boyce also felt intimidated and humiliated, and remembers what Klages said about filing a report.

“She said, ‘I can file this, but there are going to be serious consequences for you and Nassar,’” Boyce said. “I said I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

Klages, who retired in February after victims came forward through lawsuits, declined to be interviewed regarding the incident or whether she told anyone else about the girls’ complaints. The response came through her attorney, Steven Stapleton of Grand Rapids.

Klages didn’t tell Boyce’s parents, but she did tell Nassar, Boyce said.

“Had I known she was such good friends with him, I would not have said anything,” Boyce said.

Victim impact statements continued for the fourth dayVictim impact statements continued for the fourth day in Larry Nassar’s sentencing hearing on Friday, January 19, 2018 in Lansing. Aly Raisman, right, makes her impact statement and gets a hug from fellow Olympic gymnast Jordyn Wieber.

‘New way of treating’

Two years later, runner Christie Achenbach sounded an alarm when she told her coach about Nassar’s conduct in 1999.

Achenbach, a track and cross country athlete, had hurt her right hamstring and seen 15 other medical specialists before MSU athletic center staff referred her to Nassar.

During her appointment, Nassar told her that he was going to do something different for her pain, she said in an interview.

“He said his new way of treating people was going internally and manipulating the pelvic floor in order to help with any problem a female might have,” said Achenbach, then 21. “He said he had to go in, but he didn’t tell me that the way he was going to go in was not using lubricant like a doctor would. He just kept rubbing back and forth — that’s when I knew something was going on … Then he put his fingers up inside me.”

Immediately afterward, Achenbach called her parents. She then said she called her coach, Kelli Bert, and told her that Nassar had rubbed her and inserted his fingers inside her, Achenbach said in an interview.

“He’s an Olympic doctor and he should know what he is doing,” Achenbach, now 40, said Bert told her.

Bert, who worked for MSU for one year as an assistant coach, told The News she doesn’t remember Achenbach complaining about Nassar. She also said she didn’t know Nassar was an Olympic doctor.

“I don’t recall any of that,” said Bert. “If he had done something sexual, I believe I would have reported that immediately.”

Bert said she learned of Nassar’s assaults from media reports and said no one told her that he was “doing something disgusting like that.”

Crying, Bert said she was upset that someone had to go through that.

“If someone had said something about being assaulted, I would never brush it aside,” she said. “To me, that is every woman’s nightmare.”

‘No way, that’s not right’

In 2000, another victim spoke up, this time to an athletic trainer. Tiffany Thomas Lopez had moved to East Lansing from southern California to play softball for the Spartans.

Soon after, Thomas Lopez developed low back pain and she was referred to Nassar, who told her he would manipulate the pelvic floor area.

During the early treatments, Nassar briefly would slip his thumb inside her. But in later visits, he put his fingers inside her and moved them around, sometimes for 15 minutes, she said. She started to question it to her trainers and often made up excuses not to go.

While away at a softball tournament, Thomas Lopez was in the hotel room of her team trainer, Lianna Hadden, who was working with her because she was in so much pain. Thomas Lopez demonstrated to the trainer what Nassar would do to her to relieve her pain.

“She gasped,” said Thomas Lopez, now 37. “She said, ‘No way, that’s not right.’”

Hadden, who remains an MSU athletic trainer working with the volleyball team, declined to comment to The News.

Thomas Lopez said Hadden told her she needed to tell Destiny Teachnor-Hauk, an athletic trainer at MSU.

Thomas Lopez recalls talking to Teachnor-Hauk after the tournament while sitting on the bleachers in MSU’s Jenison Field House.

“I was told if I felt extremely uncomfortable then of course we could pursue something but I was assured this was actual medical treatment,” said Thomas Lopez. “If I decided to pursue something, it was going to cast a burden over my family. She said it was going cause a lot of heartache, it was going to cause a lot of trauma and why would I want drag him through this?”

During testimony Tuesday at Nassar’s sentencing, a second woman — Jennifer Rood Bedford — testified that about two years after Thomas Lopez, she told Hadden that Nassar had made her uncomfortable.

“I was so scared of revealing what I thought were shameful details that I didn’t give her much to go on,” Rood Bedford said. “In the end, she wanted me to understand that filing a report, it would involve an investigation, making an accusation against Nassar and statement that I felt that what Nassar did was unprofessional or criminally wrong.”

Rood Bedford said she couldn’t say that with certainty.

For Thomas Lopez, who learned of Rood Bedford’s testimony from a reporter, it was a second betrayal.

Fourteen years after Thomas Lopez said she told Teachnor-Hauk about Nassar, Teachnor-Hauk was interviewed during a Title IX investigation into Nassar’s conduct headed by Kristine Moore, then assistant director of the Institutional Equity Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives.

“Ms. Teachnor-Hauk states that she has never had a complaint about Dr. Nassar in 17 years and has no concern about him crossing the line between medically appropriate and inappropriate,” the report says.

Three years later, according to a March 2017 police report, Teachnor-Hauk told two MSU police officers and an FBI agent she “never had an athlete tell her that Nassar made them uncomfortable.”

Thomas Lopez was audibly distraught after being told by a reporter of Teachnor-Hauk’s statements in the Title IX and police reports.

She began sobbing. “That is not my truth,” Thomas Lopez said. “My life has been turned upside down because she decided not to tell my truth.”

Teachnor-Hauk did not respond to requests for comment for this story. She remains an athletic trainer in charge of MSU women’s gymnastics and supervises training for the varsity and novice rowing teams, as well as the Jenison training room.

Family friend an accuser

Nassar’s victims were not limited to his work as a physician. A family friend of Nassar testified last year that she told MSU clinical psychologist Dr. Gary Stollak about the doctor’s abuse in the mid-2000s.

Kyle Stephens, the first to publicly testify against Nassar last year, said he began molesting her in 1998 by exposing himself in the basement of his home. She was 6.

Over six years, Nassar touched himself in front of her, massaged her feet against his groin and inserted his fingers inside her, Stephens testified in a preliminary examination for Nassar in an Ingham County district court.

She repeated her testimony at Nassar’s sentencing hearing Tuesday.

After Stephens told her parents in 2004, when she was in the sixth grade, they took her to see Stollak, Stephens said in an interview.

Stollak suggested her parents meet with him and Nassar. During the meeting, Nassar denied using her feet to stimulate himself, and her parents believed him, said Stephens, who did not attend.

Nassar came to her house that day and told her that if anything like that ever happened to her, she needed to tell someone.

“Larry is a very sick man who is very devoted to putting himself in a position to feed his pedophilia,” said Stephens, now 25. “I wasn’t anything but an object or a catalyst to make that happen.”

Reached at his home, Stollak, who retired in 2010, repeated to The News what he testified in court last year.

“I had a stroke in 2016 and I said with my right hand raised, I have no memories of any encounters with any of the people related to the case,” said Stollak.

Stephens said Stollak didn’t try hard enough to find out what Nassar did and should have reported her allegations against the doctor to authorities.

“Dr. Stollak did a pretty pathetic job of trying to uncover the truth,” she said. “There should have been mandatory reporting. He was in a profession where he should have done that.”

A 1975 Michigan law requires certain professionals to report suspicions of child abuse to Children’s Protective Services including school administrators, teachers, psychologists and law enforcement officers.

‘Police … just took his word’

Brianne Randall-Gay went to local police in spring 2004 after leaving her second visit with Nassar for back pain. He had touched her bare breast and put his hand between her legs, she said.

Randall-Gay, then a 16-year-old soccer and tennis player, told friends at her high school in Haslett, near Lansing, about the visit. Then she went home and told her mother. That evening, Randall-Gay went to the Meridian Township Police Department, where officers sent her to Sparrow Hospital for a rape kit.

A few weeks later, police asked Randall-Gay and her parents to meet with Nassar.

Randall-Gay didn’t want to go, so her parents went without her. Afterward, they told her Nassar and the police said what she experienced was a legitimate treatment.

Randall-Gay’s father is deceased and her mother couldn’t be reached for comment.

“Larry said it was a misunderstanding because I was not a gymnast and not as comfortable with my body and that was where the misunderstanding was,” said Randall-Gay, now 30. “The police … just took his word.”

Randall-Gay, who publicly revealed her identity during Nassar’s sentencing hearing and in an interview with The Detroit News, said she did not know if Meridian Township police contacted MSU about her complaint.

Assistant Police Chief Ken Plaga said the department did not alert Michigan State University and never forwarded her report to the Ingham County prosecutor. He declined to elaborate.

Plaga said the department is withholding the release of Randall-Gay’s police report, which The News requested, at the direction of the Attorney General’s office until sentencing of Nassar is finished.

Randall-Gay said she wishes police had told officials at MSU. She believes someone at MSU should be held accountable for Nassar’s actions.

“It’s really hard to see an institution that I look up to not take ownership for its mistakes of allowing a predator to continue to abuse for so long,” Randall-Gay said. “They should be ashamed.”

Complaints reach Simon

A decade later, another woman took a step to alert MSU about Nassar in a report that came to the attention of MSU’s president.

In April 2014, MSU alum Amanda Thomashow told Dr. Jeff Kovan, of the MSU Sports Medicine Clinic, about possible sexual misconduct while on a March 24 visit to Nassar’s office for treatment of hip pain.

Kovan reported the incident to the Office for Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives, then the office that investigated sexual misconduct complaints under Title IX laws that bar discrimination on the basis of sex. The accuser also reported the abuse to the MSU police department in May 2014.

Kovan declined a request for comment through Laura Probyn, a spokeswoman for the MSU College of Osteopathic Medicine.

Notice of both complaints reached Simon. The MSU president declined to be interviewed for this story, although she briefly answered questions Wednesday in a break during Nassar’s sentencing hearing indicating she knew very little about the investigation.

Moore, the office’s assistant director and now MSU’s assistant general counsel, investigated for the university.

Thomashow — who had kept her identity concealed until this week — told the investigator Nassar worked on her shoulder and massaged her breast “like your boyfriend would while you were making out with him,” according to the report.

She tried to stop him, but Nassar continued, massaging her over the top of her clothes and then moving his hands underneath her sweat pants.

“He began to massage her with three fingers in a circular motion in her vaginal area,” according to the Title IX report. “She states that he was extremely close to inserting a finger into her.”

The report includes interviews with the victim’s mother and three of her friends, plus Nassar and three MSU medical manipulation specialists — Dr. Brooke Lemmen, Dr. Lisa DeStefano and Dr. Jennifer Gilmore — plus Teachnor-Hauk, the MSU athletic trainer. All told investigators that Nassar’s behavior was medically appropriate, according to the report.

All three doctors also said they don’t do skin-to-skin contact, even though it makes it easier to feel for soft tissue changes.

“She does it over clothes because, as a woman, she is sensitive to the fact that skin-to-skin contact may be uncomfortable for some,” according to the report’s summary of the interview with DeStefano, chairwoman and associate professor in the Department of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine.

The Title IX complaint concluded that Nassar’s conduct was not of a sexual nature.

There is not a consistent level at which MSU administrators are alerted of the disposition of Title IX complaints, Cody told The News.

“It all depends on the circumstances involved in each specific case,” he said in an email. “There is no blanket answer.”

Cody said Simon did not receive additional information about the inquiry or its outcome.

“As there was no finding of a policy violation, there was no further briefing,” he said. “There typically wouldn’t be.”

Probyn said DeStefano and Gilmore, an assistant professor, declined to comment.

Lemmen resigned in January 2017 after being threatened with termination, MSU documents show. According to the records, Nassar had told Lemmen USA Gymnastics was investigating him, but she told no one. She removed several boxes of confidential treatment records at Nassar’s request after allegations emerged about him but returned the records before giving them to Nassar, the MSU documents show.

Aaron Kemp, an attorney for Lemmen, said she would not comment.

Moore notified Nassar’s boss, Dr. William Strampel, dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine, about the complaint. At Strampel’s direction, Nassar agreed to have another person in the room when treating patients and to limit skin-to-skin contact, according to emails obtained by The News.

Strampel recently stepped down from his position and is on medical leave. He did not respond to requests for comment.

A year after the complaint, MSU police forwarded the report to the Ingham County Prosecutor’s Office, which declined to file charges against Nassar. The prosecutor at the time, Stuart Dunnings III, could not be reached for comment.

MSU Detective Kelly Johnson spoke with Nassar in December 2015 and told him the prosecutor was not pressing charges, but reminded him to have a chaperone in the room and to explain his procedures, according to an MSU police report.

That same report showed that after July 2014, when Nassar was cleared in the Title IX investigation, at least 12 assaults occurred. Thomashow, who filed the complaint, said she suspects the number is far higher.

“It makes me sad my word wasn’t enough to protect them,” Thomashow told The News. “I am really frustrated that MSU did not stop him when I gave them information. It’s time for MSU to be held accountable for what happened. They need to admit they were wrong.”

Head Coach Sean McVay – November 22, 2017

"I can tell just by the focus and concentration today that they’ve got the right mindset and mentality." pic.twitter.com/DayHl6sX6s

— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) November 23, 2017

(Opening Remarks)

“From an injury standpoint today, (OLB Connor) Barwin, (C John) Sullivan and (T Andrew) Whitworth, their typical days of rest. (LB) Mark Barron did not participate with a hand. (CB) Kayvon Webster did not participate with his concussion, (CB) Nickell (Robey-Coleman) with his thigh, (RB) Malcolm (Brown) with his knee – (RB) Lance Dunbar did not participate with his knee, (WR) Robert Woods with his shoulder, (CB) Troy Hill was a full participant, (TE) Derek Carrier was a full participant and (LB) Bryce Hager was limited with a calf.”

(On if he has determined who will fill in for WR Robert Woods)

“It’s going to be kind of a group effort and we’ve got a lot of confidence in those guys to step up. Clearly it’s a big void that we’re going to be missing with Robert and what he’s brought to this team and to our offense. But, I think when you look at guys like (WR) Josh Reynolds, (WR) Mike Thomas, we’ve talked about (WR) Tavon (Austin) getting him more involved, (WR) Pharoh Cooper, so you’ll see a combination of those guys in addition to (WR) Sammy (Watkins) and (WR) Cooper Kupp. We’ll get all of those guys going and it will be a nice mix, keep them fresh and be in and out of the lineup.”

(On CB Kevin Peterson being activated to the 53-man roster being because Robey or Webster won’t be able to play)

“We haven’t made those decisions yet. It’s more of an insurance thing than anything else and Kevin’s a guy that when he’s been asked to be brought up and potentially have the chance to compete, he’s done a nice job. So, we’re taking it one day at a time with Kayvon and Nickell, but Kevin does provide some nice insurance if for whatever reason, those guys aren’t able to go.”

(On CB Kayvon Webster still being in the concussion protocol)

“He is and it’s a very specific, strategic process that those guys go through. All things are going in a positive direction with Kayvon, so that’s encouraging. But, just based on the way that that typically flows, we’re kind of on par for the course right now. Hoping to still be able to get him back by the end of the week if everything goes the way that we want.”

(On if he feels like he can ramp up the targets for WR Sammy Watkins)

“I think so. Like you guys have heard us talk about, Sammy is a special player. You always want to try to get guys like him involved, but we also try to make sure that it’s my responsibility and then we never want (QB) Jared (Goff) to feel like he’s got to force the ball – let the coverage and let whatever the defense presents dictate your decision making process in terms of whatever concept it is that we’re running. I think he’s done a good job with that. You always have to look at yourself critically and find ways to get a player like Sammy more and more involved and that’s something that is a constant, ongoing process. You always look at what are the opportunities where maybe we could have given some better direction and get him the football. That’s what makes football fun, is you’re always figuring out ways to improve and this week will be no different.”

(On how important it has been for QB Jared Goff that he has limited turnovers this season)

“It’s huge. Other than points, it’s the most important stat there is. I think when you look at it, he’s conscientious about it. Our coaches do a great job with (Rams Offensive Coordinator) Matt (LaFleur) and (Rams Quarterbacks Coach) Greg (Olson) in terms of just emphasizing that with him on a daily basis, moving with two hands on the ball in the pocket, making good decisions. Then, I think you look at it, a lot of that ends up being a team effort as well. The one ball down the field, Robert Woods becomes a great DB in that situation, so everybody has their contribution to kind of taking care of the football from an offensive standpoint and defensively we always emphasize getting it back. That’s something that it’s a very clear stat for our team especially – when you look at the 10 games, we’re 7-0 when we’re even or in the plus margin with turnovers and when we’ve lost it we’re 0-3. So, if that right there isn’t enough information and incentive for our team to make sure we know how important that it, I don’t know what would be.”

(On if WR Pharoh Cooper’s punt return and kickoff return duties plays into the amount of playing time he will see at the receiver position)

“I think it does a little bit because he’s been such a good, positive returner for us that’s impacted and affected the game in the right way, so you want to make sure that you continue to allow him to be special in that area. But, he does deserve to be able to get on the field and do some different things, so that will be a factor in it. It’s not the determining factor, but because of what a good impact he’s made in the return game, it has something to do with kind of our overall flow and kind of the plan going in.”

(On if Dunbar got hurt in the Vikings game)

“He didn’t hurt it. I think it was just typically just kind of going through where he played some snaps, just a little sore today and we always want to be smart early in the week with him. Hopefully we get some good news, he’ll feel good tomorrow and get him back out there. But, it’s one of those things where we’ve just got to be patient and I know it’s been a frustrating deal with him. But, to his credit, he’s put himself in a position to get back on the field. When he’s gotten out there he’s been efficient, he’s been productive and hopefully that knee will quiet down and he’ll feel good.”

(On what he likes about how his team responds to losses)

“I think that consistent, just positive outlook where everybody takes an accountability for what they can do and be a part of the solution moving forward of trying to get back in the win column. But, we know that the week is a process and especially with a great challenge that we have with the Saints coming in, riding an eight game win streak. They’re playing really well in all three phases. Excellent coach in (Saints Head Coach) Sean Payton. They’ve got great players all around, so it’s a great challenge for our guys. I can tell just by the focus and concentration today that they’ve got the right mindset and mentality and hopefully we’ll have a good week that will lead to a good performance on Sunday.”

(On if there are a lot of similarities between Washington’s offense and his offense)

“I think there are similarities just because a lot of the influence and things that I’ve learned in this game come from (Redskins Head) Coach (Jay) Gruden. They did some things last week that will give us a similar look as far as maybe some formations and some concepts. They did a great job. I thought it was a great, competitive game last week. But, anytime that you play similar opponents it provides a good film for the teams to be able to look at and utilize going into that week of preparation.”

(On if there’s an advantage for him since Washington played the Saints prior to their matchup)

“I think each week you’ve got a specific game plan, but when you see some similar concepts, you could look at it like that. But, I think what their defense has done is they’ve put offenses in tough spots. They do a great job of kind of attacking, trying to dictate the tempo for the way that they want to operate. They don’t let the offense kind of dictate how they’re running things. You can see – they mix it up very well, they present a variety of issues and they’ve got great players that can really cause some problems, so it’s a great challenge for us and you see very easily why they’re a top-10 scoring unit in this league.”

(On if it’s surprising to make it this far in the season before suffering a major injury)

“I think you feel good about what a nice job our training staff has done, trying to avoid the things that you can prevent. I think when you look at the Robert Woods injury, it’s an unfortunate one. Just being involved in this game, inevitably you kind of know some of these things are going to naturally occur and that’s where the next man up mentality kind of comes from. Guys have to do a good job stepping up, lock in this week because of how important Robert was to us. But, you do feel fortunate. It’s unfortunate that now because of how well Robert was playing and how important he was that we won’t have him, but everybody deals with it. They’ve got some injuries that they have to deal with as well, so this is something that will be a good challenge for us and looking forward to seeing how our guys respond.”

(On his favorite Thanksgiving dish)

“Favorite Thanksgiving dish? My mom makes a pretty good broccoli casserole, so we’ll see. They’re getting in town later today. I don’t know if she’s making that or not, we’ll find out. I’ll tell you after tomorrow (laughs).”

***

QB Jared Goff – November 22, 2017

"We talk about it everyday, it’s all about the ball." pic.twitter.com/0HcZPn8FTb

— Los Angeles Rams (@RamsNFL) November 23, 2017

(On what he recalls from playing New Orleans last year)

“They’re one of the, besides the division, one of the few teams that I’ve actually played before so, they have somewhat experience from that, but they got different players back there, especially in their secondary. They’ve got different guys and so it’s definitely going to be a challenge for sure.”

(On if there’s anything specific from last year’s New Orleans game that stands out to him)

“No. I remember it being a shoot out for a minute and then they kind of pulled away.”

(On how he will adjust to WR Robert Woods being out)

“We’ve got a chance to see some guys step up. I think today at practice we had a good chance to see some guys. I think I know it will be kind of a by-committee approach, but each guy will have their opportunity in there and it will be cool. A chance to see these young guys get a chance and don’t expect much of a fall off. I know Robert’s really special and his production has been great this year, but we need these guys to step up this week for sure.”

(On how important it is for WR Sammy Watkins to step up in Woods’ absence)

“Very. I don’t think he needs to do anything different than what he’s been doing. He’s been doing a great job, practicing hard and really been good in games. We need to find some ways to get him the ball a little bit more and something that we’ll definitely be conscious of.”

(On what Woods brought to the team that they’re going to lose with him being out)

“I think that on the field you obviously have the numbers and all that stuff and his production’s been great. But, I think off the field what his presence is at practice is something that people don’t usually see as much so, it’s kind of maybe the bigger part of it. Obviously we miss him on the field, but having him out there every day is huge.”

(On if he sees WR Tavon Austin’s role changing this week with Woods being out and what does Austin have to offer)

“He’s an electric player and can bring a lot to an offense. Yeah, I think we’re going to try to get him the ball like we have. That’s a better question for (Head Coach) Sean (McVay), I’m going to continue to do what I do and try to distribute, but I’m sure we’ll try to get him involved again for sure.”

(On how proud he is for limiting turnovers)

“It’s a big part of the game. We talk about every day, it’s all about the ball – just try to take care of it. Sometimes there maybe times where you may think about it too much. I try on my part to take care of it and I think if we do that as an offense we’re 7-0 when we’ve been even or better in the turnover margin. That’s all of our seven wins and the three losses have come when we’ve lost the turnover margin, so that’s obviously a huge part of the game.”

(On what has been key to him limiting turnovers this year)

“I don’t know. A multitude of things. Just Learning and getting better. Maybe one thing is just learning how to use the check down and learning how huge that can be when you get (RB) Todd (Gurley II) space.”

(On what he things they can correct after watching the game film from last Sunday’s game against the Vikings)

“I’d love to get the running game going a little bit more. I think that would be something we’d love to get Todd going and pop some more long runs. But besides that, I thought we, for the most part, executed pretty well. We had some lapses and a few plays here and there. It seemed to be one guy here, one guy there. I slip on the ball to Todd – just little stuff like that kept happening. But, no I don’t think we need to do anything radically different.”

(On what makes this team so good at facing adversity and then moving on)

“I think we’ve been through some stuff together as a team and understand that a loss is not the worst thing in the world. You can come back from that and we look to this week for sure is respond to last week’s lost.”

(On what his favorite Thanksgiving dish is)

“Mashed potatoes.”