Mike Pence owes his position as Vice President to none other than Paul Manafort.
Manafort, named Trump's campaign manager in April 2016, was arrested today and charged by Special Prosecuter Robert Mueller. The 12 counts against him including conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading statements under the Foreign Agent Registration Act, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts.
During most of the summer of 2016, Manafort controlled hiring for the Trump campaign, along with its media campaign and budget. One of his achievements was persuading Trump to name Mike Pence, the governor of Indiana, as his running mate.
When he was tapped as Vice Presidentail nominee, Pence's job approval rating in Indiana was underwater at 40 percent, according to a May poll, and even among Republicans only six-in-10 supported his re-election.
No mind.
Manafort has always taken credit for Mike Pence on the GOP National Ticket. According to most reports, Trump,who favors long time associates, intended to choose Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, active on his campaign from its start. Christie was already heading the Trump transition team.
According to a report by Albert Hunt in Bloomberg, March 23, 2017, at a breakfast in Cleveland in July 1016 Manafort boasted that he had put Trump in touch with Mike Pence, then governor of Indiana and now vice president. "I brought him in to meet Pence," Manafort said of Trump, adding that the contact led to the notion that the Indiana governor "had value to Trump as a potential VP nominee."
What was that value? to gain the support of the far right? or was the connection supposed to harvest even more fruit?
Mike Pence chose Michael T. Flynn.
You may recall that as the man now in charge of Trump's transition team, Pence ignored multiple warnings, one from Flynn himself, weeks before the inauguration that he was under federal investigation for secretly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey during the campaign.
We know that President Obama, who had fired Flynn in 2014 from the Defense Intellegiance Agency, also warned Trump himself, in their White House meeting on November 10, that Flynn was unfit to serve and definitely shouldn't be named National Security advisor.
Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings sent to Pence as a warning about Flynn and Turkey.
Sally Yates, Acting Acting Attorney General, also spoke up about Flynn, but not just about Flynn and Turkey.
At the root of the D.O.J.'s concerns was the fact that intercepted communications revealed that Flynn had discussed the election-relation sanctions in place against Moscow with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump's inauguration and contrary to statements made by White House officials, most notably Vice President Mike Pence.
Sally Yates later testified before Congress that Flynn had lied about his Russian contacts and was vulnerable to blackmail by Moscow.
But Trump did not immediately fire Flynn over the apparent lie or the susceptibility to blackmail. Instead, Flynn remained in office for 18 more days. Only after the news of his false statements broke publicly did he lose his job on Feb. 13.
You may recall that In February, 2017, Flynn was forced to resign not for having inappropriate talks with the Russian ambassador, but, according to Trump, for lying to Pence.
Was Pence really an innocent about Flynn? Why did he ignore warnings and recommend Trump appoint him?
According to The Palmer Report, (September 18, 2017), “During that transition period, it's been confirmed that Pence and Paul Manafort communicated regularly (link)*. What's vital here is that Manafort had officially left the Trump campaign months earlier, and he had no official transition role, meaning that he had no above-board reason to be regularly communicating with the head of the transition team."
The Palmer Report quoted above cites a article in The Daily Beast which tried to pin down unnamed but multiple sources on Manafort's continued influence on the Trump campaign after he was forced out in August 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/paul-manafort-is-back-and-advising-donald-trump-on-cabinet-picks
Maybe Mueller will help us name the sources.
Maybe Mueller will tell us more about Pence and Flynn.
Maybe Mueller will tell us more about the whole Trump team, including Pence,Trump himself, and the Russians.
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October 30, 2017
Addendum. Want to know more about Paul Manafort? He has been the partner in a lobbying firm he founded with Trump friend and advisor Roger Stone, Jr since 1980. It was Stone who urged his appointment.
Manafort has lobbied on behalf of some of the slimiest dictators and tyrants since that time. Recently, he has worked for pro-Putin opposition in the Ukraine.
One of his activities as campaign manager for Trump was to persuade the GOP to change their National Party Platform to help the Putin team in the Ukraine.
Manafort had owned an apartment in Trump Tower since 2006.
