PBD Podcast | EP 151 | Political Consultant Paul Manafort
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PBD Podcast Episode 151. In this episode, Patrick Bet-David is joined by Adam Sosnick and Paul Manafort
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About:
Paul John Manafort Jr. is an American lobbyist, political consultant, attorney and convicted fraudster. A long-time Republican Party campaign consultant, he chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August 2016. Manafort served as an adviser to the U.S. presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bob Dole. In 1980, he co-founded the Washington, D.C.–based lobbying firm Black, Manafort & Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black Jr., and Roger J. Stone,
About Co-Host:
Adam “Sos” Sosnick has lived a true rags to riches story. He hasn’t always been an authority on money. Connect with him on his weekly SOSCAST here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw4s_zB_R7I0VW88nOW4PJkyREjT7rJic
Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal bestseller Your Next Five Moves (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
To reach the Valuetainment team you can email: booking@valuetainment.com
0:00 - Start
1:00 - Who is Paul Manafort
7:00 - Should Ukraine be a part of EU
12:00 - Opinion on Putin
17:00 - Was Yanukovich against Putin?
24:00 - Zelenskyy
30:00 - How did Yanukovich find Paul Manafort
36:00 - Burisma
50:00 - Russia warns WW3 Significant
54:00 - Putin with Trump vs Biden
56:00 - Lobbyist
1:04:00 - Is Paul a part of the swamp
1:14:00 - Are lobbyists a net positive?
1:29:00 - Dwayne Johnson
1:32:00 - Trump 2024
1:45:00 - Who is Paul Manafort
1:52:00 - Speed round
Okay, folks, episode number 151 with Paul Manafort.
Paul Manafort, if you don't know the name, probably in 2016, you couldn't have turned on the TV, newspaper, magazine, anything.
If you turn on social media, you would have seen his face all over the place, nonstop.
And there was many different reasons for that.
We'll talk about many of the reasons today.
We kind of want to hear from himself as well.
Background, party campaign consultant, chaired the Trump presidential campaign from June to August of 2016.
He served as an advisor for presidential campaigns of Republicans Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole.
And on top of that, in 1980, he co-founded the Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm Black, Manfort, and Stone, along with principals Charles R. Black and Roger Stone, joined by Peter G. Kelly in 1984.
So we got a lot of stuff to cover.
With that being said, thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast.
Good to be here.
And if I ask you, correct me, this is the first time you're doing a long form like this.
You've not done a two-hour one.
Not yet.
It's going to feel like five minutes.
So for the audience that doesn't know, because you've been away from it for a few years, meaning not that you've been away from it, you've not been, the controversy has not been at its peak the last 12, 24, 36 months.
But if people that know your name, the average person that knows your name, if they're from the Republican side, they think you were framed.
They think they put you in jail.
They think they came after you simply because you were associating with Trump.
And they think that that Durham investigation that came out saying the fact that Hillary Clinton's dossier was all fake targeting, trying to get you guys to not get re-elected, a form of revenge.
On the other side, if you watch SNL, if you watch Rachel Maddow, Anderson Coper, Don Lamont, any of these other guys, they would say you had a connection to Russia and Putin and collusion and Trump and all of that.
And all that's true.
And that's actually not why you went away.
But for the audience that doesn't know, maybe share with us a little bit about your background and how it came to the controversies in 2016.
Sure.
I guess I started with I went to Georgetown University, graduated from the Law Center there as well.
Practiced law for a few years, but then always was interested in politics.
Got involved in Republican politics very young.
My father was mayor of my hometown.
It was a blue-collar town, very Democratic town.
He was a Republican, first one in his family.
Became a Republican because he disagreed with what FDR did in Yalta.
My father fought in the World War II and was incensed that Roosevelt gave away Central Europe and Eastern Europe and thought we fought for those freedoms.
How could he just give that to a communist country?
That was impactful on him.
And in talking to him as I was growing up, it became impactful on me.
First campaigns I got really involved in were when I was at Georgetown.
I got involved with Nixon's reelection campaign.
And then Ford's campaign and began to be actively involved at the national level, really in Ford's campaign.
Served as part of the team that ran it, working with Jim Baker, who was his first campaign.
He and I became very good friends during that campaign.
Awful man.
He's a good man.
He's a very good man.
And I talked about it in the book.
I talk some of the stories about those early years when he was learning.
Chief of staff for Jerry Ford was a very green, behind-the-years policy guy named Dick Cheney.
And so really early on in my career with that campaign, I got to know a number of people personally and that who became figures in the Republican Party for the next 40 years.
During the, you know, after the 76 campaign, got involved in Governor Reagan's campaign for president, again, was part of the senior team.
And after he was elected, Roger Stone, Charlie Black, and I started a political consulting firm, which really became a lobbying firm, a government affairs firm as well.
And that really began to change the model.
Before 1980, most of the government affairs work was done by law firms.
People were hired.
Law firms were hired to deal with specific issues that made legislative issues or regulatory issues.
And we decided to create a different model.
We were interested in international affairs.
We were interested in government affairs.
And so we thought it was a natural, as grassroots politics was just beginning and we were on the cutting edge of some of that to bring some of the campaign skills into Washington government affairs.
And the only Republican firm at that time was a company called Timmons and Company.
Bill Timmons was legislative director for Nixon and the White House.
But he had a very different model.
His model was to have 10 or 12 corporate clients and to only represent that group.
We saw ourselves as a much different concept.
And the firm grew, became probably one of the most powerful firms in the Washington scene during the Reagan and Bush years.
During that time, we expanded our work beyond just corporate 500 work to include a number of countries, represented a number of countries, always, I should add, with U.S. foreign policy interests at heart and always in concert with the White House, notwithstanding what Rachel Maddow and people like that have said over the last few years.
And in fact, if you look at our clients, you will see that we were always involved in areas where foreign policy issues were the issues affecting those countries.
For example, in Angola, we represented Jonas Vimbi, who was a freedom fighter for UNITA and active in dealing with trying to end the Cuban concentrated and Soviet-dominated Angolan government.
And we similarly got involved in the Congo, got involved in Guinea, and had a big African practice working with Reagan foreign policy and Bush foreign policy objectives in Africa.
Again, in the course of the last five years, a lot of this has been distorted.
And we'll talk about this some, I'm sure, today.
It's in my book as well, where the woke left, for want of a better term, decided that they were just going to declare that I was pro-Russian, pro-Putin, and never with any facts.
I mean, because I represented an oligarch in Russia that became tantamount to anything and everything for my whole career.
And he was an oligarch that we were not doing things in Russia on.
Although he was concerned with bringing some changes to Russia as well.
And I get into that in the book.
So over the course of the last 20 years, I got involved in Ukraine.
I mean, I thought Ukraine was a very important country.
Well, the Russians were trying to force Ukraine to not become part of Europe.
I thought Ukraine should be a part of Europe.
I elected a government that was from eastern Ukraine.
You thought Ukraine should be part of Europe.
Absolutely, 100%.
In fact, my whole time there, this is all by Europe.
But your client didn't want that, though.
No, that's not true.
That's not true.
And in fact, if you look at his presidency, you will see that the changes that were made in Ukraine over those three and a half years of his presidency, we changed the economic system, the legal system, and the regulatory system, working with the European Union directly.
And I was working with the European Union directly.
Are you talking about Yanukovych?
Yeah, talking about Yanukovych.
And this has been part of 1314?
He was elected president in 2010.
And immediately, the first thing he did was go to Brussels and commit himself to working with Brussels to become part of Ukraine.
When historically, all previous incoming presidents went to Moscow first.
It was very controversial, very controversial, not going to Moscow.
He understood what he was doing.
He understood the symbolism of it.
And so did the Europeans.
And so did the Americans.
And they started working with him.
And if you look at, and this is all public information, but it's not convenient facts.
If you look at what he did during those three and a half years, he prepared Ukraine to become part of Europe.
He even said that while he wasn't committed to make Ukraine part of NATO yet, because that was too controversial of a decision inside Ukraine, he left that question open.
And it was only when Putin realized that the negotiations for the trade agreement, which was the predecessor for the political association agreement, was about to be signed, that Putin threatened Yanukovych publicly.
Again, this is all public information.
It said to Yanukovych that if you sign this trade agreement, I will immediately shut down all trade with Ukraine, which was approximately 70% of Ukraine's trade.
And the trade agreement that we had negotiated with...
Putin said that publicly.
Oh, yeah.
Because the decision was made sudden.
There's celebration.
Everyone's outside.
Kids are waiting.
College students are waiting.
They're about to go out there and party.
You know the scene.
You've seen it.
And all of a sudden, boom.
We're not going to do it.
But there's a lot more to the story.
And that's all, again, public information.
When Putin made that threat publicly, because he wanted Ukraine to be part of a trade association that he was creating, he, Putin, Yanukovych said no.
And Yanukovych said, we actually asked Borosa, the president of the European Union, for a subsidy to help Ukraine bridge the timeframe when it was going to sign the association agreement.
Because the way this document read, if you look at it, all the advantages in the first three to four years were favorable to European companies because Ukraine was basically taking down its barriers and its trade, its trade barriers in its own tariffs and allowing it to be a part of a free trade association.
And if Russia was going to shut 70% of their trade down of the country down, all of its trade with Ukraine, but 70% of the foreign trade, Ukraine couldn't have survived that.
And so it needed the subsidy.
The Europeans said no.
And Yanukovych then said, look, I can't sign this and have my country shut down if you're not willing to help me.
But I'm not saying I'm not going to sign it.
I've got to work out this problem because a week before, whatever it was when he made this final statement, Ukraine learned that it was going to have its markets shut down.
That's when everything fell apart.
That's when everything exploded.
Did he share that with his people?
This is public information.
But what I'm trying to say is, in that moment when he said, I can't, did he share that with his people that 70% of our commerce that goes through Russia, we're going to lose?
This was all public information.
Yes, absolutely.
100%.
That same debt.
That's in, you go back and you look at the international news.
You look at what Putin threatened.
You look at the Ukrainian news of the impact of what that would be.
You look at what was being said to the European Union members.
This is all public information.
So let me ask you, what's your opinion on Putin on the way he threatened?
So in that situation, say it's 2013 and Yankovich is sitting there and he's kind of like, I'm not saying his name correctly.
Yanukovych is sitting there and he's saying, hey, listen, I'd love to do this and join you, but if I do, our number one guy that's doing business with us, we're going to lose 70%.
In that moment when Putin was bullying Yanukovych, what was your opinion about Putin in that moment?
Well, my opinion has always been the same, going before that moment, after that moment.
He's a thug.
What you're seeing today in Ukraine was what those who were paying attention to Ukraine 20 years ago saw.
You saw the writing on the wall with Putin 20 years ago that you like, did you, are you saying that you kind of predicted what's happening today?
Yes.
I mean, can I predict that the rubble that's happened?
No.
I would never have thought that Putin would have leveled the country.
But did I, was I aware, or was anybody aware of Putin's desire for Ukraine?
Yes.
Putin always felt, and again, in the West, things are right out there that we don't pay attention to because we don't want them to be true.
But Putin has always said he thought Ukraine should never have been given its independence by Khrushchev and Khrushchev.
I mean, the story on Ukraine's independence, it was part of the Soviet Union, but it was an integral part of Greater Russia.
Khrushchev, when he was the general secretary in the 50s, was from Ukraine.
He was Ukrainian.
And so as a gift on their Independence Day, he gave them their independence, never thinking that the Soviet Union was going to collapse, never thinking that it made, it was a distinction without a difference.
And, you know, Putin was totally against that.
I mean, he wasn't involved back then, but he thought that was one of the two biggest mistakes in the history of the Soviet Union.
The other being Gorbachev's working with Reagan and Bush to break up the Soviet Union.
So he has always been an historical Ukraine is part of Russia, not Ukraine is an independent country with Russian heritage.
Have you ever met Putin?
No.
And so what Putin was doing with putting the squeeze on was because he finally realized Yanukovych was serious.
Even though, mind you, changing the legal structure, changing the economic structure, changing the regulatory structure, it's a massive amount of work.
And Ukraine went through that for the first three years of Yanukovych's presidency in great detail, working with the European Union.
They call it the Committee on Enlargement, which is the body from the EC that deals with potential new countries.
And I personally was working with Stefan Rouflet, who was the commissioner of the Commission for Enlargement.
And we worked through thousands of issues all towards the end of getting the trade agreement signed and then getting the political, it's called the Association Agreement signed.
That was the key work during Yanukovych's time.
Where things went badly for Yanukovych with the West was about a year and a half in when he had his opponent, former prime minister Tymoshenko, arrested.
And he had her arrested for corruption, corruption, which her president, when she was prime minister, Viktor Yushchenko was president, Viktor Yushchenko accused Tymoshenko of the same corruption.
But it was part of his base, so he couldn't go after her.
Later in life, he did.
He was very public about how she committed crimes and dealing with Ukrainian interest on Russian gas coming to the country.
But when Yanukovych had her arrested, the West went crazy because she was the darling of Albright, the darling of Clinton, even though she was a corrupt prime minister.
For people that don't know, she would be the modern AOC.
Would you put her like that?
How would you say her personality, how she was?
Well, no, I wouldn't call her AOC.
I mean, she was a typical Soviet politician, but she was good looking.
She understood how to work the media.
Tyler Polaro?
And she sold herself to Merkel and Albright and Clinton as the hope of the West.
The reality was she was the Putin candidate again in 2010.
Yanukovych wasn't.
Again, one of the major misnomers, they didn't want Yanukovych.
And the reason they wanted her is because the corruption that she committed, that she was arrested for, was when she went to Russia to negotiate the agreement between Russia and Ukraine for the gas pipeline.
What happens until the Nord Stream pipeline with Germany, all of the Russian gas to Europe came through a pipeline through Ukraine.
It was very important to Ukraine's economic lifeblood.
This is her?
Yep, it's her before she changed her hairstyle.
Can I ask you a very good question?
Let me say one thing here, and then I'm going to go to you.
You know what's tough for me, for the average person who's not on the inside to believe this, is if Yanukovych was against Putin and Putin wasn't happy about Yanukovych, then why did he a few months later, when he was in exile, come and protect him and bring him to Russia to provide safety to him.
That's very...
I agree with that.
I was opposed to Yanukovych.
There was a some people call it a coup, some people call it a revolution that was geared towards Yanukovych that probably was not indigenously grown by itself.
Let me leave it at that for now.
I mean, I'm from Iran.
Okay, so I remember when I'm a revolution baby, October of 1978.
So three months after that, the Shah's in exile, right?
And Khomeini's in France.
He comes from France to Iran, and he was in exile for 15 years.
I think he was in exile twice, Khomeini, one day.
Eventually, he was hiding in France.
But it's kind of like Iraq to come and say, hey, Shah, come and stay here in Iraq and we'll give you protection.
It's very weird for you to say that he's not against Putin, but Putin provides that protection.
Because Putin saw the destabilizing effect.
Again, you have to understand something else about Ukraine, which Putin is learning now.
Eastern Ukraine is Ukraine's two countries.
There's Eastern Ukraine, which is a Russian ethnic base, and there's Western Ukraine, which is more European, Hungarian, Polish.
And Yanukovych was very popular in Eastern Ukraine, even near the end of his time.
Why?
Because he was protecting Russian culture, Russian heritage, Russian language, but not joining Russia.
And what Putin didn't understand when he invaded Ukraine and expected everybody to be running into the streets in the east to see him as the conquering hero was that the Ukrainian people of Russian ethnicity do cherish their freedom, their history, their language, their religion.
A big part of the fight in Ukraine is the Orthodox Russian Orthodox versus the Ukrainian Orthodox religion.
It's very political.
And the Eastern Ukrainians are Russian Orthodox Christians.
But they treasure all of that.
And Yanukovych was their protector.
But what they treasure just as much, if not more, is their freedom.
And Eastern Ukrainians, I did over 150 polls in Ukraine.
I understand the whole country very well.
In all of my polls, I would be testing to understand the dynamics between the conflicts in the country and, of course, the Eastern versus Western part of Ukraine conflicts.
No poll were any of the Russian ethnic Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine ever more than 4% saying they wanted to be part of Russia and not part of Ukraine.
They cherished their Ukrainian freedom because they knew the difference between freedom under Soviet slash Russia versus what they had in Ukraine.
And so there was no desire to become part of that.
And Putin is seeing that now in its ugliest manifestations with the people fighting.
They've got a citizen militia that's defeating the Russian army right now.
And it's just as strong in the Eastern part as it is in the Western part of the country.
Yanukovych was a hero to them.
Putin to the Eastern.
Yes, Prince, definitely to the Eastern, which was his base.
But also not to the elites in the West, but to the elites in the East.
And another ugly secret that people don't like to talk about is some of the biggest promoters.
Again, also, let me back up one second, the economics of Ukraine.
The East is where the wealth of Ukraine was because that's where the industry is.
That's where the gas is.
And the West part of Ukraine is the breadbasket, which is an important part, but it's not the engine of the Ukrainian economy.
The oligarchs in the Eastern part, which were most of the important oligarchs, my time there, they saw the importance of going, becoming part of Europe, not staying a part of Russia.
And again, if you think about it, it's logical.
They were sort of the bastard child with the oligarchs of Russia.
They didn't have the power.
They didn't have the political support.
They didn't have any of that.
And they were always at risk to the Russian model, which was also the Ukrainian model of business and who owns a business.
And in those times, and in Russia still, it's you have the power, you have the business.
So if you have a change in leadership, the new leadership, they don't try and buy up your interest.
They come to you and they say, here's the shares, sign them over to me.
It's a corrupt system.
And the Eastern Ukrainian oligarchs saw the protection of the West of their business interest if they were part of a real market economy and were part of a real democratic framework, political system, which being part of Europe would have been for Ukraine.
So they were in the fore, and this was the base, the economic base of Yanukovych's support as well.
So Yanukovych, one of the first things that I talked to him about before I agreed to help him was his commitment to becoming part of Europe.
To him, he saw the value of being an independent president of a free Ukraine that was going to be the biggest country in Europe.
Lots of natural resources.
Ukraine offers a lot to the world.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
But they have a lot of controversy.
They go back to lineage with Nazi, with Hitler.
Their history is not the most...
Well, that's the western part of Ukraine, not the eastern part.
But again, from Yanukovych's standpoint, frankly, he would say that at times, why do you overlook the blemishes of my Western Ukrainian opponents and over-exaggerate the blemishes on the Eastern Ukrainians?
There's too much to go into.
What do you think about how Zelensky is handling everything in the Latin American?
He's been brilliant.
Zielinski was an actor who played the role of president on a popular television program.
And people would joke to him and say, you ought to be run for president.
All these other guys are doing a terrible job.
And he did, and he won.
And I never expected this out of him, but he's risen to the moment.
He understands his symbolic importance to democracy, to Ukraine, and he's been brilliant.
You ever met him?
Once, but not in an important way.
I mean, yeah.
And like Ronald Reagan, and really like Donald Trump, he understood how you use the media to promote and what he's doing.
You know, one of the criticisms I always had about the West is their sort of superficial support for Ukraine being a part of Europe.
There's a lot of history as to why they didn't want Ukraine to be a part of Europe, but they could never say that.
And you look at the support that Western Europe was giving to Ukraine until it became unconscionable not to give lethal aid.
And you see exactly what I'm talking about.
Excuse me.
But what Zelensky has done is he recognizes the sort of duplicity of the leadership of Europe.
And so he's speaking to these legislatures.
The brilliant part of that movie is not that he's speaking to the politicians.
He's speaking to the people in those countries that those legislatures represent.
And he's forcing those legislatures to actually give him the lethal aid that he needs because he's creating the political groundswell in their countries.
That's his brilliance.
He's also calling on artists to create the groundswell that you're talking about.
Because he understands that the European political community and the Washington political community, by the way, is not.
There were a lot of reasons why they were comfortable with the sort of détente that existed between Russia and Ukraine, with Ukraine being Western-oriented democracy, not under Russian control, but not outside of Russian hegemony.
They accepted that.
Merkel, who I think was a terrible leader for Western democracies, she was a patsy for Putin.
You think Merkel was a terrible leader and a patsy for Putin?
Why do you say that?
Because I think that she basically empowered Putin to do what Putin is doing today with Nord Stream 2, which totally undercut Ukraine.
I mean, the economic lifeblood of Ukraine was that pipeline.
Because it flows from Russia through Ukraine.
All European gas went through there.
And she understood the importance of it.
But she signed the Nord Stream 2 deal, which was going to choke off Ukraine, create a vassal state.
That's what Putin was trying to do was one, have the Europeans dependent on the pipeline that he controlled, and two, kill Ukraine at the same time by taking it away.
I mean, Putin has been playing these moves for a long time.
The West, they're not stupid.
They've understood it, but they were comfortable in the little this, little that mentality.
Yanukovych upset all of that because Yanukovych said, the Eastern Ukraine leadership wants to be part of Europe.
The Western Ukraine leadership wants to be part of Europe.
So now we're truly united as a country wanting to be part of Europe.
One of the reasons I got involved with Yanukovych after I was convinced he would support Ukraine coming into Europe was my feeling that Ukraine was the equivalent of Nixon going to China.
Only Nixon could open up China because he came from the anti-communist right-wing part of the Republican Party.
And so he brought Republicans who would have been the natural opposition into the fold.
Same thing was true as far as I was concerned in Ukraine.
Eastern Ukraine needed a leader from Eastern Ukraine that could help them accept becoming part of Europe, minimizing the conflicts that could exist.
When Yushchenko and the Orange Revolution happened in 2004, I wasn't involved.
I got involved after that.
And I got involved, frankly, because it's a little bit of what I was talking about earlier.
Yushchenko, who was the Western candidate and who won, was renationalizing companies of Eastern Ukrainian businessmen and then selling them at below bargain prices to his oligarchs.
So the transition was happening.
And an oligarch who had a steel company had hired Aiken Gump, a Democratic firm, and they asked me to help him as well.
And that's how I got involved in Ukraine.
But what happened in 2004 as a result of this renationalization, and then privatization game that was going on, is that the Eastern Ukrainians decided it was time that they really got actively involved in becoming part of Europe.
Because in the current environment that Ukraine had, it was not really getting the protections of free market principles, of the corruption issues.
And so they got all in.
Yanukovych convinced me that he would be supportive of it, and I got involved.
And if you look at from that moment forward, where Ukraine is today, how did Yanukovych find you?
Through this oligarch.
Through this oligarch.
So did you work with the oligarch in Russia first or did you?
This was a Ukrainian oligarch.
Ukrainian oligarch, because you also work with an oligarch in Russia.
What happened was I worked for Ola Daripasco.
Right.
He was an oligarch.
And who is he exactly?
He's the aluminum king.
He's the number two largest aluminum company in the world.
From Russia.
He's from Russia, yeah.
He's a Russian oligarch.
He had plants all over the world, natural resources that were needed for aluminum and things like that.
And he hired me to help him actually get involved in elections in these countries.
Which year was that?
What year was that?
This was probably 2005.
Yeah, it was 2005.
That's way before, so you, and he was in Russia at the time when you were working with him?
He was in Russia at the time, but my work for him was not in Russia.
My work for him was in the countries in Africa and in Ukraine where he had plans and where he needed help, two types of help.
Number one, protecting his interests by having me help build a lot of lobbying strategy, public affairs strategy firm, because a lot of these countries were either dictatorships or former parts of the Soviet Union in the stand countries like Kazakhstan, Turkishmanistan, Ukraine.
And so I was helping him build and running elections for him in some of the democratic countries in Africa, like Guinea.
And in the course of that, he said, you want to get involved in Ukraine because they're talking about nationalizing one of my plants down there in this pro-Western government that's supposed to be against this kind of stuff.
And so I went down and I looked and I started getting involved.
That's how I interacted with Aiken Gubb.
And that's how I then was introduced to Renat Akhmatov, who was the Ukrainian oligarch, who was having his countries nationalized as well.
And it was because of that that as I was helping him, Akhmatov said to me, would you ever think of helping us with an election here in Ukraine?
I said, well, it's going to depend.
I mean, who am I going to help you with?
What's it going to be all about?
And he said, look, take a poll.
I mean, you know our interests now because I've gotten to know some of the political interests.
Figure out what we need to do.
And so I did.
And in the party of regents, which was the party of the eastern Ukrainians, and that had been discredited in the 2004 elections, what I saw in that first poll was that the party wasn't really discredited as much as demoralized.
There was support for the party in Eastern Ukraine.
It was a regional support.
I mean, just like you have red states and blue states here in the United States, in Ukraine, you had Russian ethnic states, oblivious as they call them, and Western-oriented oblis, which was in the Western part of the country.
And so it became a red-blue kind of breakdown.
And typical to what you see here in the United States, they didn't talk to each other.
They talked over each other.
They didn't listen to each other.
But what I found was that the Eastern part, as I said a few minutes ago, they did not want to be part of Russia.
They wanted to protect their interests.
The party of regions protected their interests because it was from the Eastern part.
Yanukovych was the governor of Donets before he ran for president, Donetsk being one of the biggest oblists in the East.
And they saw him as a loser.
And there was some controversy whether he tried to steal the election.
Some people say Yushchenko tried.
I wasn't involved.
I never got involved in that issue.
I made it a point that whatever campaign I was going to be involved in, we were going to have an election integrity component and work with all of the international organizations to bring them in to watch the elections and ballot security.
And every one of the elections I was a part of, there was a major component of it where I actually had a part of my staff dealing directly with the European Union on election integrity and facilitating the international observers coming in to watch the elections in all of the potential places that were corrupt.
You know what's crazy?
As I'm listening with the poll, this guy's a Ukraine expert.
I mean, you know, don't judge a book by its cover.
You know, there's a lot of people, especially on the left, they're like, oh, he's just this corrupt Russian pawn.
Like, this guy's been dealing with Ukrainian politics for two decades, and he's breaking it all down.
I'm trying to follow what's going on in Ukrainian politics.
How many Americans literally know as much about Ukrainian politics as you?
None.
Zero.
Like, you're an expert on this.
I'm the expert on it.
The expert on Ukrainian politics.
Including with the U.S. State Department as well, by the way.
That's what I'm saying here.
I feel like he could be utilized, not scrutinized, that he's been by the media.
But it's not convenient.
I mean, there are, to quote Al Gore, inconvenient truths.
And the inconvenient truth is that they would have to acknowledge that it isn't black and white.
One of the biggest problems for Yanukovych, and the reason I think he fled, was something that came down hard on a marketer.
He's corrupt.
Yanukovych was corrupt.
But they were all corrupt.
I mean, if you say, you can't be for Yanukovych, you have to be for X. X was just as corrupt.
So Zelensky is also.
No, no, no.
Zelensky is a different model.
I mean, there's a.
Zelensky represents an emergence of Ukraine from the shadows of the Ukrainian, of Soviet influence.
I mean, he's a new style politician.
He hasn't come out of politics.
He hasn't been corrupted on the way up.
Now, there are people who will say, well, he's owned by one of the oligarchs who is corrupt.
But it's almost by necessity, right?
Like, he was doing his thing, whatever.
But now, when Putin invades, he's got no other option.
When did you realize Yanukovych was corrupt?
Well, I mean, I didn't know how corrupt until it was over.
But it would show up in my polls.
I mean, there was corruption that was going on.
And Burisma was one of the corrupt companies that I was wailing against.
You've got to bring light onto all of this stuff.
And Burisma was managed by corrupt Yanukovych people who were partners of Hunter Biden.
So let me ask you: while you're in it and you're going through this and you're having, you know, you're saying 150 polls, I've been there, you know, two decades, all this stuff.
What do you know on the inside of the involvement of Biden's, what they were doing, Hunter and his father?
Well, did I know that he was nosing around in Ukrainian business?
Yes.
Did I know what he was doing?
No.
Did I care?
No.
Why?
Because I was working with the Obama administration.
The Obama administration, the Obama embassy in Kiev needed my help.
I mean, one of Obama's first major international victories was getting all of the nuclear fission waste product out of Ukraine.
There was a big conference on collecting all of the from the various Soviet countries that had nuclear byproduct that were weapon-grade nuclear product.
Obama and the West was trying to put it all under control of the West.
And Russia was totally against it.
And Yanukovych, in his first year as president, sat down with the Obama administration and got the deal done with huge objections being expressed by Putin and I think it was Medvedev at the time in Russia.
And so I was working with the embassy on a regular basis.
Whenever the embassy in Kiev, U.S. Embassy in Kiev, had a problem with U.S. business companies or for something that was going on politically that they disagreed with what was happening, they'd reach out to me.
And I would work as an ombudsman, if you will, with them and every one of the ambassadors.
And mundane things as getting Jeff Pyatt's dog into the country because he couldn't get it into the country.
That's a big deal.
To him it was to Working with them to make sure the international observers got to go to every district to watch election results as they wanted to.
And so.
By the way, you're saying this is under the Obama administration.
This is the Obama administration.
And who was Secretary of State at that time?
Hillary Clinton.
Okay.
Yeah.
Who reset the Russian-U.S. relationship.
Right.
The button that she couldn't even press correctly to reset the relationship.
So when you hear Rachel Maddow and people thought, oh, I was working with this Russian oligarch in 2005, 6, and 7, because that's when I worked with him, who's very close to Putin now, but wasn't then, and he wasn't part of it then.
It's no different than when Obama became president.
And I was working, you know, Obama set the reset with Russia, not Paul Manafort.
And what he reset was the political relationship between the two countries.
My oligarch that I was working with was at a different time.
But now the stink of Putin today and the image of Putin today is being held up as what I was dealing with and for with Derek Pasco back in 2000.
It's totally different.
There's no distinction between Putin and U.S. attitudes in Russia from 2004 with Bush to 2009 and 10, resetting it with Obama and Clinton to 2013 when Putin went to war against Ukraine and the West.
And even then, Obama blinked and let Putin get away with it, which is why with Crimea and what he tried to do with these, quote, independent Eastern zones of influence in Ukraine and Doraska Lahans.
So it's just all blurred together.
And there's no distinction between you could have been for Medvedev when he was president.
The U.S. was looking at him as potentially being the end of Putin.
Now, because they viewed Medvedev as a bureaucrat and somebody who didn't come out of the KGB.
And so his one term of president that Putin actually put him in on, they were hoping he would become a two-term president and Putin would fade into history.
And if that had happened, I think the world would be very different today.
But they didn't do anything to help Medvedev.
And at that time, I was trying to promote Western foreign policy because I saw the difference between Medvedev and Putin and how that could impact the world, but also more importantly, from my vision at that time, Ukraine.
Wasn't Medvedev the individual who Obama got caught with a hot mic?
Isn't that the conversation?
So what was the space?
So what are your thoughts on what happened there?
Well, I mean, that's another part of the hypocrisy of the attacks against me.
I mean, here, Obama gets caught on the hot mic, saying to Medvedev, tell Vlad I can be a lot more flexible in dealing with him after my election.
Because this was done in a second.
Second to this was done, I think, in the fall of 2012.
And Obama meant it.
He wanted to be more flexible and broaden relationships, partially, I think, because he recognized that Putin was not going to let Medvedev have a second term and he was going to have to deal with, you know, he's saying to the current president, Medvedev, tell the prime minister, I'm going to be more flexible.
What is that?
What kind of signal does that send?
Well, Medvedev, you're still the lackey, and Putin, you're still the power, even though Medvedev, you're the president.
Putin in particular knows how to read these signals.
And so guess what happens in 2013?
2013, you have the revolt in Ukraine.
At 2014, Crimea gets invaded because Putin doesn't fear Obama.
Who does Putin fear?
Well, right now he probably fears Zelensky.
I think so.
I mean, he respects him a lot more.
He'll never say that.
But he's just Zelensky's, with a citizen militia, has just defeated the Russian.
Okay, but that's misleading because it's not a citizen militia just by itself.
They're backed and armed to the teeth by the United States government.
We've sent them $15 billion in federal and military aid.
We are now switching from Soviet-era weapons to NATO weapons.
We're also providing them intelligence.
So it's not just a citizen militia.
They are completely backed in a proxy war by the United States.
Well, no, you've blended it all together.
What they did the first month, where they blunted the Russian invasion in Kiev, was done with the remnants of the lethal aid that Trump gave them.
Obama wasn't given them lethal aid in the first month.
Again, they're still backed by the states, whether it's Trump or Biden.
They're still backed by the United States.
Well, barely.
Now Biden has gotten much more active.
The Secretary of State and the Minister of Defense have just gone to Ukraine because he's got to.
Why, though?
Because one, it's the right thing to do.
Yes, but I wonder how this ends up.
Because even back in 2016, the Obama doctrine, Obama was interviewed by David Goldberg of The Atlantic and said that the United States has no interest in Ukraine because Russia can always exert dominance over there.
There's no interest to us.
Okay, so again, it may be the right thing to do, but why is it the right thing for us to do?
We're continually providing aid.
We're continually providing intelligence.
And day after day, we get more and more involved in this proxy war with the second strongest nuclear power in the world.
Okay, you've said a bunch of things that we need to break down here.
Because number one, you said correctly what Obama's policy was, which was it's not our backyard.
Okay.
I happen to think 44 million people who want to be part of the West deserve to be given the tools they need to become a part of the West.
I also happen to believe that Putin showed his teeth in 2014 when he invaded Crimea, and we didn't do a thing.
We barely registered objection.
No sanctions of serious nature were put on.
There were sanctions, but they were not significant.
And what happened as a result of that?
Putin then moved into eastern Ukraine in 2014.
That got stopped pretty much because of the Ukrainians, not because of the West, and pressure that the Europeans were starting to feel now.
And it was an election year coming up in the United States.
Then, so now Putin sees all of that.
Trump becomes president.
And Obama refuses to give any lethal aid, any lethal aid, which people here don't follow, but the people over there do.
And they understood the significance of that.
Putin understood the significance of it.
So did the Ukrainians.
And so how did the Ukrainians get their weapons in 2016?
Through mercenaries, through the underground arms operation.
And that's how they were able to get some, but not enough.
Then Trump gets elected president.
What does Trump do for almost first thing in his first year in office?
He gives lethal aid.
Now, Putin is seeing a change in the leadership of the country.
This pro-Putin new president, Donald Trump, is given lethal aid and is said, don't mess with Ukraine.
Putin pays attention to that.
Biden gets elected president.
Biden brings in the same foreign policy team that was dealing with this area under Obama, new titles, new chairs, but it's the same team.
Putin understands what that means.
First thing Biden does is he makes the United States energy dependent, again, by shutting down new production.
Second thing he does is he removes the sanctions that Trump put on on Nord Stream 2, which were serious sanctions.
And what does that Putin see there?
Okay, I got the Obama foreign policy team in place now.
I got Biden helping me build my energy position in the world.
And because the U.S. is going to be becoming a net importer, the extra flow of gas is coming from Russia through third parties, which means he's making billions of dollars more to funnel his war machine in Moscow.
So he sees all of that.
And then he says, you know, to the West, don't bring anybody into NATO.
What were his conditions for peace, not having him invade Ukraine?
He wanted the commitment that Ukraine would not be part of NATO.
Well, Ukraine said they were not prepared to be a part of NATO.
They were never going to be a part of NATO.
So that wasn't an issue.
But then he said, and I want all NATO country borders with military, Western NATO troops to go back to 1997.
You know what 1997 was?
That's when the Soviet Union basically fell apart.
And so what he was saying is he wants no NATO troops in any of Eastern and Central Europe and also in the Baltics.
He wants to pull back on Latvia and Estonia.
No, that wasn't a peace gesture.
That was a war gesture.
Well, and I think you're correct.
Let's not forget that Trump was impeached because he threatened to withhold federal aid from Ukraine.
You're correct about that.
Well, we can go into that in a separate issue, but we're going to confuse the conversation.
I think we should stick on this and then we can talk about that.
He did send federal lethal aid to Ukraine.
And again, nobody's saying what Vladimir Putin is doing is correct, right?
If 44 million people want to be free, they have the right to be free.
But again, I ask, where does this end up?
Why is that our responsibility?
How does this end?
I didn't say that was argued.
What you took objection to is me saying that Ukraine blunted in the first month the Russian invasion by using a citizen militia.
That's what I said.
That's what I said.
And I didn't get a chance to, but now I'll give you a chance to become relevant on your comment, to say that what the West should have been doing from that point was facilitating what Ukraine needed in order to defend themselves, because we are committed to freedom and democracy.
And you're talking about 44 million people who are dealing with.
I'm not saying we should have put troops in there.
I am saying we should have allowed the air equipment to go in there.
Now we are.
Why are we now allowing it to go in there?
Because it's now apparent that Ukraine can use them and win.
But back then, we didn't want to get drawn in.
Why?
Because Putin was threatening us, like he's now threatening us with nuclear weapons.
Putin is a bully.
Bullies push until they find a wall.
Putin's got a problem.
He can't win Ukraine.
And he's not going to be able to win Ukraine because of the Ukrainian people if they're given the tools they need to defend themselves.
The Poles understand this.
Why are the Poles on the front line here?
Because they know if Ukraine falls to and becomes part of Russia, they're the border, and they know what that means.
Hey, Pat, you're doing a lot of listening, right?
You're probably processing everything in Paul.
And thanks, Tyler, getting in on it.
How are you processing all this?
I mean, you've done a whole episode on Ukraine.
You've watched Ukraine on fire.
Everything.
There's a difference between watching an episode and being on the inside.
And no matter how many papers I read, you don't know until you're dealing directly with Yanukovych and oligarchs and you're there for a few years.
I think the question would be the following.
So American military news comes out yesterday, two days ago.
Russia warns World War III risk is very significant.
So Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned on Monday that the risk of a third world war cannot be underestimated and said the U.S. and NATO are adding to the risk by supplying weapons to Ukraine.
Lavrov said Russia agreed on the admissibility of nuclear war and said avoiding such conflict is our principal position.
However, he warned that now the risks are very significant.
He particularly criticized the U.S. for supplying manned portable anti-aircraft missile launchers and anti-tank javelin missiles, which he said could be used for terrorist attacks.
So is this just a threat or is this a bluff or do you think things can get pretty ugly there?
You know what happens when you capitulate to a bully?
They keep moving.
Is it a threat?
Yeah, it's a threat.
Is it a serious threat?
I don't know.
I know that they're losing and they know that.
And so they're getting desperate.
And so they're making these crazy accusers or threats.
But frankly, the moment we capitulate is the moment the world becomes more dangerous, not less dangerous, because the bully understands where the red line doesn't mean a red line anymore.
And when they start getting away with a nuclear threat, then what happens in Estonia?
When the Russian ethnic population in Estonia that Putin is stirring up right now, what happens when he gets them to do like what he did in eastern Ukraine and say they're not having their interests protected and Russia's got to go in there now and protect them?
Well, no, they're a NATO country.
So if Moscow goes into Estonia, are we going to give in?
And if we've given in on the nuclear threat on Ukraine, we'll give in on the nuclear threat in Estonia.
And all of a sudden, the Balkans go back.
All of a sudden, Sweden and Finland are talking about maybe becoming a part of NATO.
Why?
Because they feel threatened now.
For years, they've always said neutrality.
We don't need to be a part of NATO.
All of a sudden, they're changing.
Germany, I mean, this is one of the big surprises to me.
Yeah, the Chancellor of Germany is a Social Democrat, which is the party that's affiliated with Putin's party, where you have these affiliations internationally.
And he's rearming Germany.
Amazing.
It's historic.
Why?
Because now Germany started.
This guy recognizes his country is worried.
I mean, he's got his relationships with Putin, but the country is worried that Germany's borders now could potentially be a risk.
Should the world be worried if Germany starts arming itself?
I mean, they don't exactly have the best reputation about arms, right?
But the point I'm getting at is you've got all these things swirling around.
Nothing is black and white.
Putin is causing all of the swirling around.
And so when he starts threatening us with doomsday and we give in, it's not going to get better.
It's going to get worse.
Let me ask you.
We talk about him being a bully.
How different was his relationship with Trump versus Biden?
I was preoccupied during those days.
My understanding of it is what you saw in the papers as well.
I never thought Trump was pro-Putin.
I think Trump's foreign policy, and it's true, it was true in Russia, it was true everywhere.
It was true in North Korea, was personal diplomacy.
He believed, I mean, that Donald Trump I know believes that when he can look you in the face and he can talk to you, you'll understand his resolve.
And if you understand his resolve, that ability to understand it will allow for things to happen.
You know, in theory, Moscow and Putin, no Russian invasions happened anywhere during Trump's presidency.
Why?
Because I believe Putin understood Trump wouldn't tolerate it.
And so what they talked about, I have no idea.
But I do know that just like North Korea would rattle the sabers before Trump was president.
They went quiet after Trump met with Kim Jong-un.
Trump's conversations with Putin, Putin went quiet.
And even China.
I mean, I happen to think if Trump had been re-elected, I think they would have finished the international tariff negotiations.
And then you'd have seen a new kind of approach on foreign policy with Xi Jinping by Trump because he would have fixed what he thought was the first problem, and then he'd be dealing with the political relationship, all on a personal basis.
And so I don't know what Trump and Putin talked about.
I just know the consequence, with the results of his presidency.
And the results were very positive for freedom-loving countries.
So before we transition out from the story of Ukraine and the story of Russia, Putin, the story with you in the world of lobbyists, okay, and that's the business you've been in since 1980, you know, when you got into the business.
You know, when they talk about you going to jail, what did you really go get sentenced 47 months for?
Some are saying Russia, some are saying the $10 million loan from the oligarch, some are saying the $60 million from Ukraine.
What was the real reason at the end that you got 47 months?
There was no $10 million loan from oligarchs.
There was no loans from oligarchs.
There was a bank loan that they accused me of, U.S. bank.
What I was villainized for was being pro-Putin, you know, traitor to my country.
What I was convicted of were legal issues, which I talk about in the book, that I'd already been cleared up on.
Already been cleared up on in the fairy issues, on the tax issues, on the F-bar, which is the offshore accounts issues.
And I'm not going to get into them today, but in the book, I get into them in detail.
And you need to understand the context.
And that was exactly what Weissman's strategy was, was to confuse the context, to make me a villain in the media, and then get me convicted on just overcharging and just dropping hundreds of thousands of documents, millions of pages, and putting me in solitary, putting me in solitary so I couldn't really prepare myself.
Weisman being the right-hand guy for Mueller, right?
Weissman ran, at least my case, he ran it.
I think he ran the whole special war.
What role did Letitia Jackson play?
Letitia James played.
I'm sorry, Letitia James played.
No.
She's the attorney general in New York.
But she was trying to go after Trump, you know, God knows how many different things they were trying to find.
They couldn't find anything except for, you know, the CEO, you know, who apparently Trump gave Ferrari or something like that.
They couldn't find anything else.
So I guess the question for you would be to follow.
From 1980 till you going to 47 months, how often, Ford, Reagan, all these guys you work with, how often were you a target the way you were a target the moment you started helping out Trump?
Never.
So you've never been a target like the...
I don't know.
So why this level of hatred towards targeting Trump versus everybody else your supporter was also Republican.
What's the difference between Trump and everyone else?
The world has changed.
I mean, number one, social media.
Number two, I mean, social media was Trump's, helped Trump facilitate Trump's election, and it dominated Trump's presidency.
You know, we used to have, going back to four days, there was one news cycle, and you got to use between 8 in the morning until about 3 in the afternoon to get on the three network news programs that night.
And that was the way you built your strategy for the day.
By the time Reagan's second term and Jim Baker mastered this, we had two cycles.
We had the morning cycle and the afternoon cycle so that we dominated what was in the news in the evening and what you saw in the papers in the morning.
Today, you have a 24-hour cycle.
And you've also had journalism, mainstream journalism, change.
It used to be that the fact-checkers were the most important part of any articles you'd read in the non-editorial pages.
Fact checkers don't exist anymore.
It's first to file, not first to get the facts.
And that's driven by the social media to some respect.
And the social media has, you know, has dominated the mainstream medias because the mainstream media is, how do these new reporters grown into national celebrities?
The articles they get to be writing and also the coverage they get on the TV talk shows and the clicks.
How many clicks?
So if their articles get clicks, the more clicks they get, the more attention that brings to them.
The more attention it brings to them.
It's helped their economics.
And what gets clicks?
News?
Or sensationalism.
I want to say, okay, it's social media, but Nixon got targeted hardcore when they were after him.
We can give names of people.
Of course, post-media coming out, first debate being John F. Kennedy and Nixon on TV where it was no longer radio.
Radio Nixon's winning on TV is not.
But the targeting has happened for a while.
Maybe not at the levels that we have today, right?
Intensity, intensity.
But why, though?
That's what I want to know.
Forget the social media side.
Why specifically towards Trump?
Well, again, I think the main reason for Trump, and I get into this in the book, is because he threatened the system.
Not Democrats, the system.
He was going to drain the swamp.
The swamp wasn't the Democrats.
The swamp was Washington.
The swamp was New York.
The swamp was the elites versus the people.
To quote Hillary Clinton, the basket of deplorables.
They were coming, not since Andrew Jackson were the people coming to the streets of Washington the way they were under Trump.
Really?
I mean, you look at all of the changes, the FDR, even Abraham Lincoln, you didn't have an attack on the system the way you did when Trump or Andrew Jackson, depending on how you want to do it, became president.
And they weren't ready for it.
In Trump's case, nobody was ready for Trump to be president except Trump's supporters.
And they were the quiet, still, to quote Nixon, silent majority.
I mean, they were hoping.
I felt Trump was going to win the whole time in 2016.
I wrote a memo, which they tried and Weissman tried to make into something it wasn't on Thursday before the election in 2016 that I sent to the president, to Jared, and to Reitz Previous, who was running the RNC at the time, where I said that Trump is going to win on Tuesday.
And I wrote the memo on Thursday specifically because I felt that there was still time the week before for Clinton to change.
If Clinton had run a smart last 10 days of the campaign, she could have won.
I'm not saying she would have, but she could have.
By Thursday, it was too late.
She couldn't do, in my mind, what had to be done in the states where I thought Trump would win.
So I wrote a memo that said that it's really important this weekend that we get out there and make people understand we're going to win.
I said, the media's not going to believe it in the memo, but we have to put the marker down because when we do win on Tuesday, I said, no one's going to understand how this happened.
And they're going to try and say, we stole the election.
And we didn't.
Some of what I asked for, they suggested it happened, happened, but I'm not saying it was because of my memo.
But my point was that the system wasn't expecting Trump to win.
And so the combination of he's going to drain the swamp, nobody expected him to be standing on Wednesday after the election, the people crying, schools closed, teachers unions closing schools because when did we ever have that happen?
When did we ever have that happen?
But that became the defining atmosphere for Trump's presidency.
I guess what I'm asking is the following.
By the way, some people may even say, you know, you are part of the swamp.
As a lobbyist, you know, I think lobbyists, would you say lobbyists have done a lot of damage?
I think lobbyists.
Well, it depends on what they do.
I mean, lobbying is government affairs.
I mean, you walk to an office of a congressman, you think they're the experts on all the topics they're dealing with in the committees?
No.
A good government affairs firm is providing information for people to make decisions.
Now, there's corruption within the system.
What good does a lobbyist do?
Like, if I were to say a, you know, what good does a cop do?
Okay, I can say what good a cop does.
What good does a military soldier do?
What good does a, whoever, what good, what good does a lobbyist do?
They provide information, factual information on whatever the issues are that they're representing.
In the case of foreign government, representing foreign governments, they facilitate understanding because people, they don't, they, they don't, people don't talk the same to each other.
They don't understand the same to each other.
And a good lobbyist, which has become a pejorative term, but a good lobbyist is somebody who brings information, finds out what the problems are, goes back and gets responses to the problems and comes back.
And that's the mundane work that gets done in the legislative process and the regulatory process all the time.
What you read about are the excesses.
Hunter Biden going into the State Department and saying that we need to back off on prosecutors in Ukraine coming down on Burisma.
That's what lobbying is viewed, but that's not lobbying.
Aren't we?
That's political influence.
Wouldn't you say lobbyists are like the ultimate spinners, though?
They're the ultimate spinners.
They'll spin any story into, they'll use some factual things and then they'll spin it into whatever story or narrative they want to tell.
But it is a form.
They're like the ultimate ultimate spinners.
Well, that's one of the things they do.
Yes, absolutely.
But again, don't deceive yourself.
The system in Washington is not meant for congressmen to know everything and their staffs to know everything about all the issues that they, on the committees they sit on.
They need information from outside to make informed decisions.
And good lobbyists provide that information.
Some of it is spinning.
The congressmen have to, in the end, make judgments.
But isn't it all money-driven?
Meaning like a lobbyist is going to tell them that information based on how much they're getting paid by that company that they represent.
But the member of Congress understands that the lobbyist is showing up on behalf of AT ⁇ T.
And so that comes with a certain frame of understanding.
And the information they're getting from AT ⁇ T, they get, and they have to contextualize that versus what they're getting from a company that's opposing AT ⁇ T, you know, buying Time Warner or whatever the case might be.
What would happen if lobbyists were just completely eliminated?
Then you would have a lot of legislation that was uninformed.
But watch this, though.
Check this out.
So about half of retiring senators and a third of retiring House members retire as lobbyists.
But let's, you know, we've got this image in our head of lobbyists.
You know who's a lobbyist?
Who?
The teachers' union.
Okay.
Teachers union is a lobbyist.
I agree.
So you're going to take them out?
No.
No one's talking about taking teachers' union out.
They're talking about taking a lobbying company out.
But the teachers' union is a lobbyist.
AARP is a lobbyist.
There's an element of them that's also corrupt.
But my point is there's a role they serve.
And when you start saying take lobbyists out of the equation, you're taking everybody out of the equation.
Who would win elections if there was no lobbyists?
Like, let's just say it's criminal to hire a lobbyist or a lobbyist firm.
Who would that favor the most if all of that was gone and out?
I don't even know how you could do that to start with.
But if you're saying take lobbyists out, you're really, I think what you're saying is take the money out of contribution.
Sure, if there's no money, there's no lobbying.
But again, that means the teachers' union doesn't get to contribute.
The FL-CIO doesn't get to contribute.
I mean, start, and you think they're going to give that up?
No way.
I'm not saying they're going to give it up.
By the way, I actually don't think it's going to happen.
Not in my lifetime.
I'm 43.
It ain't going to happen in my lifetime.
But all I'm asking is, you know, if we did in everywhere, who does it hurt?
Who does it benefit?
Look, I think done correctly, it hurts good legislation.
I mean, if you take out the information flow that lobbying companies bring to the system, how does a member of Congress get their information?
Where are they going to get it?
They're not going to intuitively know the technicalities of big tech and the exemptions that they have from publishing.
They're not going to intuitively know that.
A friend of mine was a lobbyist and a very high-paid lobbyist.
He made very good money, very, very good money.
And he left and got into a completely different industry.
I said, so why'd you get into a lobbyist?
You can make a lot of money.
I made a lot of money.
I said, okay, this whole thing about politics is dirty and all this stuff.
He says, listen, some of the stuff I did as a lobbyist, it eventually got to a point where I'm like, holy shit, if I continue like this, this thing's eventually going to catch up to me with what we're doing with our team.
How ugly is the world of lobbying, meaning the power plays?
Is it, you know how, okay, we ask this question regularly.
You know, hey, if you want to build a championship in football, what matters the most?
The GM, the owner, the quarterback, the running back, the defense, blah, blah, blah.
All this stuff you go through.
Offensive coordinator, recruit, who do you put up there, right?
If we want somebody to win, okay, if we want somebody to win to a candidate to win, how important of a role does a lobbyist play to help that person win?
How important of a role does a lobbyist play to get an Amazon who moves a part of their headquarters closer to Virginia or D.C. to pass some laws?
How important of a role do lobbyists plays to pass some of these laws for them?
Well, those are two different things.
Getting elected versus governed.
Both of them.
Getting elected, money is important, but money comes from a lot of sources, not just lobbyists.
So I would not make lobbying as the distinction.
There are probably people, the Republicans probably feel like they're outmanned by the Democrats and getting lobbyist money.
If you look at lobbyist money, most of it goes to Democrats.
A lot of it does.
But I don't think that matters to getting elected.
I think what matters to getting elected is your issue agenda, and then as an incumbent, what you've done.
At the end of the day, the American people usually figure things out.
I'm a big believer in our system.
They usually figure things out.
They can be fooled for an election cycle, but they generally figure things out.
And so lobbying to me is more impactful in governance, not in elections.
Money's going to come from somewhere regardless.
You take lobbying money out, it's still going to come from somewhere.
And so getting elected is a different paradigm from my standpoint.
As far as governing is concerned, lobbying plays a constructive role if you frame things correctly.
It's still going to be up to the member to make a decision on the information that he gets.
And it's not like it's happening in a vacuum.
You get lobbyists on both sides of issues, oftentimes than multiple sides of issues.
And so, yes, that puts a responsibility on the member to understand the facts, but that's part of his job, is to understand the facts.
You've got to make sure he gets the facts.
And if he's getting both sides of the facts, he's got enough to make judgments.
I would make the point that special interests are not particularly necessarily lobbyists that control members of Congress, but industries.
And how do you get, I mean, and that's part of, if you come from a coal mining area, coal mining industry is going to have an impact on the members of Congress from that area.
Is that wrong?
Probably not, because that's the area they're from, and they need to understand those issues.
It's where I have my problem with Washington and where I think Trump tapped into something in 2016 was where members of Congress will be for something when they're in power, and then when they lose power, they're against what they were for on an issue.
And that hypocrisy is what gets Obama or Trump.
I mean, neither in that sense.
I'm talking more congressional.
I mean, I'll give you an example.
It's a political one, but it's nonetheless.
The filibuster in the Senate.
You've seen all the eclipse, Schumer and the Democrats being against the filibuster being removed when they were in the minority in the Senate, and now they're for the filibuster being getting rid of it.
Why?
Because it enhances their power.
So the equation is defined by what it does for power, not what it does for democracy.
McConnell's done the same thing.
Same thing.
Both sides.
And Trump campaigned against both of them.
They were the swords.
McConnell can't stand Trump out of it.
Yeah, well, it's probably mutual.
It's probably.
It is mutual.
But the point is, why doesn't Trump like McConnell?
Because McConnell to Trump is the same thing as Schumer is to Trump as far as...
He's just a swamp creature.
He's a swamp creature.
Why doesn't McConnell like Trump?
Because McConnell is a swab creature and Trump wants to get rid of the disruptor.
Yeah.
And so will they ever see eye to eye McConnell and Trump?
No, I was.
There's no hope for reconciliation.
Well, no, there's always hope for reconciliation because there'll be mutuality of interest.
Will they ever like each other?
No.
But will they ever work together?
Yeah, I think they would.
Hey, Pat.
It would seem, tell me if I'm wrong here.
We're talking about lobbyists back to that.
Paul's almost defending lobbyists.
I would say that you would, I mean, as a lobbyist, hello, I mean, a political consultant as well, you would think that there's a role.
That there's a role and that they are a net positive to governance.
Whereas Pat, correct me if I'm wrong, at the end of the day, you think lobbyists are a net negative to America.
Am I wrong on that?
Okay, so here's how I see it.
Okay.
You know the whole conversation between sales and marketing?
Yep.
What's sales?
What's marketing?
Right?
Marketing spreads.
Sales was one-dimensional.
Marketing is like a story goes out like Coca-Cola.
Share a Coke with Jose, with Adam.
Oh, my God.
I don't even drink Coke.
But hey, I got this.
Craig campaign came out of Australia.
Coke took off.
They become who they become, right?
I think lobbyists are the ultimate CMOs.
They'll do laps around CMOs at major corporations.
Like if a major corporation wants to hire a real good CMO, go freaking put out an ad and say, I'm looking for former lobbyists who help somebody win.
I'll give you a lot of money.
There's a lot of congressmen that would have to be.
I tell you, like he would make one hell of a CMO at a major corporation.
And I'm being very frank with you.
I'm being very serious because the strategy they take with research and data and gathering them and telling the story and saying it in a way where you're like, man, this thing makes sense.
It's a very powerful job.
But it's the ultimate spin zone, though.
It's the ultimate spin zone.
In my opinion, I may be wrong.
And by the way, let's just say one day you get into politics.
If the other guy's using lobbyists, guess what we got to get for you?
We got to get some solid lobbyists on you because if you're going to use it, I have to use it.
You understand what I'm saying?
I'm not going to do it where, hey, you're going to use it.
Oh, we're going to become these noble people.
We're not going to use it.
No, you have to.
So he makes the point about, so what do you want to do?
Teachers union?
Should we get rid of them?
I mean, if both sides are going to use it, you have to use it.
Okay.
That's the part where once you get into that game, that shit is dirty.
And you're going to play that game against me?
Watch how better of a job I'm going to maneuver against you.
And you may disagree with me, but that's my assessment of the world of lobbying.
Look, I mean, I understand the point.
And by the way, Donald Trump would agree with a lot of what you just said.
But the point is, what are you going to replace it with?
I mean, you can't expect Congress, especially in today's day and age, to be experts on all the things they have to be experts on.
And you can't, there's not enough staff for them, the money for the staff they would need to have an expert on this, an expert on this, an expert on this, et cetera.
So you have to have a role.
How you frame the role to protect the concerns that you have, that's a different issue.
But to say that throw the baby in the bathwater out, that's not, it's not realistic.
And frankly, I think it's harmful to the system.
I disagree with a lot of what the teachers union stand for as far as what they think they can do with our kids in school.
But I see a role for them.
They're massive bullies, though.
Well, they are massive bullies.
They're massive bullies because they have the power to be a massive bully.
But again, it goes back because we've empowered them.
I think in 1870, I don't know what the year was when they were trying to eliminate lobbies and create laws and all this stuff.
This has been going on for a while where they knew this was eventually because some of these guys were going to become more powerful than actual presidents, congressmen, and senators.
Some lobbyists are more powerful than, you know, Jim Baker.
You've read his book.
I'm sure you've read it.
If you haven't read his book, I couldn't put the book down, by the way.
Some of the stuff he was talking about on the stories of what happened.
Jim Baker is more powerful than most of these guys that became president.
Jim, he could have become a president, but he chose to play a different role, you know?
Yeah, I think, again, I think lobbyists, in a big way, make the political world.
Well, you know what?
You know, I just thought of it for his lobbyists because you at one point said, well, they represent industry.
This guy's a beast, by the way.
You said industries.
Lobbyists represent industry.
We met initially at an insurance conference 10 years ago.
That's probably the biggest brokerage industry meeting.
There's another one called AALU.
You're probably familiar with that.
They've changed their name since then, but it's the insurance advocacy group in D.C. Every year the meeting is in D.C. We're in the insurance business, financial services business.
The whole point of that meeting is to get all the insurance people to D.C. to do our meeting.
And then what do they all do?
Go to the Hill to meet with our congressmen to basically promote the importance of insurance and financial wellness in the family.
So there is an upside, you know, even to us.
But the reason why they need that, because on the other side, Elizabeth Warren's got the best of the best, who's lobbying against hurting people in the financial industry.
So you have to have the counterattack.
That's why I'm excited.
That's my point of view.
If you're going to use it, I have to lobbyists.
And that's what he's saying.
You can't touch a baby with the bathwater.
I don't disagree with you.
And yes, there are excesses.
Again, part of my biggest problem with, and why I believe that Trump was going to win in 2016 was because Washington becomes segmented, segregated, and they focus on what's in their interest and not in the people whose interests they are representing, meaning the American people.
And it bothers me.
And I got out of American politics for about eight years when I was over in Ukraine because I was fed up with being part of a system where when people got elected and came to Washington, they didn't worry about their promises as much as they worried about building a power base inside Washington.
And that was true of Republicans and Democrats.
And the hypocrisy that I said a minute ago, using the filibuster example, but that is true throughout on issues and on it's it's power-based and that bothered me and did I think I could change the system?
No, I couldn't change the system, so I just said okay, come on Paul, you could have done it.
Well, I did, and actually because I then changed my mind in 2016 when I saw somebody who could do it and and I got back in the game.
Um, and do you regret it?
No, not at all no.
Do you do you think when you wrote that uh article Thursday of 2016, right before Tuesday, saying this guy's gonna win it, do you feel that way about him in 2024?
That Trump is gonna win, Because I don't think DeSantis is going to run?
I don't think DeSantis wants to be on the same stage with Trump because it's going to get ugly.
Oh, I don't think DeSantis runs if Trump runs.
I agree.
I think if Trump runs, it freezes the field.
I mean, there'll be somebody, whether it's Bill Weld again or Hogan or Kasich, somebody will run.
It won't matter.
Trump will dominate on the Republican primary side.
What are the chances he runs?
100%?
Well, I think Biden is making it easier every day.
Well, Biden won't be running again in 2024.
We all know that.
But you've got to look at what you got.
Now we have to project what's 2024 going to look like.
Well, we have to look at it through the prism of two things: the Biden administration and the 2022 elections.
The Biden administration has failed on all of the key issues that Trump was succeeding on.
And to the point where I couldn't believe this.
I mean, I think the poll is an outlier poll.
19% of the people who voted for him want him to run again in 2024.
Now, think about that for a minute.
Biden got 80 million votes.
19% of Biden?
Right.
Want him to run?
16 million out of the 80?
That's my point.
Do the math.
That's embarrassing.
Who gave that number?
I think it was Harris's poll.
I think it was Mark Penn's poll.
Why is that number shocking, though?
In one and a half years, he's lost 60 million people that voted for him.
They weren't voting for him, Paul.
You know that.
They were voting against Trump.
You know this.
Well, some of them were.
But my point is.
Nobody's like, hell yeah.
But Joe's my guy.
They said Donald Trump's not my guy, and I'll take anyone else.
Well, we can get into that in a minute, but the point still to me that's shocking, and Pat picked it up.
60 million people who voted for him within a year have said, I don't want him to run again.
That's an incredible number.
But now get underneath the numbers.
What does it mean?
Young people.
Why do you think they're talking about student debt again?
Because young people, I think there's like 60% of his vote in 2020.
He's down in the 30s.
33% of young people said they would vote for him if they show up.
So you've got an issue on turnout, and then you got to show up of who turns out is not going to vote.
A third is going to vote for him.
You look at Hispanics.
This was a movement that was starting in 2016.
It was already starting to move on to cultural issues and on the economy.
Those are the things that are important to the Latino community.
Trump accelerated that a little bit.
And Biden, in one year as president, is accelerating even more for Republicans to the point that Republicans could carry a majority of the Hispanic vote in 2024.
They do.
It's a layup to.
That's why it looks like a layup for 2022.
And what does that mean?
Well, that means that these developing segments of the voting population are moving away from their traditional place.
And once it starts to move, it doesn't just come back.
And what's going to happen as a result of that in 2023, 23?
What will happen, in my judgment, is the Republicans are going to win both houses of Congress.
More importantly, is what happens in the House.
The plurality in the House of the Democratic caucus is going to be the left.
It's going to be the AOC types.
Maybe not the leadership, but the plurality.
The Elizabeth Warrens on the Senate side are going to be empowered as well, so that the left is going to have more of a stranglehold on Washington than they do today in 23.
What does that mean for Republicans in 24?
And to your question about Trump, the agenda is going to be way out of heat over here when the American people are here And the governance is making it worse.
How does the woke left not realize that?
Because they don't care about it.
What they care about is getting power.
The left understands a very basic thing.
First, you take power, then you create change.
They have to take power first.
Being the big fish in a small pond is how they take power.
Then they'll worry about it.
Because at the end of the day, what is American politics?
It's two people generally running for president.
You get one of the two people nominated, you got a chance to take over the White House.
Joe Biden's the best example of that.
And so from the left standpoint, they're playing the long game.
And they see the opportunity to take control of the Democratic Party in Washington in 23 and then worry about 24 next.
Elizabeth Ward, she's already running for president.
And she's going to, you know, she'll change her strokes here and there.
But first, she's got to consolidate.
She doesn't stand a chance.
Well, Elizabeth Warren?
No, she's not marketable.
Again, nominations are a different game.
Oh, nomination.
Yeah.
But if she gets nominated, she's got a chance.
I'm not saying she's.
She hasn't that ship all sailed.
The Elizabeth Warwicks, the Bernies.
Like, we've been there, done that.
2016, 2020, they're out.
But no, we haven't.
I totally disagree with you.
I totally disagree with you.
2016 was the, I mean, 2020 was the wrong time.
Bernie Sanders, when we put the strategy together for Trump in 2016, part of the vote that he got and we targeted, it was Sanders' vote in the primaries because they weren't leftist.
They were drain the swamp type of people.
And what's going to happen is the rhetoric of 2024 is going to be revolutionary from the left standpoint.
And again, if they can consolidate and get in the primaries, because you get through the primaries, the left, the Democratic primaries are going to be primaries of the left, not the moderate Democrats, not the Joe Manchins, not the Joe Bidens.
I mean, Biden emerged for very specific reasons.
I always feared Joe Biden.
I mean, he was the one.
I mean, in fact, I did a couple of things.
You might be the only person in America that fears Joe Biden.
I feared him in 2020.
Feared him in 2015 because I thought he could win.
Why?
Because American presidential politics, when you have an incumbent running for re-election, so it's not an open seat.
It's a matter of contrast.
You said it a minute ago.
People were voting against Trump.
Why were they voting against Trump?
His personality.
Correct.
Uncle Joe.
Uncle Joe.
Hide him in the basement.
Create this image of this soft, gentle person.
That's the right image.
Throw COVID on top of that.
Throw expansion of voting on top of that.
Throw everything else.
He gets a chance and he pulled it off.
Should he have won?
No, but he did for that reason.
So from the left standpoint, they think they're smarter than that.
And yet, Joe won.
So we get control of the Democratic Party.
We'll figure out how to win the general election against whoever.
If it's Trump, we're going to go at him hard on Trump.
And they'll make his personality, they'll try and make that the issue and sneak by with softening Elizabeth Warren or softening Buttigedge and then figure it out later after they win.
You think a wild car like Rock celebrity, like if there's ever been a time to come in and win, like this is a good time to do it.
One of these guys that's got a couple hundred million followers on Instagram, Twitter, they come and use that car.
Think Elon Musk in the future is a candidate for president.
He's not born here, though.
Born in South Carolina.
Well, that's true, actually.
You're right.
That is the restriction.
You're right.
But he's going to be a major player.
Well, he is now.
On Twitter.
But in our political system.
You're saying an outsider with a major, massive following and a ton of money.
Like a Mark Cuban, will he run in 2024?
Possible.
He'd like to be president.
He saw Trump do it.
He's a Democrat.
got a social image he's building.
Could he win the nomination?
I don't think so.
I think the problem on the Democratic side is it's going to be a leftist candidate for president.
Wow.
Well, we're going to have a leftist candidate.
I think that's what's going to emerge from the Democratic Party, especially if what happens in 22.
They're going to get trounced if that's the direction they go.
And look at what they're doing.
They're doubling down on moving left.
I'm putting pressure on Biden right now on student debt.
If he does student debt, I mean, it's really stupid from a political standpoint, but from the left standpoint, they like what it stands for.
But if he does the student debt issue, what's going to happen?
He's not going to pump up turnoff in an off-year cycle among young people.
I mean, he may go from 37 to 45% voting for Democrats.
But you know what the number one issue is for people 18 to 29 right now?
Inflation, the economy, and jobs.
So do you think that forgiving the debt for a segment of the 18 to 29?
Because what happens to all the people who aren't going to college?
What happens to the people who are starting college next year?
What about my debt?
These are the kinds of issues that affect who's going to turn out and how they're going to turn out.
What about the guys who paid for their debt?
Yeah, like me.
I paid off my debt.
There you go.
I mean, the point is, the left doesn't care.
That's a big vote if you're able to get all these folks' college debt to be forgiven.
You know what loyalty you'll get from them?
Because that keeps a lot of people.
But they're not even a majority of the segment of the 18 to 20.
Not at all.
They're not.
And what's going to happen?
What does it do to inflation?
Which is the number one issue for that voter block.
Well, actually, for every voter block, but for that voter block, it's going to make it worse.
And so all of a sudden now, you're rewarding people, a small segment who got college debt, and you're punishing everyone in the country with inflation, which is the number one issue.
But the left only cares about where they're going to be in January of 2023.
Are you in Trump in communication right now?
You guys talk?
I'm not going to get into that kind of conversation.
The only reason I ask the question is because if he does go 2023, 2024 and he runs, who's he going to put on his campaign?
Who's he going to bring in?
Who's out there that he can bring in to help him out?
I don't think he'll have any trouble hiring people.
I mean, I.
I saw Thiel is making a decision to, you know, Thiel is Peter Thiel.
That's a pretty big name to have there, but that's a different role.
That's more on the truth side.
Yeah, yeah, no.
But I don't think Trump will have any trouble putting together a campaign if he decides to run.
And it'll be a campaign that's more pro-Trump.
I mean, in the sense that one of Trump's biggest problems when he first became president, when he was first elected, is he didn't have a bench.
He didn't have people to put into the government.
Trump didn't know anybody in Washington when he ran for president.
I tell the story of the book.
I mean, when I got involved, normally when you get involved in a campaign, you're somewhere in the middle of the process and you have a specific role, you have to come in, you have to clean out some stuff, move people aside, bring your own people in.
I had none of that problem because there was nobody to move out.
There was no there.
Trump was the campaign.
He was the candidate.
He was the pollster.
He was the communication director.
He was the speechwriter.
He was the advanced guy.
I mean, there were a couple of people who were the gophers, not gophers, assistants to do things.
Hope was very important for Trump because Hope was a very organized person.
She understood Trump.
And so she could get done what Trump asked her to do efficiently and quickly, which is why he loved her.
But I'm talking about, but Trump came up with the strategy of Hope, do this, let's put this to eat out, whatever.
He was the strategist of the campaign and the media guy as well.
What was your role?
Well, when I came in, I first came in to help, because of that kind of campaign structure, the nomination process is a multifaceted process.
You have to win the primaries, but you have to win the delegates.
And they're not connected.
There's a dotted line connection.
But for example, Cruz understood all the rules of the Republican Party and the nominating process.
And so the feeling was, Trump's strategy was, I'm one of 16 people.
I can get nominated by just building my pluralities after each election.
Cruz's strategy was there are 16 people against Trump.
And so the opportunity to elect delegates that are not automatically elected creates the opportunity to have a convention floor of non-Trump people.
Meaning, let's say, and every state was different, but let's say Virginia elects their delegates at a convention, but they have a primary and there's some, the allocations are by CD and by at-large.
But the conventions elect the delegates.
So let's say I've won, I think Virginia has 51 delegates, but I've won 37 delegates based on the law.
But I don't control the convention.
I could have 10 delegates on the floor.
10 delegates on the floor.
If there's a majority of people who are not for Trump on the floor, even though Trump's got 40%, 45% of the convention, they can vote.
They have to vote for Trump based on the states, the first ballot, but they can vote against Trump on rules, on freeing up delegates and undercutting state laws, on convention officers, on the platform.
And then on the second ballot, if they keep it from happening on the first ballot, the ones who are voting for Trump, in many cases, are freed to do whatever they want.
And if they're not Trump people, but they were just Trump bodies, or not Trump bodies, the nomination is at risk, which was the Cruz strategy.
That was Cruz's strategy.
He had people who understood convention politics very well and party rules very well.
So Trump sees himself all of a sudden winning primaries and then subsequent state conventions electing Cruz delegates who have to vote for Trump for the first ballot, but only for Trump on the ballot question.
And he's saying, this is fixed.
I'm being robbed.
The party is cheating me.
Well, the party wasn't cheating him.
He just didn't have a structure that was paying attention to the rules.
So that the way he was running the campaign, he came into a state, he wins the state, he then moves.
There's no that almost cost him, by the way.
Well, that's why he brought me in.
That's why he brought me in, because when he moved, there was nobody left in the state.
Well, guess what?
Cruz people were going in after the primaries, and they were electing the bodies to be at the convention.
And so Trump finally had a meeting with Priebus to complain that the party is screwing me.
And Priebus said to him, No, Donald, you just don't understand the rules.
You just don't understand the rules.
I remember that.
And so Trump turned to Lewandowski, who was sitting with him there.
He said, Did you know this, Corey?
Of course, no.
Because Corey had never done anything like this.
He didn't understand the rules.
And so Trump's realizing I'm winning, but I'm not winning.
And that's my expertise, among other things.
And that's why I was brought in.
What happened to Roger Stone?
What happened?
He seems like he's like turning more and more against your former business partner.
What's going on with him and Trump?
Oh, they just have a little, I mean, they're like Big Brother, Little Brother.
I mean, going back to the 1980s, I mean, Rogers, Trump became president because of Roger Stone.
Not in the sense that Roger elected Trump, but Roger was the one who set in Trump's mind, you can be president.
And when Trump started to finally look at Washington, because he, again, the only time he never, when I brought him to Washington in the spring of 2016, he didn't know, basically didn't know anybody unless they had come to New York to ask him for money.
And he knew just as many on the Democratic side as on the Republican side.
Right, right.
And so nobody knew Trump, but Roger knew Trump.
And Roger got Trump to start paying attention to politics in like 1983 and 84.
And then, and I go into this in detail as well, then Ross Perot ran for president in 92.
And Trump looked at the Perot thing and said, well, it's an interesting phenomenon.
And then, of course, Ross Perot loses, but Trump says, I'm smarter than these guys.
I mean, I wouldn't, he did only stupid things.
He could have been president.
And there was a chance at the time, a point that Perot was leading or close to leading in the three-party race.
19, 21%.
You know, he was hovering.
Right, but Bush was at 36 and Clinton was about 35, 36, and there was a lot of undecided horse race.
It was legitimate.
Real Perot was Clinton's best campaign manager.
Well, he was in the end.
He was in the end.
But Trump's point was Ross Perot could have been elected.
But he wasn't smart enough.
And he wasn't ready enough.
And he wasn't tall enough.
And he wasn't tall enough.
That's another theory of Rogers, the guy with the big head and the height wins.
But Roger was sort of the adrenaline to that with Trump.
You said Big Brother, Little Brother, you're comparing Roger Stone as the Big Brother to Trump being the Little Brother?
No, I think it's changed.
But at the time, at the time, Roger was the expert and Trump was trying to learn.
Trump never looked at himself as a little brother.
But the point is, they would fight like that.
I mean, they loved each other.
They hated each other.
And Stone was your full-on business partner.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
In the 80s.
When we sold the firm in 92, I left the firm after my lockup and Roger went off in a different direction.
Did you get a Nixon tattoo like him?
No, I did not.
Although Nixon used to, Roger would, my office was Nixon's office when he came to Washington because I had the big office and Roger convinced Nixon.
Paul, do you have any tattoos?
I have no tattoo.
If you had to get a tattoo of a president, if you had to, who would it be?
George Washington.
Boom, right there.
On your back.
Father of the country.
There you go.
Not Trump.
I would never get a tattoo, but if I had to have a symbol of something, I'd have the father of our country.
I'm not fair enough.
And then maybe Abraham Lincoln after that.
But Trump and Roger have their falling outs.
Trump has never, Trump Rogers always been there somewhere in Trump's world.
And their fallouts are more just because they're both media people, media stories, but not really behind the scenes realities.
Tyler, do you have that story about voting?
I'm curious, you know, get the final thoughts before we wrap up.
The voting story that they want to get 100% of people to vote if you don't, it's a $20 fine.
Did you hear about that or no?
What's that?
That they're trying to legislate where 100% of people who are able to vote have to vote or else there's going to be a $20 fine.
Have you heard any of this?
I haven't, but that's who's they?
Do you have this, Tyler?
Is this a Minneapolis?
Let me tell you, if a Republican offered that, they'd be called racist because who's going to suffer from that?
The blacks and the minority communities.
There's a $20 poll tax penalty.
Yeah, so it's a crazy idea.
Can you find it or no?
Okay, Lee Look Ford.
I'm going to go to the Kevin McCarthy story.
Tucker Carlson said, declares Kevin McCarthy a puppet of the Democratic Party who shouldn't be speaker.
Sounds like an MSNBC contributor.
Carlson pointed to an expert excerpt in a forthcoming book, This Will Not Pass by New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin four days after the January 6th insurrection.
Capital Ride, they quote McCarthy as musing, allowed whether Twitter would ban incendiary accounts that have tweeted favorably about the incident.
He was participating in a meeting of the House of GOP leadership at the time.
Congressman Kevin McCarthy of California told his close friends Liz Cheney that he hoped the social media companies would censor more conservative Republicans in Congress, he stated.
Donald Trump, the sitting president, had already been silenced by those companies, but McCarthy wanted the tech oligarchs to do more and force disobedient lawmakers off the internet.
What are your thoughts on Kevin McCarthy?
I mean, there's a lot of emotion goes into that timeframe and what people were saying.
I don't know what McCarthy said.
I've heard the tape as well, but I don't know the context.
Do I think Trump and McCarthy have settled whatever the differences are?
Yeah, I do.
I mean, the story is out today, but this leaked out a while ago.
And I've watched what McCarthy has said since that time.
I've watched what Trump has not said since that time.
And it appears to me that they've made their peace on it.
Can I ask them a good question?
Sure.
So, Paul Manafort, he's in the house.
I mean, I didn't just realize that.
But what I'm learning about you is there's a lot more to you prior to than when everyone really full-on knew your name in 2016.
Okay, so I'm looking at your essentially your Wikipedia page right here.
My question to you is a two-part question is number one, how important is your reputation to you?
My reputation is important to me.
I'm writing the book to sort of at least have an historical record.
I mean, I realized in the moment in 2017 and 18, there was a tsunami against me.
There was no way me trying to put out anything was possible.
Plus, once I got indicted, they put a gag order on me so that I couldn't say a thing, even though all the stories continue to leak and characterize me.
So your reputation is important to you, is what I'm establishing.
So it says here in the book, it says, it's no exaggeration that everything most Americans think they know about Paul Manafort is false.
So I'm looking at, again, your Wikipedia here.
Essentially, nothing is black and white.
A lot of gray.
So, you know, essentially there's words at the beginning, power broker, political advocate, political consultant, political expert, right?
And then you kind of keep reading down, and then it says criminal, tax fraudster, money launderer, scandal.
So you have all these things, you know, for and against you.
So my essential question is, who actually is Paul Manafort?
Paul Manafort is an American who has spent his life trying to improve the political system and bring democracy in countries around the world.
Paul Manafort has always been somebody who works with the United States government's interest overseas.
That includes whether they're Republicans or Democrats in Washington, because overseas, I grew up with, you know, politics stops at the American border.
And I spent my life doing that.
The Paul Manafort of 2017-18 is not Paul Manafort.
It's a lie.
It was part of a social media orchestration to define me so that I could, and I get into this in the book, so that I would feel the pressure and give in to the system and give them up Donald Trump, which I wouldn't do.
One, because there was nothing to give up, but two, because I wasn't going to lie.
And because I wouldn't lie, and because I wouldn't concede to what I considered to be a cabal against me, I went to jail and I suffered.
And the parts of that Wikipedia that you're reading were written by people who were, some of whom were paid to stand outside the courtroom holding signs, traitor, go back to Russia, pro-Putin, things that I spent my whole life in politics fighting was now being used to define me when I couldn't speak back.
In the book, I get to speak back.
It's coming out in August.
I'm looking forward to it.
I'll be willing to come back here and talk to you in the more of the details of it when it does come out, because I'm not afraid of talking about my life.
I'm not afraid.
My life is something that I'm proud of.
And my book talks about why that is.
My father became a Republican on a matter of principle.
The only Republican in his family.
He was elected as the working man's mayor.
It was a blue-collar town.
Three times.
New Britain was a blue-collar town.
Stanley Works had their first, that's where their headquarters still is.
Fafner, Bulbarians, all these is an ethnic melting pot.
Irish, Italian, Ukrainians, Armenians.
And I grew up where you lived by your, you played sports, you went to school, you lived by your brains, and you chose your careers by your interests.
And that's the American dream.
And I lived it.
My father, my family company is a good example of that, which I chose not to get involved in in the end.
But my grandfather in 1919, at 10 years old, came over from Italy, sent over by himself to be picked up in New York.
And he created in 19, I mean, keep moving before 1990, but in 1919, he created with one pickaxe and a shovel a demolition company that with one employee, they went and they would take down buildings and the salvage was what they made their money on.
We're in the fifth generation of the family business now.
It's one of the largest nuclear plant decomposes not demolishing, but to deconstruct it worldwide.
And it's, I think, the biggest family-owned business in Connecticut now.
They live the American dream too, each generation of my family.
And one of the reasons I felt Donald Trump could win in 2016 is my cousins are not political.
They're businessmen.
And many of them still haven't gone to college.
I mean, the fifth generation is, but the fourth generation.
But they were the fabric of our country.
And they were all for Donald Trump.
And they were calling me saying, what do you know about Donald Trump?
They've never called me in my political career, asked me about a candidate running for president.
It was a signal to me, what I already felt, but it was confirmation that Trump was onto something that when you got out of Washington existed in the country.
Ronald Reagan understood the United States very well.
He understood it because when he was the spokesman for GE and their weekly television program, he would travel to all the GE plants around the country, which were not in the main capitalists.
He was getting so he paid a million to do that.
Eventually they fired him because they said, you're talking too much about America.
But the point is he was not going to the capital because the plants were in the secondary cities and suburbs.
But he got to understand the country.
And the reason he was such a, and some of my treasured moments is when I traveled with him, the reason he was so confident in what he was talking about was because what he had learned about the American people.
Powerful.
Donald Trump was the same way.
Donald Trump, through The Apprentice, but the same kind of connections, made those connections with the American people.
And I saw it firsthand when I would travel with Trump, just like I saw it firsthand with Reagan.
Well, that's who I am.
I'm that person.
And I came to Washington to help to make a career on representing and to try and protect it.
That's not in the Wikipedia because the Wikipedia is a political document that's written by the Twitter types who spent all the time trying to define it.
I'll admit, I wasn't a fan of Paul Manafort in 2016, 2017.
Straight up.
I'm now officially a fan.
Well, thank you very much.
I wouldn't have expected you to be, but I'm glad you are now.
Paul, are you a movie guy?
I am.
Favorite movie of all time.
I'm assuming it's number two.
Is it Godfather 2 or no?
You know, my favorite movie of all time is.
Well, Godfather is up in the top five, but there's a movie that I really like a lot.
It's a silly movie.
It's called Michael.
And Michael is in the movie, John Travolta is an angel who comes down.
Incredible movie.
But it's a movie about hope and about dreams.
Crazy.
And that is my favorite.
I never guess you're going to say Michael.
I mean, most people don't even know the movie Michael.
They probably don't, but to me, that is my favorite movie of all time.
Why do you think Godfather 2?
No, first of all, Italian.
No, it's in the top five.
First of all, if you have any interest of politics, you have to.
You have to because it's all power plays.
That's all it is.
And to be able to survive the power plays of what you're doing in there, that's not easy, especially for four decades.
That's a pretty hard thing to do.
I'm going to compliment you.
I would not expect you to know Michael.
Great movie.
It's a great movie.
Great movie.
But do you think they'll ever change the laws for a guy like Elon Musk to be able to run a law to say they're not going to change?
That's not going to happen.
Yeah.
Because if so, it opens up PBD.
No, I'm a kingmaker.
I want to help the guy get there.
Speedrun.
I'll give you a name.
Give me one word that comes to your mind.
Steve Bannon, uh, uh, ideologue.
Okay.
Corey Londowski.
Small man.
Hope Hicks.
Good person.
Roger Stone.
Good friend.
Kellyanne Conway.
Good friend.
Mike Pence.
A very good vice president.
DeSantis.
The potential future.
Mueller.
A man who's passed one word.
Not a good person.
There's about one word.
Mueller was used.
And in my book, I talk about my experience with him.
I was not impressed with him.
Hillary Clinton.
Fake.
Biden.
Beyond his time.
The FBI.
I don't want to define all of the FBI, but people who abuse their power.
Avenatti.
Charlotte.
Cohen.
Michael Cohen.
Over his head.
Podesta.
Which one?
The one you worked with.
Good guy.
Okay.
John Durham?
Hope.
Last but not least, Donald Trump.
A man who made a difference.
Fantastic.
Awesome.
It's been a blast having you on.
Seriously, this was great.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I'm looking forward to having you back on when the book comes out.
Ty, I'll put the link below for the link of the book.
I'll give you the final thoughts.
Any final thoughts you want to share with the audience before we wrap up?
Well, I mean, I appreciated this opportunity today in this expanded format that allowed me the opportunity to get into the context, which I couldn't.
And I would just like the American people to pay attention to what I say, not what other people say about me.
Fair enough.
When's the book coming out?
August 16th.
August 16th.
But it's pre-sales now.
Yeah.
We're going to put the link below in chat box and the description, all of it for people to get it.
Folks, we are not doing a podcast until next Tuesday, I believe.
Do we have Tuesday?
Monday, we have William Roger Reeves, the pilot for Escobar.
