Oct. 16, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
45:48
Sunday Special: The Truth About Paul Manafort
In this Sunday Special of Human Events Daily, Jack Posobiec is joined by Paul Manafort to discuss his book ‘Political Prisoner’ and his experiences being the target of the fake Russian collusion investigation. Join Manafort and Poso as they have an engaging discussion about the Durham investigation, why Weissmann targeted Manafort, and the Biden ties to Ukraine through Burisma. After analyzing the economics of Ukraine and the different outcomes of Ukraine joining NATO, Poso analyzes how the r...
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard to this weekend's Human Events special.
This Sunday, we're here with one of the most influential political operatives of the modern era, the chairman of the Trump 2016 campaign and the author of the new book, Political Prisoner, published by Simon & Schuster, Mr. Paul Manafort.
Paul, thank you so much for joining the show.
My pleasure, Jack.
I'm glad to be with you today.
Well, you know, you may not realize this, but actually this is not the first time that you and I have been together.
Because all the way back in 2018, when you were going through everything they put you through in Virginia, I was actually there at the courtroom every single day back at the time when I was reporting for One America News, and we covered that trial in and out every single day.
I've still got my legal pad somewhere in my notes of what they were throwing at you.
And so when I went through that, I got a complete just understanding of how this system works, or at least how it's supposed to work.
And then we come to this case of Russiagate because when I look at the news right now and I see everything that's going on, we're seeing the source now of the Steele dossier is on trial and they're asking him if he could corroborate any of this.
And apparently the FBI offered him a million dollars.
They said, we'll give you a million dollars if you can corroborate any of this stuff.
He couldn't do it.
They went ahead with the FISA warrants anyway.
They went ahead with the investigation, the Trump investigation.
While you were chairman of the campaign, this was all going on.
So the thing that I was waiting for the entire time, you know, this evidence and that evidence and this FBI just said, Are we going to get to any actual connections between you, Russia, the Intel community?
And I'm not talking about some tangential, I knew a guy who... No, no, show me the stuff, show me the phone call, show me the tape.
You know, what were the 18 minutes from the Nixon tapes in the White House?
Let's, let's get it.
And it never once came up.
It boils down so much to a he said, she said, arguments about Some of these very arcane laws of the way the IRO you file it this way file it that way and suffice to say we'll get into all that.
We've got you for the full hour.
We've got four segments here with you, but what is it like having gone through that four years ago when it really started six years ago during the campaign and now to have it come full circle and you're watching as Durham is put the source of that dossier which remember
Interestingly enough, you were originally, we were told that you were the epicenter of Russiagate, that Page and Papadopoulos and all these guys were, you know, they were all working for you and you're working for, you know, this Russian agency and that Russian agency.
And yet, none of that ever seemed to come out at the trial, none of that ever seemed to come out even in the dossier, and then people even kind of stopped mentioning you in connection with the dossier, but as a matter of fact, the dossier actually says that.
And so, I guess my question is, what's it like watching this, here we are a couple years later, and realizing the shoe's now on the other foot?
Well, how did I feel about it?
I never took it seriously, Jack, because as far as I was, I knew there was no Russian collusion.
I knew there was no connection.
And the Durham investigation really has connected the dots, as you just said, but not just with Devchenko and his trial.
I mean, the earlier trials Durham had this year also were very important.
I mean, from his trials, we got the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, Robbie Mooks, to admit That she told him in early July of 2016 to put out a fake Russian narrative.
And he did.
And he admitted under oath that it was fake, and they knew it was fake.
We also got from Durham that John Brennan, a couple days later from his own handwritten notes, briefed Obama that Clinton was doing this.
So yet, Two weeks later, the end of July, Peter Strzok and the FBI started a crossfire hurricane, which was the investigation to connect the Trump campaign to the Kremlin.
And shortly after that, the Clinton campaign, through Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS, who hired Christopher Steele, who hired Devchenko to go out and find, if not create, what effectively was the fake Steele dossier.
The important thing from all of that, from Durham, is we know that the White House, the FBI, the CIA, all knew that this Russian collusion was a Clinton hoax before any of the investigations started.
And by the time the Mueller Commission was formed, They knew it was done.
There was no proof.
They knew that this was all Hillary Clinton, yet they still created a special counsel to find us.
And the special counsel, as you recall, had a very limited mandate.
Russian collusion.
Within one day, They had expanded my whole life because they thought that I could be the link.
Why?
I don't know.
Because if they studied anything I did in Ukraine for the 10 years previous, they would have seen that I elected a government that was totally committed and involved in bringing Ukraine into Europe.
So they knew when the Mueller Commission was formed that there was no Russian collusion.
Yet they still went out to create a link, and in Weissman's mind, I was the link for Russian collusion because I worked in Ukraine.
But if in fact they'd done any research on public, all the public information that existed of my 10 years in Ukraine, they would have seen that I was involved in helping to bring Ukraine into Europe, which Putin was 100% against, and that I was a bullseye to Putin, not a link to Putin, for the work I was doing.
So, when you're looking at this, you know, I just kind of mentioned it out there.
Day one, as we're recording this, of the Denchenko trial has just gotten underway and one of the big bombshells that we're hearing is that he was offered a million dollars by the FBI to corroborate the Steele dossier.
They went back to him and they said, hey, we know you're the source because, to your point, The US federal government, I used to be in the intelligence community, they can find this stuff out very, very quickly with everything that the NSA has.
They know, they know very quickly.
So they couldn't corroborate it.
They go to Devchenko, he can't corroborate it.
My question is, did they ever go to Paul Manafort and offer you anything to corroborate any of this dossier?
Well, they didn't offer me anything, but they were intimidating me and threatening me of what was going to happen to me if I didn't tell the truth.
And the truth was giving up Donald Trump.
But I told him I would tell the truth, and I did.
And it wasn't the truth that they wanted to hear because they weren't dealing with the truth.
They were dealing with a narrative that they knew was false.
Mooks has admitted it.
The campaign manager admitted it.
And what they did very cleverly in the Mueller report, To the uneducated eye, is they blurred Russian interference and Russian collusion.
Yes.
Russian interference was nothing that we had Ukrainian interference.
We had Romanian interference.
We had China interference.
There are countries interfering cyberally in Russian elections every year.
And we do the same, by the way, in other countries.
But that's very different than colluding with a foreign national government to undermine an election.
And Mueller came down on the right side of there being no collusion, but he still tried to blur the line because of Weissman to imply that there was still something sinister as part of the Russian interference.
Nobody ever found one iota of evidence because there was none.
And yet the media, even through the Durham trials, has never retracted the false information that they put out against me, against the President, and others over the six years of this crisis.
One of those pieces of interference, by the way, it wasn't just sort of these online troll farms.
It was actually this campaign that was directed at you regarding a black ledger that somebody found in Ukraine somewhere and said that you'd been paid in cash and then Signed your name in this illegal ledger.
Aha!
Now we found the thing.
And I remember hearing about that.
So that just sounds silly.
And then that's what starts the narrative during the campaign.
But now in the last year, and I talk about this in the book, we've now found out why they were doing this in 2015.
In 2015, the Obama White House was getting a lot of reports of Hunter Biden's activities in Ukraine.
And they actually met with the vice president and said, you know, you're our link to Ukraine.
Your son is doing these things.
You need to pull him back.
Biden didn't do anything about it.
And so the White House was concerned.
So what they did through their embassy in Kiev, the U.S.
embassy in Kiev and George Soros' network in Ukraine and this Alexandre Chlubo, he used to be a DNC staff person who worked in Ukraine, was Ukrainian.
What they did is they went to try and find dirt on me from my 10 years in Ukraine.
But they had a problem.
There wasn't any.
Because one of the decisions I made early on was my commitment to Ukraine was to elect a government that was going to bring Ukraine to Europe.
So I, because of the corruption that exists at all levels in Ukraine, I made the decision I was going to do no business in Ukraine other than run the campaigns and work to bring Ukraine in.
And so I had the chances to represent the barismas and the oligarchs of Ukraine.
I didn't.
And as a result, when they thought they were going to find easy chance of me mixing up with the oligarchs in corrupt situations, they couldn't find a thing.
So what did they do?
Because they wanted to deflect the Hunter Biden stuff.
They still had to come up with something.
So just like with the Devchenko and the Steele dossier, they created the Black Ledger.
And the Black Ledger was exactly as you described.
It's a total fiction.
No one's ever seen the Ledger.
It was a copy of one page of a document that was a phony document that even the National Anti-Corruption Bureau that the U.S.
government funded in Ukraine, even they, within a month, said this document is not real.
It's a fake document.
But you never heard the fake document part.
You only heard about the Black Ledger and the millions of dollars in cash that I was paid that it purported to say.
But that was what triggered The fair issue with me, because I was working in Ukraine on political campaigns and working in Europe to bring Ukraine to Europe, I didn't have any fair obligations.
I wasn't working in the United States.
In fact, I had lobbyists who were doing the work in the United States that were filing.
I never registered with FARA for that, for the Ukrainian work.
But when the FARA office saw these clips about the cash black ledger, they contacted me and my lawyers, and I had no problem.
I sat with them.
I explained to them what I was doing.
I showed them the evidence of what I was doing.
And over a course of about three or four months, we reached an agreement that I would file for one year, very limited filing, because I wasn't, I didn't fit the bill, but it had gotten politically hot.
So I agreed to do that.
No penalties, no crime, no civil violations, just please file this limited filing.
And I did!
Weissman gets appointed by Mueller in the special counsel's office, and he goes to the head of the FARA office and says, what's going on with the Manafort situation?
She said, well, there is no situation.
We've resolved it.
He's filing.
And he says, no, no, he's not.
I'm not accepting your agreement.
I'm taking control of this.
And he went on to proceed to charge me criminally, the only first criminal charged 70 years under FARA.
For the filing that I did, the agreement that I reached was just thrown out because it didn't fit.
That's what I was up against.
Going back to the Obama 2015 to try and blunt, deflect Hunter Biden, to the Clinton fake narrative to blunt her server issue, to now Weissman needing a link to Russia and them deciding that I was the hook because of the way the news had played out.
We are coming up on our first break, so let's hold it right there because I want to dig a little bit deeper on this and the fact that obviously, Hunter Biden's over there operating in Ukraine.
You're operating in Ukraine.
Let's see what more we can dig on this.
Stay tuned, we'll be right back.
Okay, we are back for our next segment here.
We're sitting down with Paul Manafort for this Human Events special.
When we just left, Well, you were telling us about how the Obama administration, the George Soros Network, the Clinton Foundation Network, which includes Victor Pinchuk and so many other of these oligarchs, they were essentially working to cover up for what Hunter Biden was doing in Ukraine using your previous work in Ukraine as a way to go after this.
Were you aware at all that Hunter Biden was over there, Burisma, any of these things?
Did you ever brush up against this, get any information about this?
Tell me about that.
I was aware he was working in Ukraine.
I knew he had some links into Burisma, which I thought was a bit unusual because Burisma was a corrupt company.
And because his father was the link, I thought that This was exposing his father to, if nothing else, some serious questioning.
But I didn't pay any attention.
I mean, honestly, it wasn't relevant to me.
I wasn't trying to make a political issue of Biden in 2015.
In fact, I had actually worked with the Obama administration on the nuclear decommissioning of fission That was in Ukraine, that Obama was promoting in a world effort to collect all of that, and I helped get the Ukrainian government to participate in that in a real way.
Again, Russia was opposed to it, but I got the Ukrainian government to do it.
So my relationships with Ukraine were not hostile.
I mean, with Obama, we're not hostile in the job I was doing in Ukraine.
It wasn't U.S.
politics.
It was Ukrainian-European situation.
So I ignored the Biden thing and really it wasn't until I was in the middle of it all in 2017 that I started to see these pieces all coming together because the old what they used to call the mockingbird approach that the CIA did that was exposed by the church investigation
Many years ago, when we have bots now, but they were operatives in the media and in the public arena, taking a storyline that's put out and then having it pop up all over the world.
So it looks like there's something real there.
When this was happening to me, I couldn't understand it because I knew there was nothing Russian collusion.
I knew there was nothing about me being involved with the Kremlin.
I knew the Trump campaign wasn't doing anything in that.
And so I was confused as to why all of these arrows were now starting to focus on me.
I started to see the pieces in 2017, but it really wasn't until I was in prison that I was, and some of these books started to come out exposing the piece of it.
Yeah, so the Durham investigation, what was going on there, I was able to capture in my book.
And as a result of that, in the book, I lay out what I did know about the Weissman theory of Russia collusion.
And it was a crazy one.
And what really happened in all the networking that was going on between the CIA, the NSA, the FBI.
And Weissman's problem was he needed two things that didn't exist.
He needed a link to the Kremlin.
And he needed a motive for what the buyout payout would be to Putin for helping Trump.
And both of his theories were totally concocted.
One was, I was the link because I had a person who worked for me by the name of Konstantin Kolemnik, who was Ukrainian of Russian, or was Russian-Ukrainian, who had served two years in the military as his mandatory service, and I think he was 20 years old at the time.
And they said that he was in the language school, which was his expertise, where some KGP people went.
That's the evidence that links Konstantin to the KGB.
The fact that still under seal is the proof that Constantine was a U.S.
asset, not a Russian asset.
I mean, he had even had a code name by the U.S.
Embassy in the travel traffic going back and forth between Washington and Kiev on the meetings they would have with him on a regular basis.
So there was plenty of information, and Weissman had access to all of it, showing he wasn't the link.
By the way, that's what they did with Carter Page as well, where Carter Page had worked for the agency when he's over there meeting with Rose Neft, and then Kevin Clinesmith lies, alters the email to make it look like he wasn't an asset.
Yeah, and in fact, Page was my first link to Russia.
I was feeding Page, and Page was feeding Susloff, who was feeding the Kremlin.
You know, but it came out over time that I never met Carter Page.
I didn't know Carter Page.
I never talked to Carter Page.
And so they needed a new link, and that became Konstantin because he was Russian.
Now, he had worked for McCain running the Democracy Institute for the International Republican Institute in Moscow.
Then he worked for me.
And in my meetings with Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine, They were just he and I. That was it.
Nobody else was in the meeting.
We had all these discussions we would have about Ukraine and Europe.
And the only other person in the room every time was Kolomnik, because he was the translator.
He spoke perfect English, perfect Ukrainian.
He was Ukrainian.
The SBU, which is the equivalent of the KGB in Ukraine, Before they would ever let me meet with Yanukovych, vetted me to make sure I wasn't a CIA agent.
And before they would let Kolomnik be the only other person in the room, made sure he wasn't a Russian agent.
That was totally vetted.
Again, there was, and the U.S.
had signed off on that when they made him an asset for the U.S.
Embassy there.
So they had plenty of evidence dismissing that, but they needed, they had to have something.
So they made that on the fact that he spent two years in the military, that was his mandatory duty, and he was Russian.
The other piece that Weissman needed in his theory was to pay out for Trump, that Putin was going to get from Trump.
And Weissman's theory was, well, when Trump becomes president, he'll give Putin Ukraine.
Now, the problem with that theory, and I was able to expose it during the time I was there in jail dealing with the special counsel, the problem with that was when Trump became president, He gave the military weapons to Ukraine that Obama wouldn't give.
He put sanctions on North Stream that Obama wouldn't do.
And he told Putin, no more territory.
And we don't recognize Crimea.
So not only would he not give them Ukraine, he wouldn't recognize Crimea as being a part of Russia.
Biden gets elected and he stops the military aid.
He recognizes Nord Stream 2.
And then he looks so weak that Putin decides, after Afghanistan, that this is the same foreign policy team under Obama that I was able to just walk in and take Crimea.
I'm going to do the same thing again to the rest of Ukraine.
And he announces it and starts mobilizing on the borders of Ukraine.
And so, when you compare Trump versus Obama and Biden, Trump is the only one who stood up for Ukraine, against Putin.
Yet, Weissman's theory was that was what Trump was going to give him.
And from the very get-go of his presidency, he did the exact opposite.
So, as a result, Weissman had nowhere to go, and even Mueller couldn't accept Weissman's theories.
I had lit it all out in my conversation, 50 hours that I spent with them, as to what the real facts were.
They wouldn't accept them, but I at least got it on the record.
The House and Senate Intel Committees, those reports were garbage.
They were totally political, no facts.
They had 90 pages on me without one piece of evidence on anything that they were accusing me of as being the link to Russia.
And again, the only evidence they had on Kolemnik, which they made as the important link, was his two years of military service.
And then they all hide behind unsealed or sealed documents.
The sealed documents prove he wasn't an aide, an assistant to Putin or connected to Russia, but they won't release those.
I've asked them to be unsealed.
They're never going to get unsealed.
We're coming up on our one minute here.
I'd really like to get into that with you in the next segment though, this idea of where we are now with Ukraine, how things have gotten so completely out of control.
And I think you have to put both of those in balance because As the U.S. government, these elements, whether it be Weissman, whether it be the DOJ writ large, whether it be Mueller, they're going after anybody inside the U.S. government that's talking for at least having an open line of communication with the Russians, trying to funnel these weapons, go after Nord Stream.
Then, obviously, the Kremlin is looking at all of that and saying, wait a minute, you're accusing us of stealing the election.
You're accusing us of interference.
You're accusing us of going after, you know, working with Paul Manafort and working with Constantine and all the rest of it.
Did they ever stop to consider how the Kremlin might look at that, knowing that the Kremlin obviously knew it was fake?
Stay tuned.
We'll be right back.
Paul Manafort, next segment.
And we're back, Human Events Sunday special here with Paul Manafort.
The book is Political Prisoner, out by Simon & Schuster.
We're here with the author, the man himself, one of the most influential and well-known political operatives in modern politics, Paul Manafort.
Paul, in your book, when you talk about Ukraine, you just mentioned Yanukovych, you mentioned the current situation, the way these administrations have dealt with Ukraine over, really, the Biden administration prior to that, the Obama administration.
Do you think that things had to end up where they are with Putin coming back in across the border?
Obviously, he took Crimea under Obama.
He had Maidan kick off with the network there.
Now we're seeing he's pushing into Kherson, these other areas.
Do you think that there's another road that could have been taken?
Because one of the things that you write is that the West should have worked with Yanukovych.
You've talked about this idea of bringing Ukraine into the EU, but if I'm reading your book correctly, it seems like what you were trying, the way you were trying to balance it, or at least they were trying to balance it, was they get into EU for the economics, right?
And for the travel and Schengen and all that, but they don't go into NATO.
So it sort of maintains that military neutrality.
Yeah, the NATO thing was the red flag.
And my strategy all along was get into the house and then worry about what floor you're allowed to be on.
And the key was to get Ukraine as part of the economic community, the European community.
And the economics was the way.
That's what Europe wanted.
Because Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe.
44 million people.
The breadbasket of Europe.
An important industrial country and aluminum, special metals and construction materials.
So there was real value to Europe to have that market opened up, which it wasn't to Europe at that point in time.
And the trade association, which we were negotiating, would have opened it up and given actually the Europeans about a three or four year advantage, because as part of the admission, Ukraine had to remove all their subsidies.
And the market was going to be wide open for the Europeans to come in, but the European companies weren't ready to go into the European market.
So we knew it was going to be a one-way advantage, but it was still important enough because getting Ukraine under that umbrella would be good in the long run.
And interestingly, and I've said this in the book, even the Ukrainian oligarchs, who everybody tries to make as junior brothers of the Russians, they were very strongly in favor of Ukraine being a part of Europe.
Because they understood that they could never have the value of their businesses as a part of Russia.
But as a part of Europe and the West, their business could grow and flourish in ways that, with real market economies, that would be beneficial for them.
So there was unanimity on that.
NATO was a flashpoint, and frankly, the Europeans didn't want Ukraine in NATO either.
They were very resistant to that.
Oh, and by the way, they still don't, even though they don't like to admit it, but they'll never actually come out.
And even just this last week, you saw Stoltenberg come out and say, well, we'd like to have it, but there's a process, and we'll consider your application.
It's the double talk.
The Poles would like him in NATO, because the Poles understand if Ukraine is part of Russia, The border to Russia has just been moved to them.
And they know what that means.
The Baltics want it.
They understand it.
And I always felt that if Ukraine was being logical about NATO not being a part on the table, that it would make everything more palatable for the West.
But Putin knew what the game he was playing.
He was working Merkel on a daily basis.
Nord Stream 2 was a political bribe to Germany that had economic value.
Putin was doing all kinds of business through Deutsche Bank and German companies that were being offered major contracts.
It's not surprising that Merkel never was very fast in moving Europe towards Ukraine.
She talked the talk, but never walked the walk.
And so Putin, until the very end, didn't think Yanukovych was going to do it.
And when we were approaching Vilnius, which is where the European Community Annual Meeting was going to be, and Yanukovych was going to sign the Trade Association Agreement, which was the first step towards membership, Putin finally realized this is real, and he publicly threatened Yanukovych.
He said, if you sign that agreement, I will shut down all trade between Ukraine, Russia, and all of our satellite countries immediately, which happened to be 70% of all of Ukraine's trade.
Putin had actually had pushed Yanukovych to be part of his customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and Yanukovych said, no, I'm moving into the European direction.
So, but when Putin put that threat out and he was serious, we then approached Barroso, who was the president of the Economic Commission, and said, look, we need a subsidy to broach this bridge, this transition, because Yanukovych was still prepared to sign.
But he needed some subsidies to help him because already the documents were one-sided in favor of the European companies.
And if 70% of the other traders shut down, basically Ukraine would have gone bankrupt.
And we were looking for about a $3 billion subsidy. - Which by the way, to your point, that is something that happened to Poland and Hungary, both when they entered the European Union.
That's the exact thing that happened to the markets there.
And you saw tons of companies, ones that by the way, still haven't even come back in some of those areas.
Ukraine's looking at all that, realizing, "Hey, we don't wanna lose all this domestic industry.
We want to protect our guys, even though we're expanding the market.
So obviously, they're just going based on what the history was with a couple of the other former Eastern Bloc countries.
Right.
I mean, and it was, as you said, it was well known, and Yanukovych had very smart people help him put this thing together.
So, I mean, it was, and Barossa, you know, Ukraine has corruption.
Absolutely true.
Barossa said, well, we can't trust the money will get to the right places, which I said to the commissioner-at-large, a guy named Stefan Fule, who I was dealing with on a daily basis at this time, I said, well, then just put your strings on it.
The point is, we know specifically the kind of assistance they need.
That can be protected.
They wouldn't do it.
And that's what caused everything to collapse.
And so for that $3 billion, Ukraine became vulnerable.
And then the revolution that happened, which was more of an uprising that was, shall we say, fermented by outside sources.
Yanukovych fled the country because of corruption, not because of anything else, which I totally opposed and told him not to do it.
I said, if you stay, we will weather this storm.
If you leave, you will be the villain in this story.
but he left and I haven't talked to him since, frankly.
But as a result of that, with the, whatever you want to call it, uprising coup, the changeover of a democratically elected government that everybody recognized was fairly elected, When that happened, that told Putin what he needed to know about the West and their commitment to democracy, which is their view of democracy is what's in their interest or against their enemy's interest.
And so Putin then started putting pressure on Ukraine, moved into Crimea, Obama did nothing, destabilized Eastern Ukraine, setting up these war zone autonomous areas.
Obama did nothing again, wouldn't give aid, was sending blankets and pillows to the Ukrainians with no aid.
And he, frankly, would have probably moved into Ukraine faster if Clinton had been elected.
But Trump stopped it, and he put a stop to the bleeding, he put a stop to Putin.
But then, when the same team came in under Biden, He understood.
He could do it again.
And he did.
And so did Ukraine have to happen this kind of invasion?
Absolutely not.
It shouldn't have happened in 2014.
Ukraine should have been in Europe by now.
And it shouldn't have happened in 2021.
But Putin knows how weak the Biden administration is and knows the West will talk the talk, but really isn't going to fight the fight.
Everyone said to me when the invasion happened, I had a lot of awesome reporters, how soon before Russia takes over all of Ukraine?
And the answer I gave these people was that they're not going to win the ground war.
And people couldn't understand that.
What do you mean they're not going to go to the ground war?
I said, Putin doesn't understand Ukraine.
I told these reporters, I've done over 100 polls in Ukraine, and my base in Ukraine politically was Eastern Ukraine.
I understand the Russian ethnic Ukrainians very well.
Every one of my polls, I probed their loyalty and allegiance to Ukraine and hard pressed them with questions on Russia.
In no poll I ever found was there ever more than 5% of Russian ethnic Ukrainians saying they preferred to be part of Russia instead of Ukraine.
And the reason for that is because they understood that freedom in Ukraine and freedom in Russia Two different things.
And they wanted nothing to do with the Russian definition of freedom.
They wanted the Russian language protected.
My polls all showed that.
They wanted their culture protected.
They wanted the Russian Orthodox religion protected, which was a big political fight between Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox religions.
But they didn't want to give up their country.
They wanted to stay in their country and resolve these issues.
And so when Putin invaded, I had every expectation that they would mobilize a citizen's army, which they did.
And my concern today is not that they're going to lose the ground war.
I think they're going to win the ground war.
You're starting to see that, actually, even with these incredible bombings that Putin is putting them through in the last 48 hours.
But I think they are in danger of losing the peace.
And by that, what I mean is the fear that the West will want to end this.
And Ukraine's not asking for boots on the ground.
They'd like air defense systems.
They'd like weapons.
They'll fight their own fight.
But the West is going to feel the pressure internally to pressure Ukraine when Putin decides it's time to have peace.
And I think that's coming.
I think Putin's strategy was, once they're hit, To dangle the oil and gas to the Europeans and say that he's willing to bring peace to Ukraine, and this is what he wants, and let's negotiate it out.
That was his plan, I think.
I think the bombing of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline undercuts that strategy big time for Putin.
And I think the Europeans now are going to have to stay firm because the gas will not be something that can be traded by Putin for his version of peace.
Well, interestingly enough, we just got one minute in the segment, but I did actually hear that Just yesterday, Putin or someone from the Kremlin put out there that there is the possibility that Nord Stream could be resurrected, of course, because he wants that valve open, of course, and they're going to the G20 is coming up later this month.
So, of course, what better place to have that handshake agreement, go on the sidelines, try to figure out, hey, I get these.
You get the gas, everybody goes home.
I think you're exactly right about that.
Paul, when we come back, and I thank you for sharing that on Ukraine, I could go for hours and hours on that, but when we come back, I want to talk some more about what it was like, and you write about this a lot in your book, what it was like when you were locked up by this administration, and also what your predictions are going forward.
Coming back next with legendary political operative Paul Manafort.
We're back for our final segment here with Paul Manafort.
Now, Paul, the book is Political Prisoner.
It's available at Simon & Schuster, anywhere anyone can get books.
And I was reading through the story of your time when you were in prison and I reflected back a little bit for, I did an appointment once at Guantanamo Bay.
So that's the only prison experience I ever have, but it's kind of, you know, obviously on the other side of that from, from where you were.
And I think I even saw at one point that you were And correct me if I'm wrong, but you were in the same prison that Jeffrey Epstein was in, the MCC up there in New York City.
Were you there at the same time or just nearby?
You've been in for quite a while at that time.
I'd been in about eight months at that point in time in Virginia.
And right after my trial ended in Virginia, Vance dropped charges in New York, same charges.
I mean, Weissman and he had concocted it so that right after my Virginia trial, they dropped state trials, state charges.
So I had to go to New York.
Because they were worried about a pardon from Trump coming immediately.
Exactly right.
But the problem is that there's a double jeopardy law in New York that's very clear.
And there is no way I should have been indicted in New York.
But I had to go through the process.
So I was still in prison.
And so the strategy was for me to be transferred out of federal custody to state custody in New York and sent to Rikers Island, where I could have been there for six, eight months while the process was going on.
Barr refused to give up custody of me to the state, but he agreed to transfer me to New York to be arraigned.
And so when I was in New York for, it was about three weeks, four weeks, I was put in, it's called the MCC, which is downtown of Battery Park in Manhattan, where there's a solitary confinement floor that has four cells in it.
One was empty.
Epstein was in one.
I was in one and El Chapo was in the other.
It's a real murderer's row.
And I was put there for my safety.
For your safety, they put you in with Epstein and El Chapo.
That's why I had to be in solitary.
And so it was pretty funny, these glass compartments where you walk out of the cell to talk to your lawyers, which is the only reason you get out of the cell.
And there's time frames when that happens.
And I was in the middle cell.
or cubicle epstein and his lawyers were on one side el chapo and his lawyers were on the other side i looked at my lawyer i said boy i really feel safe here but again there was to intimidate me it was to make me right yeah of course and i just ignored it to be honest with you now you you got it but you got transferred out of there before epstein died right Yes, I was going.
I was trying to look at the dates on that.
Now, look, now I'm not going to put you on the spot, but, you know, I think I'm one of the only people I actually buy it.
I think I do think that was a suicide.
To me, that looked like a suicide.
I mean, the guy lived a pampered life.
He was getting off a private plane in New York for a private plane.
And he goes from there to solitary confinement.
I mean, he wasn't ready for that.
Well, and again, he knew he knew what he was being charged with and he knew he wasn't going to walk back out.
I think this was.
Yeah.
And that and that was it.
And this is this is something because it was pretrial.
If you look at the statistics and we had this issue, by the way, when I was at Guantanamo as well, but for different reasons, we had a lot of prison suicides down there or suicide attempts.
We went through the list, the signing away of your of your your your goods.
You know, he put a lot of his stuff in a trust.
He signed it off to this lawyer.
Didn't even know that he was getting it and stuff.
I mean, it.
It actually does fit the pattern.
I know people like to say that, you know, maybe it was something else and, you know, who knows what pressured her was.
But I really do think it does fit that.
I think without trying to be conspiratorial, they were very lax.
And I saw that I was supposed to see my they're supposed to check on you every 15, 30 minutes.
Right.
On me.
And so if there was an understanding that was going to be set up, I could see that they let him kill himself.
Um, but, uh, yeah, because he never should have had the ability.
I mean, I was on a concrete slab.
I, you know, my debt, the desk for me to sit and eat was a concrete slab.
Uh, you know, the stool I would sit on was a concrete slab.
All of this was connected to the floor.
There was nothing to lift up.
Uh, the, the, the, the curtain, there was no curtain in the, uh, in the shower stall.
Didn't even have any hot water.
Um, it, so.
There was very little that he could have had access to in a legitimate way to kill himself, but it could have been provided and he could then have done whatever he did.
I think it would be hard to prove that he was murdered, although it has happened in that prison.
I think your theory is probably right.
Right.
And I think he ended up using strips of the uniform.
He had an extra one that looked like, and you could see Daily Mail had some photos of this afterwards, that he had strips of it.
They were all over.
So he must have had something like 10 attempts before he did that.
But let's get back to you in there.
And I appreciate you answering the question.
How did you make it through?
How did you make it through so long solitary?
I mean, for so many people that they don't do so well when they're put in a situation like, well, how did you do it?
Yeah.
There were three reasons.
I mean, the three things, I mean, I built a plan, but I mean, I knew I was innocent.
I knew that I didn't do anything wrong, which was important to me.
I also had my faith, and I believed that, that I relied on my faith to just give me the strength to deal with it, and my family and friends, they were, my wife said to me, before I was put into solitary, you know, which I was not supposed to be sent to, but my life which I was not supposed to be sent to, but my For your own safety, right?
Yeah.
My life was coming apart.
My bills were exorbitant.
They were coming after all my properties, going back 25 years.
I mean, this is about Russian collusion in 2016.
They went back my whole life.
They were trying to destroy my family.
And I said to my wife, you know, I was stressing out at that point, just before I went in, and she said, you need to get control of your stress.
I said, but I worry about you.
I worry about the kids.
And she said something to me, which literally was foundational in getting through the next two years.
She said, look, we started with nothing.
If we end up with nothing, but have each other and our family, that's all that matters.
And as simple as that sounds, it was profound.
And that gave me the courage to just know that I could make it through and not have to worry about them, that they would be there and would be there whichever way for me.
And then I had to put my political skills to place.
I knew, I read Sidney Powell's book.
I knew Weissman's tactics.
So I sort of understood what to expect.
I experienced some of it, but there was more to come.
And so I decided I need to use my campaign skills.
I deal with controlling the environment.
You know, build a strategy based on what is in your advantage.
And so I decided to build a schedule.
For every day, part of it would be reading, part of it was the Bible, part of it was praying, part of it was exercise, best I could, inside an 8x12 cell.
Eventually, when I got some writing materials, I was able to start writing, do some legal work, which was very hard, very elemental, because they wouldn't give me any documents.
And so I built a schedule that went all day.
And eventually they gave me a transistor radio, a little Sony transistor radio that when I was a kid in the 60s I had, in the 50s.
But it gave me an outlet to listen to Rush Limbaugh, to Mark Levin, and so I was able to keep connected that way to the real world.
Because I had no windows.
I didn't know what time of day it was really, other than when they were serving meals.
But that schedule, there were some days I didn't finish my schedule.
Because it kept me preoccupied in the framework that I was trying to do.
And eventually, my lawyers kept telling me, look, if everything goes wrong and you do get convicted, prison is going to look like a picnic compared to what you've just done for 11 months in solitary.
And it was true.
I mean, I went to Loretto, the prison I was put in, and One, I was never at risk.
To the prisoners, Donald Trump was a hero.
He had passed the First Step Act, he had passed the CARES Act, he had changed the sentencing procedures.
So to them, Trump was a hero.
He fulfilled his promises that all the Democrat presidents never did.
And I was his chairman.
So to them, I was a great guy.
None of them ever came at me in any way that risked my life.
So it made me realize even more that it was total fiction on Weissman and just one more needle he was trying to use to prick me to give him Donald Trump.
But he never did.
I never did.
That's exactly right.
You hear that a lot.
And so many times, regardless of where someone's coming from in life, they always say, going back to the Bible, having a schedule, that these are ways to just keep the mind centered.
And of course, as well, you did have that family network.
You did have the wife.
You knew that there were people out there that were counting on you.
The one question, the one safe ground that I had on this, When we were going into that trial, I remember all the way back in 2018, and everybody's there and I'm sitting there.
The one thing that we kept hearing about was this, apparently you have an ostrich jacket.
Is that correct?
No.
What's the story of the ostrich jacket?
They tried to make a lifestyle case out of me.
Right, right, right.
So they got it bought in the last 20 years for my 30th wedding anniversary, I bought my wife an ostrich jacket.
So it's her jacket?
It was her jacket.
They tried to make me into this flamboyant guy that wears ostrich coats and fancy suits.
They couldn't even get it right.
You leave that for Roger Stone.
That's correct.
Well, maybe we can get one.
It looks like the book's doing well.
We'll get you an ostrich jacket, Paul.
All right.
There you go.
Thanks a lot, Jack.
Where can people go to find more about the book, to follow you?
Are you blogging?
Are you getting into social media?
What's next for Paul?
Social media, I'm a true social.
I'm on Twitter, but Twitter's a...
You know, the people there, the bots track me all the time.
So basically, I'm on Truth Social.
It's at Paul Manafort.
They can get the book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble's online, Simon & Schuster online.
It should be in bookstores now.
I mean, it's out and about.
It's been doing very well on a lot of the bestseller lists, so I've been very pleased about that.
Well, congratulations on the success of the book.
Congratulations on everything else that's going for you.
Paul, appreciate you spending time with us here on Human Events Sunday Special.
