As News of Raid Breaks, National Enquirer Discovers Manafort’s Long-Reported Mistress

I was just asking why the news of the search on Paul Manafort’s home was breaking now. Only to discover that Trump buddy David Pecker’s National Enquirer is breaking “an investigation” about Manafort’s mistress, including this quote from a “White House insider.”

President Trump has been focused on draining the swamp in Washington D.C., … Meanwhile, one of his trusted advisers was bedding another woman behind his wife’s back, betraying her and his country.

Mind you, the affair is not news. Krypt3ia first reported it, based of hack and leaked texts, back in March.

I found conversations between Manaforts daughter and someone about how her father was having an affair with a girl younger than one of his daughters.

What is even more interesting is that the allegation here is that not only was Manafort having this affair but that girl (who is named in the chats and I have backstopped and was in fact in Ukraine at the time mentioned while Manafort was there) but that of all things Paul seems to have said that she was some “Russian friends” daughter. Though the text below states they don’t really think that the girl is Russian there are more down stream that talk about her father and her family and ties to Russia (maybe) but the sick burn here is if she is, well, that is a pretty direct tie to the country that might, ya know, use that as kompromat on Pauly eh?

Even the idea that Paul may have had a young trophy mistress is enough for blackmail but the texts go on to describe her travel with him all over the world including to Ukraine while he was working there. So, if the Russians did not have access to her or had placed her in the proximity of Paul this certainly would have been information they would not have passed up on to use. So, once more, if the sql database is legit and the information presented here is on the mark, it is quite possible that Manafort was at least in this instance easily vulnerable to compromise by the Russians.

As the chats went on though, it seems that the new girl was also straining Manafort’s money because he was being extravagant with her. As you can see from above, he allegedly rented her a house in the Hamptons by his own for a summer and bought a NYC apartment for her to be in. All of this money being spent also as it happens, was concurrent with his daughters wedding coming and Ukraine not paying him for his services.

As I noted in a comment on the raid thread, this mistress is one way Manafort’s money laundering could implicate his involvement with Trump’s campaign — which is interesting why an “insider” from the White House of a serial divorcé and philanderer deems an affair to be tantamount to betraying your country, especially given that nothing in the Enquirer supports that claim. And the Enquirer, which never met privacy violations it couldn’t profit off of, is guarding the mistress’ ID.

There is, however, one detail in the Enquirer’s short screed of interest, though not precisely in the marriage-saving context in which it presents it. It reveals that as all of this was breaking, Manafort reached out to the mistress again.

“But when he was warned about the messages being leaked on the dark web, he went into damage control mode — yet foolishly reached out to his mistress again!”

Reaching out to a mistress that may or may not have ties to his Russian friends during the middle of an investigation into any coordination with Russia’s tampering in the election Manafort briefly ran sound sounds stupid, but for entirely different reasons than his marriage.

Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial. Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.