There has to be more to Paul Manafort suddenly trying to leave the country with a revoked passport
They say that sunlight causes the cockroaches to scatter. Paul Manafort has been hiding in the dark for a few years now. He went to prison in the Mueller probe, he later got pardoned by a defeated Donald Trump, and we seemed to be hoping that history would forget him. But now he’s back – and not in the way he was hoping.
Multiple major news outlets are reporting today that Manafort was removed from an airplane this weekend due to having boarded with a revoked passport, which is wild. Manafort was attempting to travel from Miami to Dubai, which is even more wild. And the timing seemingly can’t be a coincidence.
Manafort has decades–long criminal financial ties to Russian oligarchs, and to the puppet regime that Vladimir Putin once set up in Ukraine. Now that Russia’s economy has been cut off from the world, he suddenly decided to try to get to Dubai, a haven for Russian oligarchs.
Manafort’s passports were seized when he went to prison. We’re still attempting to determine whether he got them back after he was pardoned. Given that he previously had multiple passports, it’s possible that this is a passport that the authorities never were able to seize – but they obviously revoked it at some point.
One big question is whether Manafort knew he was traveling with a revoked passport. If not, it would raise questions about when it was revoked, and whether this means he’s newly under DOJ criminal investigation. We’ve already seen the DOJ reactivate the Trump-era criminal probe against Rudy Giuliani, so it’s entirely reasonable that the DOJ would have resumed investigating Manafort in an attempt to nail him on charges that Trump didn’t pardon him for.
The other scenario would be that Manafort was traveling with a passport that he knew was revoked – an incredibly risky move. In such case, was he attempting to flee the country for fear that the DOJ was about to nab him? Or was he attempting to meet up with Russian oligarchs in Dubai, for the sake of new financial scheming to try to work around worldwide sanctions?
In any case, there have to be smarter ways for lifelong criminals to leave the country than by simply using a revoked passport and hoping no one catches on. It suggests that Manafort is too broke to have tried a more sophisticated method, or too desperate to care. There has to be a lot more to this story. It’s just anyone’s guess as to what.
