The Real Promise of the Manafort Indictment

The indictment of Paul Manafort will be an enormous source of speculation for weeks and months to come. But Special Counsel Robert Mueller has already achieved something significant, if underappreciated so far: He opened a far more promising line of inquiry into the reasons why the U.S. political establishment is broken -- on both the Republican and the Democratic side. It would take substantial courage and political will to pursue it further.

Manafort and his partner Richard Gates have been indicted for hiding from U.S. authorities their work for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the money they received for this work. That money is part of an avalanche of post-Soviet cash that hit Washington in the last two decades. The Foreign Agent Registration Act database lists a total of 211 "foreign principals" from Russia that have hired U.S. lobbying, public relations and law firms to represent them, 78 "foreign principals" from Ukraine, 54 from Georgia, 44 from Azerbaijan, 34 from Kazakhstan, and 19 from Uzbekistan. That is probably far from the full list. One of the counts of the Manafort indictment is failure to register as a foreign agent under FARA.