Tornado Alley (PROG)

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The swamp builders

"A Timeline of Paul Manafort’s Relationship with Donald Trump
They’ve known each other since the 1980s."

How Stone and Manafort helped create the mess Trump promised to clean up

By Manuel Roig-Franzia Nov. 29, 2018

On that particular April 1 in Washington, in the midst of a presidential primary season trending toward a Reagan landslide, Paul Manafort had a lot to celebrate.

The Republican operative with the thick, meticulously parted black hair and magnetic smile was turning 31. And by a quirk of bureaucratic fate, his new business happened to be officially launching on that same day in 1980.

The little shop that Manafort opened in Alexandria, Va., was envisioned as a political consulting business, like so many others in the capital. But in the coming months — as the candidate he worked for, Ronald Reagan, swept into the White House — Manafort had another idea to bounce off his two partners, Charlie Black and Roger Stone.

They should be lobbyists, too.

“I said, ‘Why in the hell would we want to do that? It’s boring as hell!’?” Black recalled in a recent interview. “Paul said it wasn’t at all boring.”

Manafort had one more thing to say: “It paid well.”

That caught Stone’s attention.

“You bet,” Stone recalled. “I’m interested in making a living!”
‘All the best people’

How President Trump’s inner circle has changed the way Washington works.

None of them knew it then, but that one conversation, a chat among three ambitious young Reaganites — Stone was just 28 and Black only 33 — would have a transformative effect on the capital, nudging Washington into a generation-long evolution. Their business would morph into a then-unheard-of hybrid, a bipartisan firm that would help elect politicians — sometimes hedging by playing both sides in the same race — then lobby those same politicians. Radical, disruptive and frequently criticized as ethically unsavory at the time, the mix is de rigueur now.

“I don’t think they invented the swamp,” said John Donaldson, a veteran Washington strategist who was an early employee of the firm. “They invented an innovative way to navigate the swamp.”

VIDEORoger Stone has a rule: 'Deny everything.' And he does. 7:51
Several of Roger Stone’s longtime associates have been interviewed by the special counsel. Stone was
indicted in the investigation Jan. 25. (Monica Akhtar, Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)

One of the first clients of the firm they christened Black, Manafort & Stone was a New York developer named Donald J. Trump, brought into their portfolio by Stone, who’d met him through the notorious Gotham lawyer Roy Cohn.

The brash Reagan boys would become essential architects of the city Trump now dominates, a place where the line between the lobbyists and the lobbied is so blurred that some question whether it exists at all.

A long one - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/politics/paul-manafort-roger-stone/