2016 ELECTION/LEGAL/PAUL MANAFORT/ROBERT MUELLER/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “A week before the Trump presidential campaign announced that it had hired Paul Manafort, a Yankees ticket specialist alerted him that his annual season tickets would soon be arriving at his 43rd-floor apartment at Trump Tower in New York. ‘Will you and Kathy be attending opening day?’ the specialist asked in an email in late March 2016, referring to Mr. Manafort’s wife. ‘Yes, Kathy and I will be attending,’ Mr. Manafort replied. The four seats — prime spots behind the Yankees’ dugout, with access to the owner’s suite — cost $210,600 for the season. But Mr. Manafort didn’t have the money to pay for them. Six months later, he still had not paid the American Express bill that included the charge. He didn’t have money to make payments on the $5.3 million loan he had just taken out against his Brooklyn brownstone, either, which was heading toward foreclosure as he ran the Trump campaign. His political consulting firm was at least $600,000 in debt and had not had a single client after taking in more than $60 million in five years from the Ukrainian oligarchs funding the country’s pro-Russia president…His trial also underscores questions about how someone in such deep financial trouble rose to the top of the Trump campaign, spreading a stain that has touched the president’s innermost circle. The formidable parade of more than 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits has further eroded the notion, advanced by President Trump, that the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, Robert S. Mueller III, is on a ‘witch hunt.’”
–Sharon LaFraniere, Kenneth P. Vogel and Maggie Haberman, “The Rise and Fall of Paul Manafort: Greed, Deception and Ego,” The New York Times online, August 12, 2018