MSNBC's Joe Scarborough reacted with shock to an in-depth profile of Paul Manafort -- whom he said fit right into the "ignorant" but "arrogant" Trump campaign team.
The "Morning Joe" host welcomed reporter Franklin Foer to discuss his lengthy Manafort profile for The Atlantic, which revealed his "mania" for conspicuous consumption and his personal troubles before joining the campaign.
"You have Paul Manafort himself, whose life crumbled in the months leading up to the Donald Trump campaign," Foer said. "He was professionally in crisis because his main client was the president of Ukraine. He'd been in Ukraine for nearly 10 years and he was making gobs of money but his client got swept away in a revolution in 2014, so Manafort needed a new client. He lost his status, he lost his power."
Manafort had little access to the money he had stashed in Cyprus and elsewhere because he had been caught up in an FBI investigation of Ukrainian money laundering, and his personal life was in turmoil after he was caught in an affair.
"His family had ultimately asked him to go to a clinic in Arizona to recover from his personal crisis," Foer said. "His daughter talked about how he had had a very large personal meltdown, so he needed something like the Trump campaign for a comeback."
He asked a mutual friend to help get him placed in the Trump campaign after treatment for suicidal thoughts, and after Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska asked him to explain where his $18.9 million investment money had gone.
"(Tom Barrack) wrote a very compelling memo to Trump that positioned Paul Manafort, who had been the ultimate insider, as the ultimate outsider," Foer said. "The Trump campaign was a mess, it was improvisational genius but it didn't have technical expertise, it needed establishment credibility, and in waltzes Paul Manafort and he's able to supply the Trump campaign with the things it desperately needed at that moment."
Manafort was ousted from the campaign in August 2016 over his ties to pro-Kremlin groups in Ukraine, and President Donald Trump's first year in office has been consumed by investigations into his own ties to Russia.
That investigation has resulted in two guilty pleas and the indictments of Manafort and his longtime associate Rick Gates, who also served on the Trump campaign, on money laundering and other charges.
"One thing that article shows us, it's not a surprise he selected Manafort because Manafort had a recklessness bordering on stupidity," Scarborough said.
"The people Trump surrounded himself," Scarborough continued, "even family members, they walked blindly through legal and ethical mine fields every day and were too ignorant to understand what they were doing and too arrogant to care -- which is why we find ourselves where we are today with this investigation and why Manafort finds himself and Gates finds himself and all of them find themselves where they are. Manafort was a very tight fit into an organization that was both ignorant and arrogant of the law and ethical traps that were laid before them."
