Maddow breaks down how Trump’s Ukraine scandal all links back to Manafort -- and the mob

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow on Monday reported how President Donald Trump is returning to the Paul Manafort playbook as he seeks re-election in 2020.

Manafort, who is currently serving a federal prison sentence, was Trump's campaign chairman during the 2016 election.

Maddow reminded how weird of a selection the choice had been seen at the time.

"Whether or not Paul Manafort, himself, is going to spend the rest of his days in prison, personally, what happened around the time that Paul Manafort was the campaign chairman for the Donald Trump for president campaign in 2016 is that however weird it seemed that the Trump campaign was hiring a guy like Manafort to come basically from Ukraine, come back to the U.S. and work on a political campaign here, I mean, what he brought with him were contacts and business partners and secret funders and organized crime-linked Kremlin connections in Ukraine," Maddow reported.

"That was the cartful of baggage that Paul Manafort brought with him as a presidential campaign chairman for Trump in 2016 -- at a time when the Kremlin wanted to use lots of different levers of power to try to get Donald Trump elected president. And now four years later for the re-elect, Trump is going back to Ukraine," she noted.

"If 2016 had been a movie, you could not sell this as a sequel. You would have to sell it as a remake because apart from Paul Manafort being in prison this time around, it’s basically all the same stuff happening all over again involving all the same people," Maddow concluded.

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