Which again, only goes to show it was about stopping the rising calls for Mueller to resign following the Hillary-Russian Bribery revelations.
Via Politico:
The real news in the indictment of Paul Manafort on laundering and tax evasion charges is that someone has actually been prosecuted under a foreign lobbying law that has existed for decades but has almost never been enforced. The indictment may or may not prove that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government, but it has already proved how flawed the foreign lobbying rules have always been and how easily they are flouted.
I’m not going to weigh in on whether Manafort or his associate, Rick Gates, did in fact launder more than $18 million dollars, largely gathered as fees from Ukrainian strongman and Putin ally Viktor Yanukovych, but I can say with certainty that the law, which Manafort is accused of violating, known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is a complete joke. The law was enacted in 1938, but it’s been under-enforced or not enforced at all for ages.
How do I know? Because I’ve written about foreign lobbying and Manafort for more than 20 years. During that time, I’ve seen only a handful of cases brought against people or organizations accused of not registering as foreign agents. And it was always some foreign group, or Washington outsider, or foreign group—the Cuban 5 or someone allegedly connected to Irish Republican Army—never a wired Washington lobbyist like Manafort. Yet Manafort, like dozens of other influence peddlers, has been operating in plain sight for years. I wrote about Manafort as recently as August 2016—one story for Fusion focusing on his Ukraine work and another story for my website WashingtonBabylon.com, that looked at his historic work for dictators and crooks.