Fusion: How Trump aide Paul Manafort got ridiculously wealthy while aiding a Ukrainian strongman
The second and related reason is that U.S. disclosure laws for foreign lobbyists are riddled with exceptions and almost entirely unenforced, and Manafort didn’t register. “Any Washington insider with an ounce of intelligence and common sense can easily evade lobby disclosure requirements,” Meredith McGehee, policy director for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, said in an interview. “You have to be really dumb to get caught.”...
Manafort can’t be fully blamed for this opaque situation, since he’s one of countless Washington lobbyists and PR professionals who advocate for clients without filing, whether they should or not. “There are a lot of very high-profile insiders who go to the Hill and to government agencies and you will not find them in the lobby disclosure forms,” McGehee told me. “There’s very little incentive to do so since no one ever gets prosecuted for violating the rules.” She said she’s been shopping a package of tougher lobby disclosure rules drafted by an American Bar Association panel— the last full reform took place in the mid-1990s, after more than 50 years without any significant revision — but “there’s very little appetite for reform.”