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It's hard to remember sometimes given the insanity that has occurred since, but eyebrows were raised across the spectrum when Manafort was initially hired as Trump's campaign manager back in 2016. Manafort was an ancillary player in Republican politics and already clearly compromised. My colleague Martin Longman noted earlier this year that Manafort was closely connected to Roger Stone, himself a disgraced crackpot with his own insalubrious ties and connection to likely Russian hacker Guccifer 2.0.

Manafort was a terrible choice for campaign manager, both in terms of competence and optics. It was neither a pick designed to buoy his populist credentials, nor was it a sop to the GOP establishment that Trump desperately needed at the time. The only thing Manafort had in his favor was his close ties to Putin, and there is no conceivable reason to have hired him except to leverage those ties.

If Manafort is indeed the primary target of Mueller's probe, it's a guarantee that the Trump campaign absolutely intended to collude closely with Russia as a longshot path to a difficult election.

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