Paul Manafort and Roger Stone go back a long ways...

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2018/02/23/the-story-of-roger-stone-paul-manafort-and-donald-trump/

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At age 19, Roger Stone, who was then an employee of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), was the youngest person to testify before the Watergate grand jury. Call it a badge of honor. In 1977, Paul Manafort successfully utilized that notoriety while running Stone’s campaign for the presidency of the Young Republicans. In 1979, Stone then used the prestige of that position to get an assignment as Ronald Reagan’s campaign organizer for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. And that’s when he decided he needed to get to know Donald Trump.

But first he had to make the acquaintance of Roy Cohn. Cohn is most famous for his role as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In that role, he led the aggressive and unethical red-baiting Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations until the U.S. Army pushed back and he was forced to resign in August 1954. In private practice Cohn represented prominent New Yorkers like la cosa nostra crime boss Carlo Gambino, Francis Cardinal Spellman and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, but he was frequently at odds with the law. Over the years, he won four separate acquittals on charges varying from conspiracy, securities fraud, bribery, and obstruction of justice before finally being disbarred in 1986 as he was dying of HIV. What Cohn learned from McCarthy was the value of being dramatic and the utility of outrageous claims and accusations. He passed these lessons along to Donald Trump.

According to Trump, he first met Roy Cohn in a members-only Midtown establishment called Le Club. It was 1973, and the government was accusing the Trumps’ real estate business of discriminatory housing practices. He asked Cohn, “The government has just filed suit against our company saying that we discriminated against blacks. What do you think I should do?” Cohn advised him to “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated.”

The Trumps retained Cohn to represent them and Donald became his student. According to author Sam Roberts, it was from Cohn that Trump learned his now familiar three-part strategy for handling litigation, a strategy which he has now transferred to political combat: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deep into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.

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