This week I’m doing something a little different from my usual podcasts. I’ve gone through the entire history of Trump’s election and presidency and the various actors/players in his administration and I break down in detail, event by event, what has been going on with who and when that has led to Trump’s current very serious legal woes.

Timeline

1987

Trump went to Moscow to find a site for luxury hotel; no deal emerged.

1996

Trump sought to build a condominium complex in Russia; that also did not succeed.

2000

Allen Weisselberg named a vice president at Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City, N.J. casino company following an accounting scandal that resulted in it eventually agreeing to a Securities and Exchange Commission cease-and-desist order.

2004

Paul Manafort first began to establish connections in Ukraine – ground zero in the geopolitical struggle between Putin’s Russia and the West – in late 2004. His reputation as a masterful political strategist and fixer was earned over decades hopping planes to the Congo, Philippines and elsewhere to advise authoritarian rulers friendly with the United States.

By the end of that year, the former Soviet republic of Ukraine was paralyzed by widespread protests amid allegations that Yanukovych, the prime minister in a government rife with corruption, had won the presidency in a rigged election. What became the Orange Revolution persisted until another, internationally monitored vote was held and rival Victor Yushchenko was declared the winner.

2005

Donald Trump signed a one-year deal with a New York development company to explore a Trump Tower in Moscow, but the effort fizzled.

Paul Manafort and a partner formed Davis Manafort Partners Inc. in early 2005 and opened offices in Kiev.

Manafort’s first client in Ukraine was Rinat Akhmetov, the country’s richest man and a key funder of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. Deripaska introduced Manafort to Akhmetov, who hailed from Russia-leaning Eastern Ukraine. In the summer of 2005, Akhmetov tapped Manafort to help Yanukovych and his party in the 2006 elections, according to an American consultant based in Kiev, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships. The multimillion-dollar political consulting deal was sealed at a meeting in an elite Moscow hotel attended by Manafort, Akhmetov and a half dozen other wealthy Ukrainians.

Manafort spent the next several years advising Deripaska, Akhmetov and other Ukrainian oligarchs and giving the gruff-talking Yanukovych a makeover down to his hair style and attire.

2007

“Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for investment,” Trump said in a 2007 deposition. “We will be in Moscow at some point,” he said.

2008

“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump Jr. noted that he traveled to Russia six times in 18 months, and “several buyers have been attracted to our projects there and everything associated therewith.” But he added: “As much as we want to take our business over there, Russia is just a different world…. It is a question of who knows who, whose brother is paying off who… It really is a scary place.”

2010

Victor Yanukovych wins the presidency of Ukraine.

Even after the February 2014 fall of Ukraine’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovych, who won office with the help of a Manafort-engineered image makeover, the American consultant flew to Kiev another 19 times over the next 20 months while working for the smaller, pro-Russian Opposition Bloc party. Manafort went so far as to suggest the party take an anti-NATO ...