Basic information eludes a typical PsyOp entity from time to time, like how deep an association goes and what it means when it comes to Donald Trump.
Roger Stone goes decades back with close friendships with Trump, as do Tom Barrack and Paul Manafort, knowing each for around thirty years.
Roger Stone also was the man behind the camera filming Trump during his first Presidential run announcement, in 2012. While the Don, never filed, eventually deleted the Vlog, From the Desk of Donald Trump, there is simply zero chance that Roger Stone being an acquaintance of Manafort would in any way be problematic for Trump. None.
If Trump was reluctant in re-hiring Manafort, that was because Paul had no media presence.
Trump’s most evident core value is loyalty and trust, albeit in a twisted self-serving way instead of the traditional two-way street. He kept in touch with Tom Barrack after the two men competed for, and Trump lost, a bid for a NY Property. The Plaza Hotel had been bought four months previous with Trump inviting Tom over to negotiate a deal to sell it to him. In typical red flag raising for money laundering fashion, Donald then bought the property with a 50M markup.
What Barrack did afterward was to lavish Trump with praise over the deal as if the trap that wound to Trump going insolvent the first time, was instead a masterful stroke of deal-making. That continual praise is why Tom stayed close to Trump for decades, then was able to push foreign-compromised assets like Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort and Gates into Donald’s inner-circle able to directly manage and influence the US Presidency.
Barrack was indicted with an unsuccessful prosecution just last month, despite his work to hand over nuclear secrets to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE, the later the nation-state he was accused of being an unregistered foreign asset for. The US could have charged Tom over the Logan Act with added charges of conspiracy considering the machinations undertaken to convince Trump to enter a nuclear deal as a candidate secretly, then execute that deal once in office. Instead they went with just FARA, the act to prevent hostile nations of using Americans to do their bidding.
A secondary consequence of unsuccessfully prosecuting Barrack was that a similar case, the one of Rudy Giuliani involving Ukraine, Lev and Igor, was dropped, as that one too hinged heavily on FARA issues, with the caveat of his being a more well-known Trump flunky whose prosecution would require not having a single Trump loyalist slip onto the jury.