Hoping that by the time he’s out this will all be a distant memory.
Seems kind of light to me, especially concurrently.
I could froth at the mouth with rage that there’s a chance Paul Manafort will again breath free air one day, but this seems fundamentally reasonable.
This was a tough but fair sentence by Judge Jackson within the guidelines of what was permissible under the law. She essentially doubled his jail sentence. After the first sentencing, Manafort was due to serve about 3-3.5 years with time served. This essentially tacks on another 3+ years to that.
As for Manafort, his chance of a pardon is very low, if not zero. There will be no pardon during the remainder of this election cycle. The Cohen pardon matter has let the cat out of the bag that Trump is being investigated for dangling pardons by SDNY, which is more threatening to him than OSC.
Manafort’s hope to get out sooner is to rat out Trump and the whole crew. He may or may not do that, but there is a good incentive for him to think about it.
So the other judge got criticized (rightly so) for a sentence that was 1/5 the guidelines. This one is still less than half the guidelines, though. Is that common for judges to be that lenient compared to the sentencing guidelines?
Is that all? White collar crime pays!
Judge Berman Jackson’s comments were fair, and the sentence was reasonable – which all makes it harder to justify a pardon. I think that Stone’s strategy with her has been to incite her to take actions which could be painted as extreme. I wouldn’t be surprised if a wariness about playing into that narrative was part of her deliberation.
What’s the plan for the ten charges that went to mistrial? Is Mueller’s team going to retry those or are they going to let the State of New York take them on?
In addition to the time in prison, did Judge Jackson impose any more fines on Manafort? He was already on the hook for millions of dollars from the other case.
Dang, I was hoping for the chair
Manafort’s probably better off in prison and safely away from Mr. Deripaska’s collections department staff.
Trump has to pardon Manafort, if he does not all the rest of the witnesses will roll on Trump. Trump turned down Cohen’s request for a pardon (probably because Cohen recorded a lot of evidence which ended up in the hands of the prosecutor and pardon or no pardon that info was not going away) and look how that turned out. Trump has no character and he surrounds himself with staff that has less character then himself.
Looking at the big picture, two takeaways (other than the fact that the criminal justice system farcically favors rich white businesspeople):
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Trump’s campaign manager and personal lawyer are (in effect) now in prison. His deputy campaign manager and NSA are awaiting sentence. That 's pretty remarkable.
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A little more darkly, the mystique surrounding the federal prosecutors has been damaged. These sentences are bad news for the defendants, in general terms, but their deterrent value is far from clear, given the enormous rewards available to people who sell their services to foreign criminals. Also unclear is the effect of the sentences on plea-bargains. It’s an open question whether Gates, Flynn, would have flipped if they knew in advance that the worst they faced was 3-6 years inside.
I also think this will have a deterrent/cooperating effect on Roger Stone. The reason Manafort got the extra months was because of his constant lying. Had he not lied to the Judge and had he not lied to the OSC, he would not have been sentenced for more than 3 years total.
Stone has to be following the Manafort matter closely. He is also well aware that there is no pardon coming from Trump and will be sacrificed. The only choice for him is to take a deal and serve some jail time.
In addition, as a careful political observer, Stone will know that Trump’s chances of winning re-election are not that good. Does one gamble everything on Trump? Or, does one cooperate and get out of prison when Trump is no longer in office. Seems like the latter is a good deal for him.
The judge brings up the question of Russia-Trump campaign collusion. She says the question was “not represented in this case period…Therefore it was not resolved one way or another by this case.”
I just checked Trump Tweets. No “No Collusion!” tweet… yet.
I like this judge’s ruling, and was struck by the smell of white privilege in Ellis’ sentencing. I have a strong intuition that as we go forward I am going to like fewer and fewer rulings by the courts that are being stacked with conservative ideologues as we speak. Mitch McConnell’s legacy will be the modern equivalent of the dark ages in American jurisprudence.
Can’t wait for the SCOTUS ruling on the citizenship question on the census as they manage to cleave all of the skulduggery and partisan hackery from the case and rule simply that, of course, the federal government can ask any questions they want to on the census.
On another site I heard an additional 6 million in fines, but I haven’t been able to verify the amount.