Paul Manafort is facing an incredibly brutal sentence in the Virginia case, and that’s before we get to the case in the District of Columbia. Start with the fact that he’s probably going to have to pay nearly $25 million in restitution. On top of that, he’ll have to forfeit more than four million dollars worth of assets. And then there’s the term of imprisonment, which will be in the 19.5 to 24.5 year range.
To be clear, this is not what the Office of Special Counsel asked for. It’s the recommendation of the Probation Office, as laid out in their Presentence Investigation Report. The OSC merely agreed with their findings. Manafort will get no mercy in Virginia. He’s not likely to get any in D.C. either after the judge found there this week that he breached his plea agreement and told numerous intentional lies to the FBI, a grand jury and to OSC prosecutors.
Under the circumstances, it’s understandable that he’d see his best option as a presidential pardon, no matter how long the odds of him receiving one.
It obviously did not have to be this way. Consider the case of his business partner, Rick Gates, who committed most of the same crimes. .
Gates pleaded guilty in February [2018] to reduced charges of lying to the FBI and conspiring against the United States and agreed to cooperate with Mueller. He faces about five to six years in prison under sentencing guidelines, but his cooperation could prompt the government to ask for significantly less time.
Rick Gates will probably be a free man sometime early in the next decade. It’s hard to see how the 69 year old Manafort will ever be free again. Why did Manafort choose this road? Is he just monumentally stupid? Or is he so guilty that he’d rather spend the rest of his life in jail than admit what he did?
Of course, he could be protecting his family from possible retaliation. Or he could be operating under an agreement that he’ll get that pardon.
If so, Trump better hope that Robert Mueller never gets wind of the deal.
Or both. Although he doesn’t strike me as someone who is willing to go to prison for his family.
Does the act of pardoning constitute obstruction of justice. If Trump pardons Manafort, it obstructs the SP from getting Stone to cooperate.
The SP doesn’t want Stone to cooperate. Nobody would believe him he’s a monstrous congenital liar. They don’t need his testimony they have his computer files and records and lots of other witnesses. There’s no indication they ever considered a deal with a weasel like Stone.
He went on and on about how he’d never “flip” but it was idle talk since nobody wanted him to flip anyway. He’s going down now and Trump isn’t going to do a thing to help him except tweet bitter comments. It’s too late for all these henchmen. Trump no longer can profit by pardoning them if he could ever have gotten away with it, that time is past. He should probably have shut down the Mueller operation immediately and taken the flack back when Republicans still controlled Congress and Democrats could do nothing about it. But, he couldn’t do it and now it’s too late.
Trump has nothing left but diversions like the declaration of emergency. He can keep manufacturing more and more crises forcing everybody to deal with his made up nonsense. He still thinks that the more danger he’s in the more chaos he has to spawn to divert attention away from his crimes. So, here we go.
SP? Special Prosecutor? Or Special Counsel?
Trump no longer can profit by pardoning them if he could ever have gotten away with it, that time is past
I’m not sure that’s true. My guess is that the whole point of bringing in Barr is so they can attempt the Iran Contra playbook- i.e. pardons and then DOJ saying we are done here, while trying to keep as much incriminating evidence as possible out of view of Congress and the public. Also, Trump doesn’t appear to be rational at this point, so he could just wake up one morning and drop a pardon or two for shits and giggles, or if Hannity tells him to.
Mueller will not charge Trump because of DOJ policy. True enough, pardons will probably guarantee impeachment, but that has a high probability of happening anyway at this point.
It all comes down to conviction in the Senate, and also longer term legal/financial issues for Trump, his family, and his “empire”. At this point, I’m skeptical of conviction in the Senate- the Republican party itself is up to their neck in this stuff, Trump still has a huge approval rating among Republicans, and the Republican electorate operates in a fact-free environment and wants to be mislead on this topic. I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of Republicans in the Senate that would be willing to vote for an impeachment conviction would be even less than the number that voted to maintain sanctions on Oleg Deripaska- a vote that ultimately failed.
Still, I agree that if Trump was going to pardon, he probably should have done so at the beginning- it would have been painful, but not nearly as bad as it is going to be now.
Better yet, Trump can commute his sentence, right? Isn’t that what C- Augustus did with Scooter Libby?
I’m more inclined to think he continues to lie simply because he is a liar, it is who he is. Much like an alcoholic that clings to his bottle of vodka because it has been his friend through good times and bad, he is addicted and he cannot see logic through the haze.
He’s shown no common sense, no wily character much less strength of character, but instead feels his lies won him fortunes. Beyond that he is full stop.
Who knows? Maybe he’s been lying for so long it just comes natural.
Or could it be Manafort is doing this out of fear for himself and his family? That full cooperation would mean putting at risk powerful former business partners and their associates in Russia and Ukraine, and while it might be difficult for them to reach him in federal prison, his family is vulnerable.
The other scenario: he’s being a “stand up guy” to impress Trump, in the hopes it will get him a pardon. If that is the case, he may be putting all his eggs in the wrong basket; Trump is the last person you want to put any trust in.
In the sealed hearing, Weissman argued that Manafort lied in order to “augment his chances for a pardon” (p 84, line 24; search pardon). That is, if Manafort admitted he gave his Russian buddies wherewithal to help the campaign materially (which we can be confident they used, and continue to use), a pardon would be much less likely.
I imagine the Яepubliclowns in Congress would like very much to sweep this all under the rug, because it seems 1) obvious that Russian use of this data would not be limited to the presidential election of 2016, and 2) perfectly reasonable to assume that some of these Яepubliclowns would have been and/or would be intended beneficiaries.
I’m wondering who’s paying for Manafort’s lawyers (who themselves are real pieces of work).
I do love the idea that Mueller’s investigation, on the basis of Manafort’s forfeitures alone, has more than paid for itself.
I have never seen a clear explanation why Manafort owed a Russian money. Did he make a bad investment like put money in a Trump Tower that was never built? Or did he just spend the Russians money and never invest is? What ever he did to create the debt which caused him to trade debt for influence in the the donald’s campaign, he seems to be just like Cohen and is unwilling to talk about Russians. He does not want to protect the donald…he is afraid of the Russians.
Ostrich jackets, my friend. Ostrich jackets.
Afraid for his life? Or that of family members?
Never happened. There was no collusion.
Love and kisses–Arthur Gilroy
Apparently Voice is the token idiot for this particular thread.
Can’t Trump use his emergency powers to imprison Mueller without trial?
You cling to this fantasy that Trump is a Russian agent and ignore his real Constitutional violations.
Normally when people take a foolish position that is later revealed by the facts to be utterly wrong they at least stop repeating the foolish position, even when they’re too far up their own ass to admit their mistake and re-assess their thinking to figure out where they went wrong.
. . . the implication that folks who engage in such normal behavior are themselves, in some sense “normal” (more or less). So . . .
Reality shields maintained at full force can produce “impressive” results.