Breaking News: Paul Manafort sentenced to 47 months in prison
Manafort, plain and simple, is going to prison for things completely outside the original scope of Mueller’s investigation. All of his convictions stem from the shady lobbying businesses he ran with his associate Rick Gates long before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.
It’s all the rage right now in the media that Paul Manafort has been sentenced to 47 months in prison for bank and tax fraud.
Here’s what we know:
BLOOMBERG – Paul Manafort, who helped define Washington’s modern lobbying culture and advised four U.S. presidents, was sentenced to less than four years in prison for hiding millions of dollars offshore to support a glittering lifestyle that included six homes, dozens of custom suits and a $15,000 ostrich jacket.Manafort, 69, faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison, but got a break from the federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, Thursday who called a recommendation for a sentence of 19 years to 24 1/2 years excessive.Manafort’s punishment of three years and 11 months behind bars could still get worse. He faces another decade in prison when he’s sentenced March 13 in Washington for conspiracy counts related to a secret lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukraine and for joining a Russian associate in tampering with witnesses.
Manafort, who attended the hearing in a wheelchair, wearing a green jumpsuit, had asked the judge for mercy in a brief statement. He was convicted of eight felonies, including hiding $55 million abroad, cheating the U.S. of more than $6 million in taxes and defrauding banks that lent him money. His lawyers didn’t dispute that his crimes were serious, conceding he didn’t report income made offshore to the Internal Revenue Service, hid accounts from the Treasury Department and lied to lenders after his cash dwindled.But they insisted that Manafort, who worked on Trump’s campaign without pay, never colluded with Russia. They said Mueller singled him out because he worked for Trump. And they said Manafort’s work for former President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine wasn’t on behalf of a Kremlin-aligned politician, as Mueller contends, but rather an effort to steer Ukraine toward the U.S.-friendly European Union.
It says something that the judge refused to imprison Manafort for the two decades that the prosecution requested, calling it excessive.
It also says something that none of this had anything to do with Russian collusion in the 2016 election.
But regardless of all this, something tells me that after Manafort is in prison for a while, Trump will likely grant him clemency. It probably won’t happen until after he wins or loses in 2020, but I fully expect it to happen.
As I’m writing this, I see on MSNBC that Manafort will get 9 months of his sentence already served. So I guess that means it’s really 38 months?
Mike Huckabee: Manafort sentencing has zero, zilch, nada, nothing to do with Russian 'collusion'
ReplyDeleteWith the release of the "Mueller Report" reportedly just around the corner, the sentencing Thursday of one-time Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison offers a timely reminder that the whole Russia collusion narrative was never more than a fantasy of the Democrats and the mainstream media.
As numerous investigations and witness testimonies have already demonstrated, there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to elect Donald Trump as president. The entire justification for the Mueller probe was a farce, invented by former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign manager Robby Mook and the rest of the Clinton brain trust to justify their humiliating defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
Even U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III acknowledged that Manafort’s convictions were completely unrelated to the Russia collusion, about which the judge had previously expressed skepticism in open court.
"He is not before the court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government,” Ellis said in court.
It’s near-universally assumed by now that Mueller’s final report, however much of it the public eventually sees, will fail to show any evidence of collusion. So the same talking heads who’ve spent nearly two years whipping half the country into a frenzy about Russian collusion have to cling to what they do have: Manafort.
The problem for them is that Manafort’s convictions illustrate just how empty Mueller’s net has come up after more than 21 months in this putrid fishing hole.
Paul Manafort was found guilty of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failure to report a foreign bank account. In addition to the 47-month prison sentence that Ellis gave him Thursday, Manafort will serve even longer because the judge in his other criminal trial threw out his guilty plea after determining he lied to Mueller’s investigators.
This is all very serious -- and all very irrelevant to Russian election interference.
Manafort, plain and simple, is going to prison for things completely outside the original scope of Mueller’s investigation. All of his convictions stem from the shady lobbying businesses he ran with his associate Rick Gates long before joining the Trump campaign in 2016.
The same could be said about any of the myriad other indictments Mueller has brought against Americans who were unfortunate enough to have ties to the Trump campaign. The only illegal conduct Mueller uncovered either predates the Trump campaign or involves “process crimes” directly linked to Mueller’s investigation, such as those of George Papadopoulos, the former Trump aide who got a whopping 14 days in jail after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
The fact is that after nearly two years of work, we still have no indication that the Mueller probe found so much as a single instance of actual Trump-Russia collusion. Cases such as Manafort’s are typically relegated to no more than a moment’s mention on the nightly news, but not this time.
The fake collusion narrative is simply too important to the media. They’ve invested too much of their capital and credibility, so they have no choice but to present Manafort’s crimes as evidence not only of Donald Trump’s supposed culpability but of Mueller’s efficacy.
For their part, the president’s detractors on Capitol Hill, particularly Democratic committee chairmen Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, need the artificial stench of the Manafort sentencing to hang in the air as long as possible so that they can prepare to launch the second wave of their vile, politically motivated attack.
ReplyDeleteWith the Mueller probe’s long reign as “The Resistance’s” best hope for overturning the 2016 presidential election quickly coming to a close, the Democrats hope to simply transition to their own witch hunts.
As Manafort’s sentencing on charges unrelated to the 2016 election reminds us, the coming congressional investigations will fare no better than Mueller did in the hunt for evidence of the collusion that never was.
Manafort legal woes to continue with DC sentencing next week, possibly new charges in NY
ReplyDeleteThursday’s sentencing of Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison hardly brings the former Trump campaign chairman’s legal matters to a close.
The tax and bank fraud case in Alexandria, Va., with U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III presiding, was only the first of two cases on which Manafort was to be sentenced this month.
Next week in Washington, D.C., Manafort is scheduled to face punishment in a separate illegal lobbying case, having pleaded guilty in that case in September.
Presiding over the D.C. case is U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the same judge who last month slapped former Trump adviser Roger Stone with a gag order in connection with Stone’s unrelated obstruction and making-false-statements case.
Whether a sentence imposed by Jackson would be added to the Ellis sentence, or run concurrent with it, remains to be seen.
“I think it’s entirely up to her,” Ellis said in court Thursday, referring to Jackson, the Hill reported.
Then there’s the question of whether Manafort will face additional charges in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is said to be preparing a case against him.
Potential charges in New York would stem from alleged unpaid states taxes as well as loans, a source told Reuters last month. They would also be part of an effort to saddle Manafort with state-level charges in the event he receives a pardon from President Trump on his convictions in federal court, Bloomberg and other sources reported.
So, it’s not clear at this stage how much total time 69-year-old Manafort – who will receive credit in the Alexandria case for nine months already served in jail -- will ultimately spend behind bars.
During Manafort’s Alexandria trial, President Trump referred to his former aide as a “very good person” whose legal predicament was “very sad.”
Manafort has been married to his wife Kathleen for more than 40 years, and they have two adult daughters. He will turn 70 on April Fools Day.