Mueller Investigation pt5

Status
Not open for further replies.
BobTheCoward said:
Jefferson was convicted of corruption charges related to accepting money as a government official. Manafort was convicted of ripping people off (by not paying taxes and lying to a bank). I think what Jefferson did was worse.
Click to expand...

After reading up on Jefferson, I agree that the things for which Jefferson was convicted are worse than the things for which Manafort was convicted, and for sentencing, that's all that matters.

If some of the allegations and inferences about Manafort's other activities are correct, those would be far worse than any of the current convictions.
 
acbytesla said:
No, I figured that in. He can get an additional 54 days per year taken off his potential sentence for good behavior. So he could have a possible 215 days credit applied to a 47 month sentence. That is 47 months minus 9 months time served and minus 7.1 months for good behavior. Little under 31 months remaining.

But I may have been wrong about him being retried for the remaining counts as I heard on a news report that part of his plea deal with Mueller was that he was required to plead guilty on the hung charges.
Click to expand...

Yep, he's skated on those, too, so it's just part of his "otherwise blameless life" now. But who cares; according to Ellis, the prosecution was just trying to get to Trump, anyway.
 
WilliamSeger said:
Yep, he's skated on those, too, so it's just part of his "otherwise blameless life" now. But who cares; according to Ellis, the prosecution was just trying to get to Trump, anyway.
Click to expand...

Yeah, Judge Ellis's description of Manafort's life is both absurd and patently false. But I don't expect the judge in the other case will be nearly as lenient.
 
acbytesla said:
Yeah, Judge Ellis's description of Manafort's life is both absurd and patently false. But I don't expect the judge in the other case will be nearly as lenient.
Click to expand...

To be fair, I'd wager you didn't expect such a lenient sentence in this case either.

But the two events are not necessarily independent. It's possible that a lenient sentence here increases the later sentence. Not sure it should or will, but it's possible.
 
acbytesla said:
No, I figured that in. He can get an additional 54 days per year taken off his potential sentence for good behavior. So he could have a possible 215 days credit applied to a 47 month sentence. That is 47 months minus 9 months time served and minus 7.1 months for good behavior. Little under 31 months remaining.

But I may have been wrong about him being retried for the remaining counts as I heard on a news report that part of his plea deal with Mueller was that he was required to plead guilty on the hung charges.
Click to expand...

OK - thanks for the clarification on the math.

I don't believe he has plead guilty to the hung charges, and he's not cooperating, so...
 
BobTheCoward said:
Jefferson was convicted of corruption charges related to accepting money as a government official. Manafort was convicted of ripping people off (by not paying taxes and lying to a bank). I think what Jefferson did was worse.
Click to expand...
Even if it could be argued that Jefferson's actions were worse than any of the single actions by Manafort (I'm not saying they are, just giving you the benefit of the doubt).... Jefferson's actions dealt with a very limited time span in which he was accepting money illegally. On the other hand, Manafort's criminal actions go back decades.
 
slyjoe said:
OK - thanks for the clarification on the math.

I don't believe he has plead guilty to the hung charges, and he's not cooperating, so...
Click to expand...

I hope you're right. But that's not what I saw on MSNBC.

From what I understood from the MSNBC report. The cooperation agreement required that he plead guilty to ALL the charges Manafort faced in Virginia which means Ellis sentence yesterday included them.

That Manafort is no longer cooperating doesn't change that. What it did do was change the prosecutions sentencing recommendations to the judge.

But I would definitely feel better to find out that I'm under a misapprehension.
 
Last edited:
Stacko said:
The part that sticks in my craw is how clearly this demonstrates the two tier justice system that exists; where stealing $100 worth of quarters potentially carries a greater sentence than defrauding the United States in more ways than I can bother to count right now. It seems see odd to so openly flaunt that everyone is equal under the law unless you committed the crimes wearing a suit and tie and had copious access to legal resources. See also nobody going to prison for the 2008 financial collapse.
Click to expand...

That sort of thing really bothers me as well.

However, the fact of the matter is that for whatever reason the courts often tend to treat white collar criminals with far more lenity than other criminals.
 
phiwum said:
To be fair, I'd wager you didn't expect such a lenient sentence in this case either.

But the two events are not necessarily independent. It's possible that a lenient sentence here increases the later sentence. Not sure it should or will, but it's possible.
Click to expand...

I didn't.

But Ellis has always been a wild card. Jackson was the judge that revoked Manafort's bail and one of the crimes he was convicted for was witness tampering. Judges usually hate that.

There are sentencing guidelines. Yesterday's sentence was grotesquely below those guidelines. Manafort according to them should have been sentenced to 237 months to 288 months. Instead he was sentenced to 47 months.

Whether it is fair or not for Judge Jackson to consider the lenient sentence when she hands down what could be up to an additional 120 months of prison I don't know. Manafort defrauded people out of millions of dollars as well as tampered with witnesses.

But consider this fromScott Hechinger@ScottHech on twitter
" For context on Manafort’s 47 months in prison, my client yesterday was offered 36-72 months in prison for stealing $100 worth of quarters from a residential laundry room."

There are similar heavy handed sentences all across the country and the rich powerful white guy gets a tiny slap for stealing millions.

******* ridiculous.
 
Last edited:
smartcooky said:
Trump may well be clever enough (or lucky enough) to have managed to distance himself with sufficient plausible deniability, from the way his campaign conspired with the Russian government to rig the 2016 election.
Click to expand...

That's the central question that the Mueller investigation is supposed to answer, though. Was the election rigged? If so, how, and who knew about it?
 
phiwum said:
To be fair, I'd wager you didn't expect such a lenient sentence in this case either.

But the two events are not necessarily independent. It's possible that a lenient sentence here increases the later sentence. Not sure it should or will, but it's possible.
Click to expand...

Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell made a case that it isn't so much that 47 months is too light a sentence for those crimes, but that federal sentencing is often overly harsh for much lesser crimes -- how about reducing them across the board, and not just for the rich?
 
theprestige said:
That's the central question that the Mueller investigation is supposed to answer, though. Was the election rigged? If so, how, and who knew about it?
Click to expand...

Rigged? No. That ISN'T the central question. Russia did not rig the election and that isn't what Mueller and his team was tasked to address. Mueller was required to investigate Russian 'involvement' in the election and IF there were any ties to the Trump campaign. AND to prosecute ANY crimes that were discovered during that investigation.
 
Last edited:
theprestige said:
That's the central question that the Mueller investigation is supposed to answer, though. Was the election rigged? If so, how, and who knew about it?
Click to expand...

We know it was influenced by it.

Whether Trump knew is an open question, but let's say that there are strong indicators that he had at least good reason to suspect it.
 
Neither our exact letter of our laws or our general context of what a "fair election" means on a moral and social ever accounted for what essentially amounts to a mass disinformation campaign by a foreign party.
 
Belz... said:
We know it was influenced by it.

Whether Trump knew is an open question, but let's say that there are strong indicators that he had at least good reason to suspect it.
Click to expand...

We KNOW that:
his son knew
his campaign manager knew
his deputy campaign manager knew
and his National Security Advisor knew.

Is it really possible Trump didn't?

Yes and there is a God......

and Big Foot,
Leprechauns,
fairies,
The Loch Ness Monster
Spiderman
etc.
 
A black woman in Texas attempted to cast a vote in an election while she was still on parole. The system worked and her vote was not accepted. Yet, she was sentenced to 5 years in prison for even trying. Law and Order.

Either she should have stolen millions of dollars or she should have been white. Maybe it would have taken both, I'm not sure.
 
Dr. Keith said:
A black woman in Texas attempted to cast a vote in an election while she was still on parole. The system worked and her vote was not accepted. Yet, she was sentenced to 5 years in prison for even trying. Law and Order.

Either she should have stolen millions of dollars or she should have been white. Maybe it would have taken both, I'm not sure.
Click to expand...
And that’s the type of situation where a president should consider a pardon, not for, say, racist, law-breaking sheriffs.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom