Hardened and Bold
By 
Surprised that someone like this could end up being employed in a critical position for Donald Trump:
Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is a “hardened” criminal who “repeatedly and brazenly violated the law,” prosecutors told a Washington federal judge.
But in the filing submitted Friday and made partially public Saturday they recommended no specific punishment for those crimes, saying that is the practice of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, whose office brought the case.
Prosecutors noted that federal guidelines call for a sentence of 17 to 22 years, although under Manafort’s guilty plea in his D.C. case, the maximum he faces behind bars is 10. The special counsel team said it may ask for Judge Amy Berman Jackson to impose a sentence that runs after any prison time Manafort is given for related crimes in Virginia federal court.
“Manafort chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law,” prosecutors said, from “garden-variety crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud” to “more esoteric laws” involving foreign lobbying.
He lied, they noted, “to tax preparers, bookkeepers, banks, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice National Security Division, the FBI, the Special Counsel’s Office, the grand jury, his own legal counsel, Members of Congress, and members of the executive branch of the United States government.”
He committed crimes while leading a presidential campaign and while out on bail before trial, and then lied to investigators after pleading guilty, prosecutors said, revealing “a hardened adherence to committing crimes and lack of remorse.”
Above all, this seems like a lone wolf with nothing to hide. Meanwhile, New York is working to make Manafort pardon-proof.
Still, we like to be fair and balanced here, so let’s get a counterpoint:
And while we’re at it, I will just note that here we have yet another filing by Our Lord & Savior Robert Mueller without even a smidgen of charges for ‘Criminal Collusion’. That should be the big takeaway here, but the #resistance obsessives will continue to shift the goalposts.
— Glem (I Do *NOT* Support Trump) (@GlemGreenwald) February 23, 2019