Tag: Manafort

  • Court is one of those places where facts still matter

    CNN is reporting live on Manafort’s sentencing hearing before Judge Amy Berman Jackson. I admit to a morbid interest in the subject, not so much because of the Trump connection but because of the horrors of his role in Ukraine.

    Have a few highlights from Judge Jackson:

    Judge Amy Berman Jackson expressed that she was not happy with how Paul Manafort approached the final stretch of this case.

     “Court is one of those places where facts still matter,” Jackson said.

    She said Manafort has begun to “minimize his conduct and shield others.”

    Jackson admitted she couldn’t tell from an FBI document if Manafort was actually asserting false facts or not.

    Jackson believes he’s repeating a lie in his sentencing memo.

    She went on to say that Manafort believed he had the right to manipulate the court proceedings and that he’s made overblown statements about where he was housed in jail when it was his benefit to do so.

    …

    Judge Jackson took issue with one of the points noted by Paul Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing earlier today.

    Citing Downing’s words — that but for the special counsel, Manafort wouldn’t have been charged in the first place — Jackson said, “Saying ‘I’m sorry I got caught’ is not an inspiring plea for leniency.”

    Jackson talked about how Manafort may not have been repeating some points for the person he was trying to persuade as she put her hands on her chest and not for “some other audience.”

    …

    Judge Jackson is now calling out the defense’s memo, which stated that the special counsel was never able to charge Russian collusion (this was their approach to the sentencing memo).

    “It’s hard to understand why an attorney would write that,” she said about Manafort’s defense team’s approach. “No collusion” is “simply a non-sequitur.”

    The judge said Manafort’s argument about the Russia investigation won’t affect her sentence.

    “The defendant’s insistence” that this shouldn’t have happened to him “is just one more thing that’s inconsistent with the notion of any genuine acceptance of responsibility,” Jackson said.

    Just in: the sentence is 43 months in addition to his sentence last week.

  • Otherwise blameless

    Manafort got 47 months.

    https://twitter.com/waltshaub/status/1103812914673274881

    An otherwise blameless life?!! He helped Yanukovich smear Tymoshenko. That’s not exactly blameless.

    Updating to add an informative tweet:

  • The underlying crime

    Virginia Heffernan reminds us:

    The *underlying* crime is his profound complicity in the mass murder of civilians under Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.

    So let’s refresh our memories on that, with help from Luke Harding at the Guardian in April:

    Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort authorised a secret media operation on behalf of Ukraine’s former president featuring “black ops”, “placed” articles in the Wall Street Journal and US websites and anonymous briefings against Hillary Clinton.

    The project was designed to boost the reputation of Ukraine’s then leader, Viktor Yanukovych. It was part of a multimillion-dollar lobbying effort carried out by Manafort on behalf of Yanukovych’s embattled government, emails and documents reveal.

    The strategies included:

    • Proposing to rewrite Wikipedia entries to smear a key opponent of the then Ukrainian president.

    • Setting up a fake thinktank in Vienna to disseminate viewpoints supporting Yanukovych.

    • A social media blitz “aimed at targeted audiences in Europe and the US”.

    • Briefing journalists from the rightwing website Breitbart to attack Clinton when she was US secretary of state.

    The same kind of thing, Harding points out, that Russia did to Clinton and for Trump in 2016. Maybe Manafort tutored them.

    The documents reveal another surreptitious operation to influence international opinion. In 2010 Yanukovych defeated his rival Yulia Tymoshenko in presidential elections. The following summer Ukrainian prosecutors arrested Tymoshenko and put her on trial. This provoked severe criticism from the Obama administration and the EU, which accused Yanukovych of locking up Tymoshenko for political reasons.

    Interesting that Trump kept talking about doing the same thing to Clinton, and continues to now.

    In 2011 Manafort approved a clandestine strategy to discredit Tymoshenko abroad. Alan Friedman, a former Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reporter, based in Italy, masterminded this project. Friedman has previously been accused of concealing his work as a paid lobbyist.

    Also involved were Rick Gates, Manafort’s then deputy, and Konstantin Kilimnik, another senior Manafort associate who the FBI believes has links to Russian military intelligence.

    In July 2011 Friedman sent Manafort a confidential six-page document titled Ukraine – A Digital Roadmap. It laid out a plan to “deconstruct” Tymoshenko via videos, articles and social media. Yanukovych deferred to Manafort, who gave the project the go-ahead, sources in Ukraine’s former government say.

    Friedman’s proposed operation was ambitious. It included producing anonymous videos attacking Tymoshenko and comparing the opposition leader to a drunk Boris Yeltsin. “The social media space offers great opportunities for guilt by association,” Friedman wrote in the document.

    None of this is about reporting facts, it’s about making shit up in order to win.

  • The flight to Moscow

    Read the charges, the Times invites us. Ok.

    Page one. For at least nine years Manafort and Gates acted as unregistered agents for Ukraine and Yanukovich. They made tens of millions doing this. They laundered the money in order to hide it from the Feds.

    Page two. They were required by law to report their foreign lobbying to the Feds. They didn’t. They concealed it instead. When the DoJ asked them about it in 2016 they lied.

    Manafort spent the laundered money on all the expensive things. He paid no taxes on it. He defrauded banks that loaned him money.

    Page 4. Manafort worked for the pro-Russia party in Ukraine. In 2010 that party’s candidate, Yanukovich, was elected President of Ukraine. In 2014 Yanukovich fled to Moscow in the wake of protests over corruption.

    There are 27 more pages.

    I hope they sing like canaries.