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Breaking: Manafort Sentenced to 47 Months
Judge T.S. Ellis sentenced Paul Manafort to nearly four years in federal prison on Thursday. The former Trump campaign chairman was found guilty of defrauding the government and banks as well as failing to pay taxes on income he earned from political work in Ukraine. The charges originally stemmed from Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. From CNN:
Manafort, 69, was wearing a green jumpsuit that said “ALEXANDRIA INMATE” as he entered the courtroom in a wheelchair and holding a cane.
“The last two years have been the most difficult years for my family and I,” Manafort told the court. “Humiliated and shamed would be a gross understatement.”
Manafort spoke briefly about how prayer and faith have helped get him through this time and asked Judge T.S. Ellis “to be compassionate.”
Prosecutors argued that Manafort deserves between 19 and 25 years in prison as well as millions of dollars in fines and restitution for the crimes, for which a jury convicted him after a three-week trial last summer. Manafort has shown little remorse, they say, and even lied under oath following a plea deal after the trial.
Prosecutor Greg Andres told Ellis that Manafort never gave meaningful help during his cooperation with the special counsel’s office, despite spending 50 hours together.“It wasn’t information we didn’t know,” Andres said. “The reason he met for 50 hours was because he lied.”
What do you think about Manafort’s sentence: too long or too lenient?
Published in Law, Politics
I know nothing about sentencing guidelines. I will have to wait for Andy McCarthy to let me know if this sentence is in line with what others get for similar crimes.
The problem, though, is that this whole process stinks to high heaven. I do not have faith in the integrity of our “justice” system after following the shenanigans of some in our law enforcement and law making institutions lately.
No fines?
Perhaps no one will agree with me, but I have long opposed imprisonment for anything other than violent offenses. White collar criminals, IMHO, should receive fines and a home incarceration ankle bracelet. They should also be obligated to do some sort of community service. Have we come no further than the debtor’s prisons of the 17th-19th centuries?
Also, it seems like anyone who wins the presidency ends up having staff guilty of campaign finance violations. That area of law is so complex that every candidate is going to violate something or other.
I am surprised. Is that it? If they proved the charges in the indictment then he’s guilty of a complex, very intentional, very large tax fraud. I know nothing about the “he lied” “he didn’t cooperate” or “he’s linked to Trumpcollusion, etc.” stuff, but I did read the indictment and it seemed his history of making large sums of money from foreign governments and not paying taxes on them was pretty well established. I supposed age and health might have lead to some compassion. I think there’s probably room for that. But of all the people Mueller has investigated, I thought Manafort the least sympathetic and the most clearly guilty of genuine crimes and non-politically motivated prosecution.
It seems a bit light, but didn’t it come as extraneous to the Russian collusion investigation? Or should I say, Russian collusion fishing trip? Perhaps the judge took it into account that the whole thing started as a political means of getting the opposition and gave a back handed slap to Mueller.
That thought has passed my mind too. Is it even possible to hold perfect campaigns without violations these days?
The BBC just assured me yesterday that he would die of old age in prison. He certainly deserves less time in prison than Crooked Hillary does.
Anyway, unless I hear otherwise, I picture him incarcerated in one of those fence free prisons on some US Air Force base, working in the library or groundskeeping the golf course.
This should fix everything.
That seems true though I can’t think of any big criminal prosecutions to date (Edwards I guess, but he was acquitted) Maybe something comes out of the Mueller probe though, but if it’s what we already know it’s week beer.
But Manafort wasn’t convicted by a jury for campaign violations. He was guilty of tax and bank fraud.
And I fully support jail for white collar crime. I’m glad Madoff went to jail. More to the point, if you steal money from people, especially small time investors like retirees, I’m fine with prison. It doesn’t seem right that the 19 y/o tough who robs a liquor store for $200 gets 5 in San Quentin but the Harvard MBA hedge fund manager who defrauds investors for 5 billion gets house arrest in his park ave pent house.
Yikes! Really tapped into my inner populist side there!
This is true in every way. I worked on a state senator’s campaign about twenty years ago. One morning we volunteer campaign staffers were the mail, and we got a lovely $200 donation. We asked the campaign manager where to record it. She said, “Wait a minute,” and she pulled down a six-inch-thick book. We could not believe our eyes.
Have any of you ever been audited and ended up paying more tax than you originally thought you owed? We were audited by the IRS going back for three years as our accountant informed us we had a legitimate loss carry forward allowing us to pay considerably less in taxes had we not had that loss. The IRS disagreed, so we got a tax lawyer and defended our return. It was expensive, but, we thought, worth it. Well, the IRS won, so we had to pay the taxes owed plus interest penalty. We certainly never considered for a moment that our loss would be disallowed, but there it is. Now, had we been high-profile politicians under investigation by Mueller, could they have made us sound like criminals?
It took a Special Prosecutor?
And don’t I recall hearing about an old law, now outdated of course, that talked about something called “equal protection”? Is that what Manafort got?
My wife and I were audited and it was terrifying even though we ended up with no deficiency. What you describe sounds very harrowing. But it’s not really analogous to what Manafort was charged with. He was convicted of purposefully hiding millions of dollars of income to defraud taxpayers like you and me in addition to lying to banks to get favorable lending terms. You, like most honest citizens, simply were trying to follow the law, Manafort was guilty of knowingly breaking it.
Since I know the author of the op to be something of a conservatarian, I’ll note that the defense bar (who is in a way my spirit animal) is not amused by Manafort’s sentence:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/paul-manafort-sentence-lawyers-say-clients-got-harsher-prison-terms-for-retail-theft-stealing-lawnmowers?ref=scroll
Though I want to add that I don’t think Manafort’s sentence is too lenient, only that too often sentences are unduly harsh.
But I happily acknowledge mine is a minority opinion amongst conservatives so don’t pillory me too much…
There is a pretty meaningful and usually obvious difference in the law between underpayment of taxes on reported income due to a good faith dispute about the application of tax law and tax fraud – which in Manafort’s case involved going to great and exotic lengths to hide taxable income from the IRS. The vast majority of audits that result in additional taxes being due do not result in criminal charges because the vast majority of the time it is a function of honest errors or good faith disagreements. What Manafort did was so extensive and so obviously illegal that it looked nothing like what you did. At bottom, he simply failed to report large amounts of income and engaged in a complicated scheme to hide it. To be a criminal you must intend to cheat. He did. No one could read those facts and doubt it. You, no doubt, didn’t.
I agree with you on the particular merits; however, the prosecutorial discretion bothers me a lot. Manafort was basically prosecuted for helping Donald Trump get elected. If there had been no shenanigans from a rogue justice department I suspect that he would be still enjoying his ill gotten gains. Also I don’t think what he did is that much more egregious than many other well connected politicos. The whole thing has caused me to loose so much faith in the process and people running it that I find myself glad that he is getting a light sentence.
I don’t think we can say for sure, but tax fraud does get prosecuted and this was a large and egregious case of it. I think it’s well within the realm of the possible that Manafort would have been prosecuted if he’d never met Trump. His crimes all pre-date the Trump campaign by a long way and he was a high profile guy who’s misbehavior kind of stuck out like a sore thumb. Frankly, I think the problem here is that Mueller handled the prosecution. It could and should have been handled much more cleanly by a line prosecutor and that would have mitigated any perception of political motivation. I believe I read Manafort was under investigation before the campaign anyway, which seems plausible, though I wouldn’t swear to it.
What I don’t understand is the fact that it took Mueller to uncover this instead of the IRS. Complicated tax returns such as those undoubtedly filed by Manafort are full of red flags and subject to audit. If the IRS didn’t see fit to refer him for prosecution, one would assume he settled with them long ago. We’ve all read the indictments, but I confess to knowing little about the details of his defense. Furthermore, he surely had professional accountants filing his returns who must have alerted him to what was and was not allowed.
That is absolutely right. Why is Mueller involved at all?
And when the IRS can find a potential problem in the return of an elderly grandmother whose only income is social security, Manafort should have been a cakewalk.
I think this debate was had at some point. But as a refresher, Manafort was under FBI investigation in 2014 for his work party bosses with the Putin backed Yonucovych party. As party chair for the 2016, he was probably the best place to look if you were tasked to investigate connections between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Obviously no connection was there via Manafort, but the special counsel shouldn’t permit this long time crook to go free. The debate, as I recall, was whether this should be kicked to the EDVA or anyone not Mueller. I think that can go either way but it doesn’t really change the guilt of Manafort. He hid money from the IRS, lied about it, then lied to banks about his assets so he could keep buying ostrich jackets. Oh yeah, he was an agent for Putin’s stooges too.
So no, I don’t think there is much similarity between Manafort’s decades of crime and shady dealing and someone who makes an error on her taxes.
The thing about our tax system is that it’s largely self reporting. And the thing about Manafort’s crimes is that a lot of it boils down to just not reporting income. When that income is coming from a foreign source that isn’t filing W-2s or 1099s like a US employer or counterparty would, there’s nothing to show up as a red flag. Basically in Manafort’s case it was a matter of “the guy’s obviously living like a king, where’s the money coming from?” But that has to come to the IRS’s attention through some informal means before it gets picked up and investigated. If Ukraine was filing 1099s on income Manafort wasn’t reporting the lack of a match would have been flagged easily and quickly. But with shady foreign sources of income, it doesn’t surprise me either that it wasn’t caught right away, or that Manafort thought he could get away with it. Frankly, if he’d kept a lower profile, he might have. For starters, don’t live in Northern Virginia, and of course don’t become a presidential campaign manager, if you don’t want to draw attention to your tax fraud.
See my comment below. The IRS has a lot of trouble identifying taxable income if neither the recipient nor the payor reports it. That’s exactly the kind of income Manafort was hiding – the kind nobody was going to report if he didn’t.
Look at it this way – if you babysit for cash, that’s taxable income. But the only way the IRS knows is if you tell it (assuming the people you sit for don’t, which is probable). That’s “under the table” income and it’s fairly common and very hard to track. It contrasts with employment income (for which somebody files a W-2) or investment or interest income (for which somebody files a 1099) or independent contractor income (ditto) in that the payor in those cases is reporting that they paid you and if you don’t report it on your tax returns, there’s a mismatch that the IRS’s computers can catch. Manafort’s under the table income didn’t come from a source that was making a separate report to the IRS so it was very hard to catch.
Many people live extremely well, especially in the wealthy, wealthy suburbs within commuting distance of Washington D.C. I still don’t understand why Mueller found crimes where a powerful IRS did not. People fear IRS audits with good reason in this country. He was also a partner in one of the most powerful lobbying firms in D.C. and no doubt was wealthy before he did work for Ukraine. Look, for example at Tony Podesta, another powerful lobbyist who was associated with Manafort and who was given immunity in exchange for testifying against Manafort. Podesta has a multi-million dollar art collection as well as homes all over the world.
I think you overestimate the investigatory power of the IRS, or rather, you place too much focus on its post-identification powers.
Something like 1% of returns get audited and this doesn’t account for the reductions in pay and personnel we have imposed on the agency.
So the IRS has to find a return they think is shady before they can launch an investigation. In contrast, as I said earlier, the FBI was investigating Manafort for 2 years prior to the special counsel. Tax returns and bank records are just about the first thing subpoenaed in a financial crimes investigation so I bet that’s how the feds got ahold of these documents.