Paul Manafort's day was worse than yours. It went from a truly bad day...
Paul Manafort was sentenced to 73 months in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday following his conviction on charges of unregistered foreign lobbying and witness tampering.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the former Trump campaign manager to 60 months on the first count, running concurrently to 30 months of the 47-month sentence imposed in his Virginia case last week.
She also sentenced him to 13 months on the witness tampering count to be served consecutively with the count one sentence and his Virginia sentence.
That would mean an additional 43 months overall, bringing the total time he faces behind bars, including the nine months that he has already served in Virginia, to 81 months.
Put another way, the combined sentences of 90 months amount to seven-and-a-half years.
The judge also ordered Manafort to pay one-time restitution of $6.16 million to the Internal Revenue Service, the same amount he was sentenced to pay in the Virginia case.
As he left the courthouse, Manafort attorney Kevin Downing told ABC News that he was "disappointed" in the sentence. He called Judge Jackson "hostile towards Mr. Manafort," with a level of "callousness" he said he hasn't seen in his many years of white-collar prosecution.
...to exponentially worse as soon as his sentence was announced.
President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was indicted Wednesday by a state grand jury in New York on charges of residential mortgage fraud — the announcement coming just minutes after Manafort was sentenced in federal court in Washington to more than seven years in prison.
The charges filed against Manafort may stand as a kind of prosecutorial insurance policy against a possible presidential pardon — a scenario that Trump has refused to discuss as Manafort’s case worked its way through the federal court system. The president has called Manafort brave for fighting his case against special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Under the Constitution, presidents have wide authority to pardon, but that power applies only to federal convictions, not state cases.
New York State Attorney General Letitia James has urged the legislature to fix what Democrats call a “double-jeopardy loophole” in state law that could negate New York’s ability to prosecute anyone pardoned by the president.
State law protects people from repeat prosecutions for the same alleged crimes, and does not make an exception for instances where a pardon has been granted by the president.
“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said in a statement announcing the indictment. “Following an investigation commenced by our office in March 2017, a Manhattan grand jury has charged Mr. Manafort with state criminal violations which strike at the heart of New York’s sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market.”
To recap, even if Trump pardons Manafort tomorrow, he's stil;l facing state charges that Trump can do nothing about, and he's most likely going away for a very long time.
Bye, Paulie.
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