It’s official: Paul Manafort’s life is over, and Donald Trump is next
Judge Amy Berman Jackson read Paul Manafort the riot act today for his lifetime of crimes, his attempts at sabotaging his own trial, and his disingenuous contrition. She also took a direct shot at Donald Trump’s “no collusion” gibberish, which she called a “non-sequitur.” The judge then handed down a complicated sentence, which by law was partially required to overlap with his existing sentence. It wasn’t as long of a sentence as many were hoping for, but it’s enough to end Manafort’s life.
The net result of today’s sentencing is that Paul Manafort’s prison sentence has basically doubled, from around four years to around eight years. Because he’s already been locked up for nearly a year, he’ll end up doing another seven years. He’s about to turn seventy, so he’ll be locked up until he’s around age seventy-seven. Almost no one pulls that off while behind bars. Also, by law, he can only get a negligible amount of time off for good behavior on federal charges. Manafort will die in prison – and the insurance policy is already underway.
New York is moving ahead with state-level criminal charges against Paul Manafort, which will end up tacking additional years onto his sentence, so he’ll probably be in prison until he’s at least eighty. This also helps ensure that Donald Trump can’t get Manafort off the hook with a pardon, though there has been absolutely no indication at any point that Trump intends to actually pardon any of his advisers. Update: New York just charged Manafort on sixteen felony counts.
And so ends Paul Manafort’s life. That may be a harsh way to put it, but this is a career criminal who helped get protesters murdered in Ukraine, and who treasonously conspired with a foreign enemy to help rig a U.S. Presidential election and illegitimately install a traitor in the Oval Office. Manafort will die in a cage – and it’s a harbinger of the fate that Donald Trump faces once he’s ousted from office.
