Friday, March 15, 2019

Light . . .

. . . sentence?

(from https://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-heffernan-manafort-blameless-0313-20190313-inx5veg56nfo5k35cp6qyzf2c4-story.html)
". . . Who knows how someone like Ellis (Judge T.S. Ellis III, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia) decides someone like Manafort deserves such magnificent leniency? To start, there’s this: The two men have class, race, gender and, evidently, party in common. . . Ellis, who turns 80 in May, was appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1987. In the same decade, Reagan also appointed Manafort, who had campaigned for him, to be associate director of the personnel office at the White House. . . It should go without saying that federal sentencing guidelines are no one’s partisan whim. They were established in the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, which passed with majority support in both houses. (The ‘80s were evidently a weird time when both parties cared about equality and justice.). . . Compare Ellis’ gratuitous hymn to Manafort’s angelic nature with the sentencing memo filed last month by Mueller’s team, which laid out how Manafort “repeatedly and brazenly violated the law” over the course of a decade. Even Manafort’s daughter described her father’s fortune as “blood money” and said he had no “moral or legal compass.” And even when Thomas J. Barrack Jr., Trump’s real estate crony, warmly recommended Manafort as campaign chair, he cited not the operator’s pure heart but his cold blood. He’s “lethal,” Barrack wrote. . .Evidently Manafort is lethal — to the moral reasoning of anyone who, like Ellis, might be blinded by gaudy-white-man social status. For five decades, Manafort has gotten a double-wide pass for his ego, his financial crimes and his whitewashing of regimes accused of human rights abuses. . ."


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