Mueller asks for September 7th sentencing for Papadopoulos - Polidicks

http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/393798-mueller-asks-for-september-sentencing-for-papadopoulos Robert Mueller's office of the special counsel has asked a judge for a September 7 sentencing hearing for former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos. Politico reports that Mueller's attorneys asked U.S. District Court Judge Randy Moss to set Papadopoulos’ sentencing for Sept. 7 or a date in October if the judge cannot grant the first date. Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign and last year plead guilty of lying to FBI agents about his contacts with pro-Russian sources during the 2016 election. He is one of three Trump associates, the others being businessman Rick Gates and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, to plead guilty to making false statements. The former Trump campaign aide was arrested last July and has been out on bond since pleading guilty.President Trump sought to distance himself from the aide after he pleaded guilty, describing Papadopoulos as a low-level volunteer with few real responsibilities. Papadopoulos and his fiancee have pushed back on that assertion. "Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!" Trump tweeted in October. The New York Times reported last year that Papadopoulos sparked the Russia investigation that would eventually be headed by Mueller after he drunkenly bragged to an Australian diplomat that the Russians had damaging information on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton before the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee's emails became publicly known. Australian government officials then tipped off the FBI to the aide's remarks, which later evolved into the now year-long special counsel probe that has dominated headlines during Trump's presidency. Mueller's also gotten more prosecutors on his team,

This is probably a bad idea, if he's sentenced before the impeachment then he will be pardoned.

I'm almost inclined to believe that Mueller's team has thought of that, and that, if nothing else, could be used as a point of argument for and direct attacks on Trump down the road.

Isn't a pardon an admission of guilt as well? I'd figured he's charged with other things, and if he gets sentenced on some and pardoned it would by extension admit other charges (this is a really skewed view so take it with a chunk of salt I'm not exactly knowledgeable on this) I agree though we need a lot of time to do this properly but with the escalation of events in recent days I feel like time isn't on our side.

It's been said about 1000 times in every thread it's been brought up in, but no, a pardon is not an admission of guilt. However, receiving a guilty verdict and then receiving a pardon after, is a different story.

Papadopoulos has already pled guilty. He's a cooperating witness who has told everything he knows to Mueller, and even wore a wire for him. There are other charges that weren't filed because Papadopoulos took the plea deal, but unless I've missed some development, Papadopoulos has already given everything he's capable of giving, and no additional charges are likely unless the investigative team uncovers new and worse conduct that might not have been covered by the original deal. Given that the nature of his plea deal was to eliminate some charges in exchange for a single lesser charge, he'll likely only be serving a minimum sentence for the one count he pled guilty to.

That's mostly what I'm concerned with. If Trump pardons him then it'd be a clear indication that cooperating is not worth it for selfish reasons.

In this context, a pardon wouldn't really make a difference, correct. I was making a more general point to counter what I have been seeing lately in threads, which is people assuming that a pardon can only be issued to someone who actually committed a crime. I was trying to explain that a pardon can be given basically any time for any thing.

It'd be the first direct pardon, but he's been indirectly broadcasting this message loud and clear. He and his cronies are constantly floating the possibility of pardons on Twitter and in the media, and he's made several pardons of high profile conservatives who were "treated unfairly" by the FBI.

Well plenty of judges and even former presidents think you're wrong there. It doesn't matter if you pled not guilty or didn't even get convicted yet, a pardon is tantamount to an admission of guilt.

I'd argue against this by saying a pardon is not explicitly an admission of guilt, and that the practice and interpretation of pardons has been varied at best. Some examples of how pardons have been interpreted and used in practice can be found here: Is accepting a pardon an admission of guilt?

You're both right. Per the Supreme Court ruling over a hundred years ago, accepting a pardon was tantamount to confessing guilt. In the time since, the application of pardons has changed quite a bit, and they are now regularly used to symbolically pardon people for all matter of things, including those who have been been falsely convicted, those who were convicted under extremely hostile and improper circumstances, etc. Basically, the original meaning of accepting a pardon has changed due to time and application. It no longer inherently confers an admission of guilt in practice.