• Paul Manafort trial starts with jury selection
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https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/31/politics/manfort-trial-jury-selection/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+CNN+-+Top+Stories%29 Alexandria, Virginia (CNN)The trial of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort began Tuesday with jury selection, sending special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into a new phase with its first case before a jury. Manafort arrived at the courthouse Tuesday morning wearing a black suit, with his hair neatly parted. Judge T.S. Ellis held a final pre-trial meeting with prosecutors and the defense team before beginning the jury selection process. Opening arguments in the case are likely this week, and the trial is expected to last several weeks. Manafort's trial, in which he faces charges on 18 counts of violating tax and banking laws, is a high-profile test of the Mueller team's investigation into Russian election interference in 2016. Manafort was a senior Trump campaign aide and he led the campaign for several months, but the charges are not directly related to campaign activity, as the White House has repeatedly emphasized. "The judge has very strictly instructed no mention of Paul Manafort's role in the Trump campaign, no mention of Trump, Russia or collusion," senior White House aide Kellyanne Conway said on Fox News Tuesday morning. "This trial obviously centers on matters that have nothing to do with the campaign." While Trump has repeatedly railed against Manafort and the "witch hunt" on Twitter in recent weeks, he has not tweeted about Manafort specifically in more than a month, when he said Manafort received a "tough sentence" after his bond was revoked over allegations of witness tampering. Manafort faces a maximum of 305 years in prison if he is convicted on all charges. Prosecutors say Manafort hid millions of dollars in income from lobbying for Ukrainian politicians, failed to pay taxes while spending the money on US real estate and luxury purchases and lied to banks to take out more than $20 million in loans. Before jury selection got underway, Ellis said that he did not plan to offer decisions on Tuesday about all of the documents that Manafort's team wants to keep out of trial. They hope to prevent jurors from seeing some documents and photos from Manafort's lobbying work in Ukraine. Instead, the judge gave broad directions to the prosecutors: Try to reduce the number of Ukrainian documents given to the jury, use testimony to add context and don't refer to individual documents in opening statements. Ellis said he thinks "the government's correct" in using the documents to broadly show how Manafort made his money. Prosecutors say Manafort made $60 million from his work.
https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1024311235981000704?s=19
Either he's a moron or has something so bad on Trump he's willing to to go to prison over it. Or he's holding out a pardon from the orange.
He can't pardon him. Tyrants have been killed for less.
Actually yeah, he can pardon him. Hell Ford pardoned Nixon pretty much the moment he swore in. The only way these guys are ever are going to see prison time is if either Trump decides it's not worth the effort or everyone involved gets impeached and charged at the same time.
Just a reminder that the President has no power to pardon state charges. Also, if Trump pardons Manafort, he cannot plead the Fifth to avoid being compelled to testify against anyone else, including the President. So be careful what you wish for, Trump, you just might be allowed to have it.
WaPo has had good coverage of the first two days of the trial https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/manafort-on-trial-a-scorched-earth-prosecutor-and-not-a-mention-of-trump/2018/07/31/848e831e-9508-11e8-810c-5fa705927d54_story.html?utm_term=.27a6f3946e36 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/08/01/paul-manafort-trial-day-two/?utm_term=.c796eec882f7
Huge if true https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1025084802301603840?s=19
Ellis has been pushing prosecutors to speed up their case and has expressed annoyance about the volume of evidence they have attempted to introduce at various points. His court district, the Eastern District of Virginia, has a reputation for pushing cases through quickly, earning it the nickname “Rocket Docket” among D.C.-area lawyers. Obviously better to do this quickly rather than properly. What a shitty judge. Shitty district too. Expediency might be important but not at the expense of doing a thorough and proper job. As with earlier witnesses, the focus on Manafort’s lavish spending drew the irritation of Judge T.S. Ellis III, who questioned how it proved the government’s case that Manafort filed false tax returns. Could this guy miss the point any more? He's repeatedly done this in two freaking days now and is totally missing the overarching point of the lavishness of the spending: Manafort was spending ridiculous amounts of money. Something that would easily be tied to his overseas accounts since he obviously didn't make that much locally or legally according to the US government. https://twitter.com/rachelweinerwp/status/1024719901691441152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw I dunno, I think a million dollars on suits alone across four years is kinda relevant to the case's subject. But hey, what do I know. https://www.justice.gov/file/1038391/download On page 27: https://i.imgur.com/cxuBFoG.png That's $13,832,298 reported income across those years. So he apparently spent 6.7% of his income just on suits alone. Not to mention all the house-related stuff mentioned in the two articles. One single contractor being paid $3,000,000 or so in total when there's multiple contractors. (That's 21.6% of his income across those years by the way.) Judge T.S. Ellis III continued to show impatience with questions from prosecutors that he believed were intended merely to display Manafort’s lavish lifestyle. For instance, he allowed Katzman to describe Manafort’s annual spending but not to add up the total for jurors. “Let’s move on. Enough is enough,” Ellis said sternly. “They can add.” This judge comes across a little bit biased. Or just a total fucking moron who's good at missing the point even when it's spelled out for him. Not going to go further into things because this is already a long post and it looks like this is only about a third of the way through the second article but I think I made my point clearly enough.
From Politico “Really? It takes publication? No, let’s move on,” Ellis said Wednesday afternoon in rejecting a Mueller prosecutor’s request to post a photograph of an expensive suit Manafort had purchased. Later Wednesday, Ellis cut off a Mueller prosecutor’s line of questioning with a Virginia landscaper who’d been describing in painstaking detail the work he’d done building an outdoor kitchen, living room and g arden at one of Manafort’s homes, “You’re done. Let’s move on,” the judge said. Ellis polices the lawyers’ language as well as their facial expressions On Wednesday he warned prosecutors against using the word “oligarchs” to describe the wealthy men who paid Manafort for his political consulting work on behalf of the country’s ousted president, Viktor Yanukovych. In May, during oral arguments on a preliminary motion to toss out the charges, the judge suggested that Mueller’s team had pursued the case — which is unrelated to the 2016 election — mainly to “tighten the screws” on Manafort and turn him into a government witness in the Russia probe. “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Ellis said. “You really care about getting information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment.” Amid a discussion about Manafort’s email accounts, Ellis interrupted: “I’m not a person of this century — and maybe not the last century. … I don’t have an email account. Never have. Never will.” The judge has also acknowledged his senior moments. He caught himself last week after sending the prospective jurors out of the courtroom before he’d given them instructions not to discuss the case with anyone. On Tuesday, he recognized late in the process that he’d forgotten to ask jurors whether they had any potential conflicts of interest with any of the financial institutions that were named in the indictment against Manafort. And after a dispute arose over whether one of Manafort’s attorneys had, during opening arguments, violated the judge’s admonition not to mention Russia, Ellis copped to spacing out. “I should have paid more attention,” he said. “I didn’t except for the very beginning.” “My hearing is not what it once was,” Ellis added Wednesday after asking a witness to speak louder. “Nothing is what it once was.” The judge’s sharp edges do tone down when it comes to the jurors. When one man began answering one of his questions before he was finished, Ellis joked, “I know I’m predictable. My wife says that’s one of my only virtues.” Ellis also enjoys teasing jurors about the free lunch they get in exchange for their service. “Those selected as jurors I hope you will not hurry to slit your wrists. There’s a positive side,” he said on Tuesday. He has noted several times that baked Alaska is not on the courthouse menu. Did Mueller agree to have the trial with this judge?
Absolutely. And for good reason -- this judge is known to be harsh on the party he intends to rule in favor for. He's so harsh because he really really hates appeals - so he tries to make all his judgments effectively 'unrepealable' by making them absolutely airtight. In other words, if Manafort gets convicted in this court, it's extremely unlikely that even the best lawyer in the country could get him a retrial.
Well, at least Manafort gets his right to a speedy trial, I guess.
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