We begin today’s roundup with Matt Stieb’s analysis of Paul Manafort’s lenient sentence:
It shouldn’t be controversial to say that Paul Manafort has not led an “otherwise blameless life,” and it’s a symptom of American virtue-signalling to the wealthy that the judge expressed such a view before handing over the lenient sentence. To be clear, the short sentence is not the problem here. It can be simultaneously true that Manafort spent the bulk of his life in a pattern of fraudulent behavior and amoral power-broking, and that he shouldn’t spend the rest of it in prison blues. The concern in Manafort’s case is the sentencing gap in America. [...]
Class and race work together in the prosecutor’s office, judge’s chambers, and juror’s box, providing something close to a systemic guarantee: a poor person, or person of color – or one of the millions of Americans to which both identities apply – will not face the same criminal justice system that men like Paul Manafort experience.
Franklin Foer at The Atlantic dives deep into the details of Manafort’s corruption:
[W]hy did Paul Manafort put himself in this position? He could have cooperated truthfully with Mueller and lightened his sentence. But he attempted to keep vital chapters of his story shrouded in lies. He wanted them to remain a mystery. Perhaps Mueller has already filled in those gaps and has gleaned a complete narrative. But there’s another possibility. Without Manafort’s cooperation, we might never gain clarity about some of the most disturbing questions that still hover around him.