BY BRIAN BEUTLER

& CROOKED MEDIA

Wednesday, March 13, 2019

—Howard Schultz: corny, corrupt, completely clueless

PARDON-PROOFING PRISON PAULIE

President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort will do years of hard time, and thanks to new charges just filed against him, there’s probably nothing Trump can do to save him.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Manafort to 73 months in federal prison for financial crimes and obstruction of justice convictions. Manafort will serve 30 of those concurrently with the extraordinarily lenient four-year sentence he received last week in Virginia, which means he will serve a maximum of 7.5 years total.

Side note: Isn’t it weird that it’s not a bigger deal that multiple people in Trump’s inner circle are felons? Or that the political establishment is treating the possibility of Trump pardoning Manafort as if it were the normal state of affairs?

That’s why it’s important that Manhattan’s district attorney, Cy Vance, unsealed a new Manafort indictment immediately after today’s sentencing. Vance has charged Manafort with mortgage fraud on the basis of documents unearthed in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. By indicting Manafort now, Vance has assured that even if Trump pardons him, he will be shipped straight up to New York to answer for new, state charges that Trump’s pardon power can’t reach.

And Manafort is definitely playing for a pardon. Speaking on the courthouse steps after the sentencing, as he did last week, Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing again lied to the cameras, claiming that “two courts have ruled no evidence of any collusion with any Russians."

Trump will be grateful for the lie, but it’s such an enormous lie that Judge Jackson actually pre-empted it in court.

• In the hearing, Jackson scolded Manafort’s lawyers, “The ‘no collusion’ refrain that runs through the entire defense memorandum is unrelated to matters at hand,” she said. “The ‘no collusion’ mantra is simply a non sequitur. The ‘no collusion’ mantra is also not accurate, because the investigation is still ongoing.”
• She added, “It’s not particularly persuasive to argue that an investigation hasn’t found anything when you lied to the investigators.” Good point!
• Manafort’s lawyers even conceded the point, in arguing for leniency, that Manafort only really lied to prosecutors about Mueller’s broader investigation, not the crimes he’s been convicted of. He only lied about collusion, your honor!

It’s good that Manafort’s crimes are now pardon proof. But even if Trump never pardons Manafort, or only pardons him after he becomes a lame duck, the fact that he’s been dangling pardons to bribe and tamper with witnesses is a reminder that Trump has no business in office, has committed impeachable offenses before our eyes, and Democrats should not give Republicans veto power over whether Congress holds him accountable for those offenses.

OBSTRUCTION JUNCTION

Former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker no longer denies that President Trump “called him to discuss the Michael Cohen case and personnel decisions in the Southern District [of New York],” according to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, who deposed Whitaker under oath on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

Whitaker also admitted he was involved in conversations with Trump about whether or not to fire one or more U.S. attorneys, the propriety of the Cohen case, and whether the Trump loyalist who runs the SDNY U.S. attorney’s office needed to be recused from it.  

Separately, an associate of President Trump’s criminal defense lawyer Rudy Giuliani told Michael Cohen to "sleep well tonight" because he had "friends in high places," after the FBI raided Cohen’s office, apartment, and hotel room in April 2018.

This all sounds pretty obstruction-y, even if it didn’t work.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has suspended the death penalty in California by executive order, sparing over 700 people currently on death row from execution. Good for Newsom.

The FAA has belatedly grounded all Boeing 737 Max aircraft in the U.S. on the basis of “new” satellite data it received on Monday, after basically every other country in the world had already grounded them. Possibly related: Boeing donated a million dollars to President Trump’s inaugural, its CEO has lobbied Trump directly at Mar-a-Lago, and until today had privately urged him not to ground the plane. Possibly related more: We need to see Trump’s tax returns.

“We need help sending some text messages tomorrow morning.” -Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign team, in emails to volunteers. Also, when you unsubscribe from his email list, you get a mopey note that says, “Email is how we keep in touch and share important updates about how you can be part of our campaign to elect Beto for president.”  🤔

Parliament has resolved that the U.K. should not leave the European Union without a deal in place with E.U. nations to smooth out the Brexit transition. Also, the Brexit deadline is March 29, and there is no deal in place. Parliament will vote Thursday on whether to request a delay of the deadline.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has told the court that disgraced Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn has completed his cooperation and is ready for sentencing, though Flynn’s attorney’s have asked for another sentencing delay because Flynn might testify in a case unrelated to Russia’s interference in the election.

In addition to thinking he can make Mitch McConnell be not terrible by offering him coffee [see above], ridiculous person Howard Schultz also promised not to nominate anyone to the Supreme Court unless he or she can be confirmed with a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Mitch McConnell will down the coffee, then give Schultz a choice between nominating hard-right justices and confirming nobody.

The Trump administration might shutter all 21 international U.S. Customs and Immigration services offices abroad, because it will gum up the family visa process, and the Trump administration is full of cruel racists.

A former Fox News reporter whose non-disclosure agreement prevents her from discussing how Fox spiked her reporting on Trump’s hush money payments before the election seems to want Congress to subpoena her, because the subpoena would override the NDA. Good idea!

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GSA Administrator Emily Murphy refused to answer questions about whether President Trump intervened to stop the government from moving FBI headquarters and selling the land where the current headquarters sits—across the street from Trump’s Washington, DC, hotel—to a developer. Murphy completely omitted the fact that she and Trump had discussed the FBI headquarters plans when she testified before the last Congress and is now standing in the way of Congress’s effort to determine whether Trump inserted himself into the process for corrupt, personal, financial reasons—even though Trump has not asserted executive privilege. Democrats need to stop accepting this kind of stonewalling and start subpoenaing administration officials who decline to answer questions about the president’s improprieties.

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