Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be windy, with snow flurries, and a high of thirty. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 5:38 PM, for 11h 01m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 69.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred thirty-seventh day.
On this day in 1863, the 28th and 29th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery take part in an expedition to Yazoo Pass by Moon Lake in Mississippi.
Recommended for reading in full:
Andrew Prokop reports Mueller issues new sentencing memo for Paul Manafort:
Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed a second sentencing memo taking former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort to task for what he says is years of illegal activity.
“For over a decade, Manafort repeatedly and brazenly violated the law,” Mueller’s team writes. “His crimes continued up through the time he was first indicted in October 2017 and remarkably went unabated even after indictment.”
The special counsel did not recommend a specific sentence for Manafort, but said his sentence “must take into account the gravity of this conduct.”
Manafort was convicted of financial crimes after a trial in Virginia, and then struck a plea deal to avert a second trial in Washington, DC. So he will be sentenced by two different judges — T.S. Ellis III in Virginia, and Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia.
Mueller’s first sentencing memo for Manafort was filed last week, in Virginia, and focused on Manafort’s financial crimes. This second sentencing memo is focused on illegal lobbying and obstruction of justice.
See Sentencing Memorandum:
[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/gov.uscourts.dcd_.190597.525.0_1.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]Reviewing the latest sentencing memorandum, Franklin Foer considers The Loud Silence of Mueller’s Manafort Memo (“A court filing by the special counsel is filled with elegant omissions—but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing there”):
The Mueller team’s sentencing recommendation is, however, an important document of Manafortology. It is the legal equivalent of a magazine profile—that is, a psychologically-driven character study with historical sweep. The prosecutors have gone back to the 1980s and toured his career.
When I first started reporting on Paul Manafort three years ago, I kept looking for a redeeming flicker of humanity. Editors would push me: “Surely, he started off as an idealist, before taking his moral tumble?” They were aching for what we call in the trade the “to-be-sure graf,” where a journalist displays all of the pieces of contrary evidence in plain view. Reader, let me tell you, I searched hard to find that sliver of goodness, and it eluded me.
It seems that the prosecutors ended up with the pretty much the same conclusion: There’s simply nothing redeeming in Paul Manafort’s career—or as they put it, “no warranted mitigating factors.” He engaged in his elaborate schemes for “no other reason than greed,” the court filing says. The prosecutors are constantly lifting their jaw from the floor, because they simply can’t believe their subject’s “hardened adherence to committing crimes.” Even when Manafort had been initially indicted, he kept right on tampering with witnesses without apparent conscience or self-consciousness.