Paul Manafort, YOU ARE GUILTY! GO THE FUCK TO JAIL!
Manafort convicted on eight counts, jury hopelessly deadlocked on the other 10!
HOLY FUCK this afternoon! Michael Cohen just finished a hearing in a New York courtroom where he said, " DURRRR I AM SO GUILTY," but this post is not about that. This post is about how Paul Manafort verdict has just come out! He has been found guilty on eight of the 18 charges he faced in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA). The jury is hopelessly deadlocked on the other 10, and so a mistrial will be declared on those and Paul Manafort may get to be retried on them, in addition to his next trial over conspiracies against the United States and witness tampering, which starts next month in Washington DC. Maybe the government will decide Manafort is going to die in jail anyway, and play hooky from retrying those other counts. They probably need a vacay, don't you think?
Trump really does hire the best people!
NBC News's Ken Dilanian broke the news that Manafort has been convicted on five counts of tax fraud, one count of failing to report a foreign bank account on an IRS form, and two charges of bank fraud. The short version of that is that he is guilty of EIGHT FEDERAL FELONIES (so far) and he is going to jail for EIGHT MILLION YEARS for each count. (OK, that is probably not completely accurate. But still, welcome to prison, Paul Manafort!)
For those who want to look up such things, Manafort was convicted on counts 1-5, 12, 25 and 27. The first group are the tax fraud charges, and he was convicted on all of them. There were four counts of failure to report foreign bank accounts, and he was convicted on just one of those, in 2013. Guess that one was more glaring to the jurors than the others for some reason! Counts 25 and 27 are bank fraud charges, but do not appear to be the ones related to the weird little bank in Chicago where Manafort was (ALLEGEDLY!) promising the CEO he would get to be the secretary of "Army," in exchange for millions of dollars of loans. We hope the prosecutors retry that one just for shits and giggles.
The jury had deliberated for four days, and came back today with a note asking what happens if they're pretty sure about some of the counts, but not sure about others. Do they get to go home now? Judge T.S. Ellis, that silly goose, said no, that is not how this works, but that he would poll the jurors to see if more deliberation would help them come to a verdict on the other 10 counts. We were not in the courtroom but we are guessing it went like this:
ELLIS: Juror Number One, can you be a champ and do this, or are you fucked?
JUROR NUMBER ONE: Fucked.
And so on, for 11 more jurors.
(MORE LIKE 11 ANGRY DEMOCRAT JURORS, AM I RIGHT, DONALD TRUMP?)
Please note real fast that the full jury was able to agree that Manafort was guilty on these eight counts, and that the deadlock was over guilt on the others. This means some of the jury was pretty sure the government had argued its case and that Manafort is guilty of ALL OF IT.
We would tell you one million more details about Paul Manafort going to jail, but we are too busy right now because we have to finish our breaking news post about Michael Cohen also being GUILTY GUILTY GUILTY.
The point is that Paul Manafort is going to jail forever, hey, isn't it weird how everybody Donald Trump knows seems to be a gigantic fucking criminal? Yeah, it's pretty weird! Anyway, POST OVER.
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I used to give my cat (RIP, Hairy) that hairball stuff from a tube. Dude, I could not get the lid off fast enough!
Our gov't is basically the honor system (h/t Kumail Nanjiani)