Re: Manafort
Posted: Wed Mar 23, 2022 11:57 am
Dubai hasn't joined the worldwide sanctions on Russia, so a lot of Russians are trying to cash in their bitcoins and buy land there these days.
Oh, interesting point.raison de arizona wrote: ↑Wed Mar 23, 2022 2:57 pm Folks on the bird site have been speculating as to why Manafort was flying out of FL to a country not observing Russian sanctions. FL is not near where he lives, but does just happen to be where tfg does.![]()
Ex-Trump adviser Paul Manafort says seeing prisoners being transferred reminded him of 'movies about the Holocaust': book
Manafort, according to the Guardian, recounted his experience in the federal prison system in the book, writing that at an airfield "somewhere in Ohio" seeing "prisoners...being herded in long lines and then separated into other buses and on to...transport planes…reminded me of movies about the Holocaust."
Manafort's memoir, "Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced," is due for release on August 16. In the book, he painted himself as a victim of the Mueller probe and the justice system.
Manafort also revealed in the book that he informally advised people close to the Trump campaign after he was released from prison to serve the rest of his sentence in home confinement amid the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020. But Manafort kept this advising under wraps because he didn't want to be scapegoated for Trump losing and thus jeopardize his chances of receiving a presidential pardon, per the excerpt.
"I didn't want anything to get in the way of the president's re-election or, importantly, a potential pardon," Manafort wrote, according to the Guardian.
Former 2016 Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort arranged for transcripts of his plea hearings to be sent to federal prison to prove to inmates that he wasn’t a “rat,” he wrote in a forthcoming book.
Manafort wrote that he needed to prove himself after conflict erupted between him and “Billie J” — a prisoner incarcerated with him at FCI Loretto who Manafort dubbed a “hypocrite” and a bully. Billie J, in Manafort’s telling, abused his power over the jailhouse commissary, using “his role there to get people hard to find commissary goods — for a price, of course.”
Yeah, there was a two minute or so clip of him talking about his book, but it was boring shilling so I didn't bother posting it. But that is why they had him on the air, I suppose.
Trump-pardoned felon Paul Manafort: “Yes, they’re targeting me and they’re targeting the president, but really they’re coming for the American people. The American people’s power to vote is a threat to their attempt to seize power and take control of all levers of govt.”
The title of Paul Manafort’s memoir, Political Prisoner, is ridiculous, but at least he’s writing what he knows. For much of his professional life, Manafort served as a lobbyist and an image consultant for the world’s most prolific torturers. One of his clients, the Angolan revolutionary Jonas Savimbi, led an army that incinerated its enemies alive. Another of his clients, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, dumped hundreds of mutilated corpses in the streets to show the price of opposing him.
After spending 23 months in prison on charges of bank fraud, witness tampering, conspiracy, and tax evasion—the longest stretch in a low-security facility in Pennsylvania—Manafort now places himself in the same category as the victims of rape and beatings whose suffering he was once handsomely paid to minimize. This grotesque conflation feels like the fitting capstone to his career.
After decades of working to soften the reputations of dictators, corporations, and Republican senatorial candidates, he’s now applying his craft to himself. His book is an attempt at redeeming a career wrecked by Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, who portrayed him as one of the most corrupt characters to ever bestride Washington. With little prospect of ever representing fancy clients again, or perhaps even finding himself a new slate of scoundrels, he has discovered that his best hope is to rebrand himself as a right-wing martyr, a victim of the same forces that Donald Trump says conspired to end his presidency.
But his greatest enemy is Andrew Weissmann, the prosecutor that Mueller assigned to his case. He depicts Weissmann as a wicked grand inquisitor bent on pressuring Manafort into submission. (Out of either spite or sloppiness, Manafort consistently misspells his tormentor’s name.) The central thesis of the book is that Weissmann wanted to inflict so much pain on Manafort that he would turn state’s witness and feel no choice but to parrot the special prosecutor’s lies about Trump.