In The End, Judge Notes Manafort's Excuses Were For Show
In spite of the sentence that many of us think was needlessly lenient, Judge Amy Berman Jackson nevertheless whipped Manafort and his attorneys from the bench for the sympathy mongering they've attempted in court. Glenn Kirshner explained this to Andrea Mitchell:
GLENN KIRSCHNER: What Judge Jackson just did, she took down every unsupportable claim that Manafort and his attorney have been making. For example, she said, 'Sir, you claim you're suffering from gout, and I'm not disputing that, but neither you nor your attorneys have presented me inform any information about that. No medical records. Not so much as a letter from a doctor asking me to take any action.' She also took down the mantra he's been subjected to solitary confinement. Essentially when he was in the Northern Neck Regional Facility, a jail in Virginia, he had like a one-person suite with a spare room to do his work in, with computer access and a television and a phone. Then she also accused both he and his lawyers of being disingenuous for a number of claims, most importantly the "no collusion" claim. 'Your no collusion mantra is', in her words, 'not factual because the investigation, the special counsel's investigation is not complete.' She really took both the defendant himself and the attorneys to task for certain representations that they had been making.
I guess Kirschner or some MSNBC brass thought it might be in poor taste to mention this: