Franklin Foer takes issue with Paul Manafort’s lenient sentence and the judge’s assertion that the convict “has lived an otherwise blameless life.”
“In an otherwise blameless life, he helped the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos bolster his image in Washington after he assassinated his primary political opponent. In an otherwise blameless life, he worked to keep arms flowing to the Angolan generalissimo Jonas Savimbi, a monstrous leader bankrolled by the apartheid government in South Africa… In otherwise blameless life, he produced a public-relations campaign to convince Washington that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was acting within his democratic rights and duties when he imprisoned his most compelling rival for power. In an otherwise blameless life, he stood mute as Yanukovych’s police killed 130 protesters in the Maidan.”
“In an otherwise blameless life, he attempted to phone a potential witness in his trial, so that they could align their stories… In an otherwise blameless life, he acted with impunity, as if the laws never applied to him… And with Ellis’s featherweight punishment, Manafort managed to bring his life’s project to a strange completion. He had devoted his career to normalizing corruption in Washington. By the time he was caught, his extraordinary avarice had become so commonplace that not even a federal judge could blame him for it.”
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