The destiny of Manafort is in the hands of an Obama-appointed anti-Bush judge



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TThe judge who will convict former Trump campaign director, Paul Manafort in federal court, was appointed by President Barack Obama, backed John Kerry at the White House in 2004 and suggested to George W. Bush to steal the presidency in 2000.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, of the District Court, ruled for the Obama administration against the Catholic Church and for Hillary Clinton against the families of those killed in Benghazi. She has already fought violently with Manafort's legal team, setting the stage for a much harsher sentence than that imposed by Justice T.S. less than four years ago. Ellis III, former US fighter pilot appointed by President Ronald Reagan.

Manafort, 69, faces up to 10 years in prison for the two conspiracy charges Jackson is considering. If she opts for the maximum, she could be serving a life sentence, especially if she decides that both sentences of Manafort must be consecutive. Although Ellis has often criticized the special advocate Robert Mueller, Jackson is lined up on him.

"I think she's going to shoot him," said Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard, this week. "The last thing I would like is to be condemned by her."

While Ellis showed sympathy for Manafort throughout his trial in Virginia, Jackson had given no indication of his leniency penchant. She rescinded Manafort's bail for allegations of falsifying witnesses, having jailed him at his trial, and agreed with Mueller that Manafort had broken his plea agreement.

In 2017, she barked against Manafort's lawyers, "It's a criminal trial, and it's not a public relations campaign … I'm waiting for that the lawyers will testify in this courtroom and in their pleadings and not on the court steps. "

Last month, Jackson agreed with the Office of the Special Advisor that Manafort "intentionally made false statements to the FBI, the OSC and the grand jury." As a result, the plea agreement between Manafort and the government was rescinded, thus making it enforceable. stiff sentence.

She also chairs the Mueller case involving Trump's long-time confidant, Roger Stone. She expressed her frustration with the "trickster" who described himself and imposed a gag order on the case. Stone had posted a picture on Instagram with what looked like a crosshair next to his head, which he then cleared and apologized. Jackson told Stone, "I'm not giving you another chance." She has a separate hearing for Stone Thursday that could put him in jail for the duration of his trial.

Jackson, 64, was born in Baltimore and his father was a doctor who practiced at Johns Hopkins University after training in the US military. Her ex-husband, Darryl Jackson, is a Republican who has been deputy secretary of President George W. Bush's administration.

Their son Matt became a viral sensation on the Internet during his series of 13 episodes on Jeopardy in 2015. He grew up in a bipartite and biracial family. He said: "My mother is white, liberal and Jewish, my father is black, Christian and conservative."

It is unclear whether the Jackson have ever discussed politics at home. But in 2004, she co-wrote an opinion piece in the Legal Times, in which she argued that the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, should be elected in Bush's place, who considered "the system with contempt "and security" by judicial means ". process "after the 2000 elections.

She also wrote that John Ashcroft, Bush's Attorney General, was "an indisputable politician who could not win against a dead opponent," referring to the 2000 Senate elections in Missouri, when Ashcroft had been defeated by the governor Mel Carnahan, killed in an attack. plane crash three weeks earlier.

During her hearing before the Senate in 2011, when she was introduced by D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, she stated that "in retrospect, the wording of the article was too harsh" and that she had "a lot of respect" for Ashcroft.

Harvard graduate and granddaughter of four immigrants, Jackson paid tribute to a grandmother who "came here, learned the language, became a citizen and was a suffragette". It was confirmed in the Senate by 97-0.

As a judge, Jackson has tended to be liberal. In 2013, she launched a challenge launched by the Catholic Church to the contraceptive mandate under Obamacare. In 2017, she ruled in favor of the government and rejected the two cases that had been presented to her as a result of a data breach in which 21 million employees of the federal government and of any future employees had been exposed to personal information.

Also in 2017, Jackson dismissed a lawsuit for wrongful death against Hillary Clinton by family members of those killed in the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012. On a question of transparency, she said pronounced against the Obama administration, declaring that the government could not claim the privilege of the leadership in the scandal Fast and Furious, ordering the publication of thousands of pages of documents.

Prior to joining the federal judiciary, Mr. Jackson worked for a decade at Trout Cacheris & Solomon, a DC Plato Cacheris-based law firm, who joined the firm after Jackson, with clients including John Mitchell, Attorney General. President Richard Nixon; Monica Lewinsky, the intern at the White House who had an affair with President Bill Clinton; and CIA officers Aldrich Ames and FBI Robert Hanssen, both of whom betrayed the United States to Russia.

Perhaps the best clue as to how Jackson could treat Manafort comes from the conviction of another Mueller defendant, Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who lied to investigators. He received 30 days from Jackson, more than twice the severity of the previous two weeks. George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign collaborator, also involved in the Mueller investigation, received from his colleague, Judge Randy Moss, the same crime.

She criticized Van der Zwaan, who, like Manafort, led a privileged life and entered into a plea bargain for not expressing remorse. She said: "It is true that he pleaded guilty, and it would not be fair to treat this accused more severely because it is about 39, a high-profile investigation, I came to the conclusion that the offense warranted a period of incarceration. "

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