the eight felony counts for which he was convicted in virginia. so separate and apart from whatever he might get in d.c., mueller s prosecutors are recommending that the president s campaign chairman spend between 19 1/2 years and 24 1/2 years in prison. again, just for the felonies for which he was convicted in virginia. separate and apart from what he s going to get in d.c. now for a man who is about to turn 70, that means prosecutors are recommending what is in effect a natural life sentence for paul manafort. you will recall that there is no parole in the the federal prison system. so 19 to 24 years. we re going to get to that manafort situation in a little more detail in a second. but this sentencing recommendation from these prosecutors, it not only spells out what they re hoping to get from the judge in virginia in terms of manafort s sentence. what s interesting about it and what s worth taking a closer look at in terms of the prosecutor s memo tonight, is
that they also in making this case to the judge, they summarized what they believed to have been manafort s crimes and their seriousness and whether or not he s done other things on top of those crimes that mean he should have even more of the book thrown at him. so it is worth looking at that in detail and we re going to get there in just a moment. before we do that, though, we shouldn t let the sort of magnitude of what just happened with the president s campaign chair, we shouldn t let that push aside a couple of other really important things that happened today before we get the manafort sentencing memo. so there are a couple of other things that basically got ripe and fell off the tree today when it comes to two other cases that derive from mueller s investigation. the first one is about roger stone, president trump s longtime adviser. he was arrested at his home in florida three weeks ago today. mr. stone has pleaded not guilty to seven felony charges. he says he s innocent every
prosecutors notified the court that they considered his case to have a sibling. they considered his case to be formally legally related to this other case that has this case number that you can see here 18cr215. that case is the mueller indictment of a dozen russian military intelligence officers. that case is the gru indictment. one of the core indictments of mueller s investigation was that gru indictment from last year. in that indictment mueller charged russian military intelligence officers with, quote, conspireing to hack into the computers of u.s. persons and entities involved in the 2016 u.s. presidential election to steal documents from those computers and to stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. that s how mueller s prosecutors have sort of nutted up that indictment. that s what those gru officers were charged with. now, roger stone and his attorneys had objected to the
manafort intentionally lied to prosecutors about important things, about matters that were material to their investigation, including the extent of his contacts with someone who prosecutors say is linked to russian intelligence. so that ruling happened a couple of days ago this week. after that ruling this week, prosecutors in the special counsel s office moved quickly to start the process of manafort finally getting sentenced for his crimes. now, manafort is facing sentencing both in the eastern district of virginia, which is where he had his trial. that s where he was convicted of eight felonies. he s also facing sentencing in washington, d.c. that s the court where he pled guilty to two felonies and started what was supposed to be his deal with prosecutors, which he blew up by lying to them. well, tonight we ve just received the recommendation from mueller s office as to how much time they think manafort should spend in prison based just on
investigating tax evasion and whether or not you filed as a federal lobbyist? all the stuff that s been done to either manafort or flynn or any of the others really seems to be about other subjects and really what they did to flynn, i think, was unconscionable and i m hoping that means mueller has a conscience. maybe it s not that flynn gave so much information. maybe mueller has a conscience and knows how unfair it is what they did to flynn. he was never discussing anything illegal but it gets tied up in talking to the fbi whether he was explicit, even though the original fbi agent said they did not think he was being duplicitous, they did not think he was lying. so it s very troubling what these special prosecutors can do. i tell people this. if a special prosecutor went after your life for the last 40 years, not you in particular but anybody, i think they could dredge up accusations. so i m absolutely against it and i think it s a miscarriage of justice and we should not have specia