income tax returns, one count of failing to file a foreign bank account report, and two counts of bank fraud. mr. manafort acknowledges that he received a fair trial before this court. he accepts the jury s verdict. he is truly remorseful for his conduct. mr. manafort submits this snntsing memorandum to aid the court in determining an appropriate sentence. quote, the u.s. probation office has calculated under u.s. sentencing guidelines an advisory sentencing range of roughly 19 1/2 to 24 years. this range is clearly disproportionate to the conduct for which mr. manafort was convicted. the defense submits that a sentence substantially below the range calculated by probation is warranted. and that s how it starts. thereafter we ve got 40 or so more pages of how what paul manafort is really no big deal, and we get lots and lot of letters of support from his relatives about what a good guy he is. on page 11 of this new filing
you might remember headlines a few weeks ago about buzzfeed, buzzfeed prevailing in a libel case. buzzfeed published the christopher steele dossier. buzzfeed was sued by a russian guy whose name appeared in unredacted fashion in that dossier, that libel case against buzzfeed made headlines recently in december because that case, the libel case was not successful. buzzfeed won the case. the case is over, but now the judge in that case appears to have just ruled that a whole bunch of information and proceedings that were part of that case are going to be unsealed and shown to the public within the next two weeks. among those things that are going to be unsealed is apparently the deposition that was made in that case by christopher steele himself. the former british spy who collected those intelligence memos that became the famous/infamous christopher steele dossier.
had intentionally lied. when i say exculpatory material, even though the stuff was being shown to the judge, what prosecutors told the judge is that this new material that had shown up helped manafort s case, didn t help their own side, helped manafort s side. we don t know what this new material was that the prosecutors turned up and dutifully handed over to the judge. we got some filings on it. as you can see, it looks like mad libs, right? it s more redactions than words. nobody s been able to quite put it together, but we do know that the material the prosecutors handed over to the judge, it appears to be about paul manafort s relationship with con stan tine ka lem nick. he s the russian guy who worked for manafort for years. he s the guy who prosecutors say has been assessed by the fbi to be linked to russian intelligence. this week manafort s former co-defendant the guy who served as deputy campaign chair on the trump campaign, rick gates, gates apparently saw news coverage about
white house about whether or not pardoning paul manafort would make it look like the president was pardoning the guy who was the link between the trump campaign and russian intelligence during the russian attack on the campaign. i mean, the special counsel s office has said in court filings and there are prosecutors who have said in open court that this guy kilimnik, manafort s right-hand man, right, he is assessed by the fbi to have active links to russian intelligence. this big redactions fight that s been happening over the past week in d.c. is that manafort s defense has been insisting that other stuff about kilimnik needs to be unredacted. it needs to come out from behind those black boxes in order to balance out that assertion from the prosecutors that kilimnik is russian intelligence. specifically what they ve been fighting to unredact in these public facing filings and transcripts are their own assertions from the defense side
is that it would be more politically palatable for paul manafort to get a presidential pardon if paul manafort seems like a grown-up altar boy who became just a poor old, you know, normally corrupt guy who had gotten away with all his financial crimes for years, and who only got caught this time this year because of his unfortunate turn at the helm of the trump campaign. poor old corrupt guy never would have otherwise been caught, just getting away with his normal corrupt stuff. how could he know that the spotlight might eventually fall on his foreign bank accounts and his bank frauds and tax cheating just because he ended up running this presidential campaign. oops, paul manafort tripped. i think the idea here may be that that kind of guy is a more palatable target for a pardon from the president than a guy who was running the president s campaign while russia was interfering in the campaign to benefit trump and simultaneously this guy running the campaign was meeting frequently with