even going to trial? it just seems like he ends up with the worst of both worlds. went to one trial, had to pay lawyer for that, which was expensive, got convicted, now he pleads, retro actively pleads to that stuff. he waited too long. he is example a of someone who why people say cooperate early, cooperate early, first one in the door gets the best deal. the other cooperaters have done the boast. let me briefly interject, that also could be tremendously abused. there s lots of people who end up cooperating and end up throughout the criminal justice system all the time in all sorts of terrible situations because of that. cooperating, as mimi said, earlier is better than later, but later is better than never. clearly that s the calculation here. from both point of views. he was up against it. put yourself in paul manafort s situation, 69-year-old guy, looking down the barrel of
accused me of, all the criminal activity, i was doing some of it when i was brought on board the campaign. yeah. big question is like, what why did manafort end up here? everyone was like why is the guy even going to trial? it just seems like he ends up with the worst of both worlds. went to one trial, had to pay lawyer for that, which was expensive, got convicted, now he pleads, retro actively pleads to that stuff. he waited too long. he is example a of someone who why people say cooperate early, cooperate early, first one in the door gets the best deal. the other cooperaters have done the boast. let me briefly interject, that also could be tremendously abused. there s lots of people who end up cooperating and end up throughout the criminal justice system all the time in all sorts of terrible situations because of that. cooperating, as mimi said, earlier is better than later,
elie, what jumped out at you? the most important thing we saw in the documents is this is all or nothing. that s the way federal cooperation works. i have experience in state system. sometimes in state system cooperation can be selective. in federal, it s everything. meaning what? manafort has to come in and tell the prosecutors everything he knows about what he did and everything he knows about what everybody else did from the lowest ranking person all the way up to don jr. all the way up to kushner, all the way up to the president. and he has no leverage here. what s striking to me is he s already been convicted once. he s facing sentencings there. he pleaded to these two crimes that were going to be in the next trial in d.c. but there s a lot of time hanging over his head. am i wrong? there is a lot of time. i mean, the way this is structured it is now limited as to these charges that he pled to, to ten years. that s the maximum. these two today, right.
eight, ten, 12 years. the d.c. trial is coming up. hugely expensive and going to expose how he earned that money, the inner workings, the things the judge tried to keep out of the virginia trial. he doesn t want that. and he s got a third trial on the hung counts he s now admitted to from virginia. so all that s super expensive. paul, there s some talk about you mentioned this, that the forfeiture, which by the way is more than the total of the budget of the mueller probe spent so far if not mistaken, sort of plundering his way through and feeding the army off what they capture. there s also the fact that some people think this is pardon proof that it was designed to be pardon proof, not just the forfeiture. what do you think of that? i think the president will probably still dangle a pardon in front of manafort as a way of saying, you know, don t cooperate too too much. but there are a couple problems with that.
all or nothing. that s the way federal cooperation works. i have experience in state system. sometimes in state system cooperation can be selective. in federal, it s everything. meaning what? manafort has to come in and tell the prosecutors everything he knows about what he did and everything he knows about what everybody else did from the lowest ranking person all the way up to don jr. all the way up to kushner, all the way up to the president. and he has no leverage here. what s striking to me is he s already been convicted once. he s facing sentencings there. he pleaded to these two crimes that were going to be in the next trial in d.c. but there s a lot of time hanging over his head. am i wrong? there is a lot of time. i mean, the way this is structured it is now limited as to these charges that he pled to, to ten years. that s the maximum. these two today, right. now, today, they notified the judge in virginia about this plea and also asked to postpone that sentencing