Russiagate Indictments: Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Reality Winner?
If there was any doubt left that Reality Winner is being singled out for severe mistreatment by her prosecutors, this week’s indictments against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates should put that to rest.
Paul Manafort and Rick Gates are charged, among other things, with “Conspiracy Against The United States”. Their offenses against the United States, and the harm they did, are spelled out in great detail -- they were paid millions of dollars by a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party to lobby the U.S. government on its behalf. They lied about acting on behalf of foreign interests and about receiving the payments. They then laundered the money to hide its source and avoid paying taxes. And Federal prosecutors recommended that the men merely be placed on house arrest.
Meanwhile, Reality’s prosecutors argued, with a straight face, that her life savings of $30,000 and a short vacation to Belize earlier this year makes her a “flight risk,” and that two or three sentences from her private conversations are proof that she “hates America” and is a “danger to the community”, requiring her to be held in jail.
Manafort and Gates are charged with doing clear, explicit, quantifiable harm to the United States. Manafort had three passports, travelled using a fake name, and did business with multiple countries notorious for acting as tax shelters. He spent more than Reality’s entire life savings in illicit, laundered money at a single Florida art gallery, and the only imposition on his freedom is an ankle bracelet.
All of this is already an outrageous injustice. But what makes it so much worse is that Reality’s alleged “crime” is exposing to the public details of the conspiracy that led to the charges against Manafort and Gates in the first place.
Read the rest of the article here.
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