ROFL: Manafort Jury Asks Judge to Clarify Meaning of "Reasonable Doubt"

Tweet from @joshgerstein:

BREAKING: Jury in Manafort case sends note asking for legal definitions on filing requirements for overseas accounts, also for clarification on 'reasonable doubt.' Suggests jurors may not view case as a slam dunk. Story TK

The thing is, really, all you need to acquit is just doubt the word of the admitted criminal Gates.

I'm not saying that'll happen. I'm just saying that when your star witness is an admitted embezzler who would go to jail but for testifying that the non-embezzling partner is a super-bad dude, and used his embezzled funds to set up a love-nest for his mistress... well, that is sort of Walking Reasonable Doubt.

Friends and I are just hoping for this for the pure entertainment value of it.

The freak out will be... why, I don't even know what it would be like.

"Epic" is too small a word.

It would be... immortal. It would be God-like. It would a freak-out of God-like dimensions, unbound by space or time.

The Spin: Assuming that there is an acquittal (which I don't know that I would, yet), the snark from the Twitter Idiots will be: "Well, I guess that's the secret to Manafort's success -- surround yourself with liars and criminals even worse than yourself and you can never be convicted because your associates' words are worthless when used against you."

But this is always a problem when there are several criminals in an organization, all possibly guilty of the most serious crimes. You pressure one criminal to rat out another criminal.

But the guy who's ratting is going to have to admit he is a criminal and liar himself (no crimes occur without a lot of lying), and that he might get some consideration in his own sentencing if he testifies for the state... It's always a dicey proposition.

That's why in many cases the prosecution will offer some fairly light sentence in a plea deal.

But here, the prosecution decided to charge Manafort for over 300 years sentencing for tax evasion, and go the jury with their star witness, the admitted embezzler, tax fraud, adulterer, etc.

And they're doing that just to Get Trump.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:52 PM

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