Manafort was convicted earlier and is doing time in Pennsylvania for white collar crimes around taxable income and foreign agent registration. These are crimes few are ever prosecuted for, but they were real enough. Now he's a wedge player in a new and very dirty deep-state political game. The Manhattan district attorney's office is throwing the elderly, now wheelchair-bound former campaign manager into Rikers Island prison, not because of any Rikers Island-worthy thuggery he could have done, but because they want to pressure him to cooperate with them to deliver Trump's head on a platter to them.
Rikers is in Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's Congressional district, and she opposes the move.
It's unprecedented. Attorney Alan Dershowitz is horrified. Even the Daily Beast is horrified. Ocasio-Cortez is not saying something out of left field this time, and she has allies.Read more here.
What we are seeing is Manafort now becoming a political prisoner. Which is insane, yet part of a believable continuum of fourth-world events coming from Trump's enemies. We have just come off an attempted coup d'etat attempt by the Deep State, which went down in flames after the Mueller investigation and report. Yet this same Deep-State left, with its hands still on the levers of state power in an area outside Trump's chain of command, is now responding with a new bid to Get Trump through its Manhattan district attorney's office prosecutors. This measure against Manafort is a bid to secure his cooperation to take down Trump in unrelated real estate cases, and Dershowitz cites a quote from a judge stating exactly that. Manafort may not even have much information anyway, given that he was Trump's campaign manager only for a few months. But that doesn't matter to them, they want Manafort there to put the screws on. And they are willing to take hostages -- political prisoners -- to do it.
And like any political prisoner operation from a fourth-world banana republic, they're putting him through torture - from a nightmarish insanity-inducing solitary confinement, which is the de facto condition that Manafort is going to get "for his own protection," to the heat of the summer without air conditioning or ice water in the confined space with only a wall slot for food deliveries. Rikers, remember, is the prison where at least one prisoner, Jerome Murdough, died in a 2014 heat wave. It's a jail so bad prisoners plea guilty to crimes they didn't commit in order to be sent to real prisons just to escape the Rikers conditions. It's so bad the entire complex is set for destruction based on human rights considerations. The Manhattan prosecutors doing this to Manafort, who is in ailing health anyway, may well kill him, and we know they may be trying to kill him. That's based on widespread knowledge of the incarceration complex's conditions, coupled with their unneccessary act of moving him from a Pennsylvania complex where he is serving time for unrelated crimes, to be available for them - and to pressure, pressure, pressure him based on the execrable conditions.
We are looking at a travesty of justice here, based on a deep state still way out of control. Ocasio-Cortez has put her finger on something important and for once, she's right.
