Paul Manafort and Roger Stone

These two characters thought they could do as they pleased.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson said: No More!

From the Washington Post:

"“It’s not appropriate to say investigators haven’t found anything when you lied to the investigators,” she said.

At least 20 people from the special counsel’s office were in the courtroom for the sentencing, a sign of the importance of Manafort’s conviction to the investigation.

In contrast to Judge T.S. Ellis III, who when sentencing Manafort to 47 months in prison last week in Alexandria said that Manafort has lived an “otherwise blameless life,” Jackson spent nearly 40 uninterrupted minutes describing the high-flying influence-peddler as a persistent liar who undermined democracy out of personal greed.

His crimes were “not just a failure to comply with some pesky regulations,” she said, but “lying to the American people and the American Congress. . . . It is hard to overstate the number of lies and amount of money involved.”

Manafort’s motivation, she added, was “not to support a family, but to sustain a lifestyle that was ostentatiously opulent and extravagantly lavish — more houses than a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear.”

But she agreed with Ellis that sentencing guidelines in the case were excessive, and said that Manafort’s age, the millions he forfeited, and the fact that his finances and career are “in tatters” minimized the chances that he would offend again."