Reported sentencing details in Paul Manafort's plea deal to wrap up his various federal prosecutions

Politico has this extended article with some of the details of the plea deal completed today between the federal government and Paul Manafort.  Here are excerpts with an emphasis, of course, on sentencing particulars:

President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort has agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller under a plea agreement revealed Friday. Manafort appeared in a Washington, D.C., courtroom Friday morning, looking relaxed in a suit and purple tie, to formally announce the deal.

The deal dismisses deadlocked charges against Manafort from an earlier trial, but only after "successful cooperation” with Mueller’s probe into Russian election interference and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow on its efforts. Later, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Manafort is agreeing to "cooperate fully and truthfully" with the investigation.

The agreement also calls for a 10-year cap on how long Manafort will be sent to prison, and for Manafort to serve time from his separate Virginia and Washington cases concurrently.  But it will not release Manafort from jail, where he has been held since Mueller's team added witness tampering charges during the run-up to the longtime lobbyist's trial.

Manafort addressed Jackson in a soft voice, saying “I do” and “I understand” as she asked him whether he understood what rights he’s giving up. “Has anybody forced you, coerced you or threatened you in any way?” she asked later. “No,” Manafort replied, in a barely audible voice. A deputy marshal stood directly behind Manafort, a reminder that he remains in custody.

Legal experts quickly spun the deal as a win for all the parties involved. Manafort gets a potentially shorter sentence and lessens his legal bills. Trump avoids several weeks of bad headlines ahead of the midterm elections about his corrupt former campaign aide. And Mueller — faced with Trump's constant claims that his probe is a witch hunt — gets to show yet again that his charges are not fabricated and can now divert resources to other elements of his Russia probe....

Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani insisted the president and his lawyers were not concerned about Manafort cutting a deal. "Once again an investigation has concluded with a plea having nothing to do with President Trump or the Trump campaign," he said in a statement Friday. "The reason: the President did nothing wrong."

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed those remarks in her own statement. "This had absolutely nothing to do with the President or his victorious 2016 Presidential campaign," she said. "It is totally unrelated.”

Prosecutors signaled the pending deal Friday morning, filing a new slimmed-down set of charges against Manafort, reining in the felony counts pending against him in D.C. from seven to just two: conspiracy against the U.S. and conspiracy to obstruct justice....

Last month, a jury in Alexandria, Virginia, convicted Manafort on eight felony charges in a tax-and-bank-fraud case also prosecuted by Mueller’s team. The jury deadlocked on 10 other counts, but a verdict form said the jurors were split, 11-1, in favor of conviction on those charges.

Many Trump aides and advisers have said they believe the president is likely to grant Manafort a pardon on all the charges, which Trump has suggested amounted to prosecutorial overkill aimed at persuading Manafort to implicate Trump in wrongdoing in connection with the ongoing Russian investigation.

The charges filed Friday morning came in a criminal information replacing the current indictment in the Washington-based case against Manafort.  The new charges mean that prosecutors have agreed to drop five counts, including money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent and making false statements. Manafort admitted to those allegations as part of the umbrella conspiracy-against-the-U.S. charge, but the individual charges and the potential prison time they carry are being dismissed.

Weissmann said Manafort is admitting to all of the bank-fraud charges from the Virginia case. While that means Manafort won’t face another trial over those federal charges, the admission could be critical to the issue of follow-up state charges, since bank fraud can typically be charged at the state and federal level.

Without seeing this plea agreement, it is unclear to me whether Manafort now has his sentencing exposure capped at 10 years for all of his convictions or just for those related to the second round of DC charges to which he today pleaded guilty.   I presume the latter, since I am not sure a DC-based plea deal could bind the sentencing discretion of the Virginia-based judge who will be sentencing Manafort on the charges which resulted in jury convictions last month.  The plea agreement could include, however, a representation by federal prosecutors that they will not seek a sentence longer than 10 years in the other part of the case (though I doubt it does).

Of course, the sentencing particulars could become academic if (when?) Prez Trump were to grant Manafort a pardon (which he could do at any time).  As of this writing, I am inclined to predict that Prez Trump will commute Manafort's sentence to reduce how long he spends in prison (rather than grant a full pardon), and do so sometime after the mid-term elections.  We might call this the "Libby treatment" as this is how Prez George Bush used his clemency powers to help our Scotter Libby after his perjury conviction but before he was sent to the federal penitentiary.  (And if Prez Trump was clever and savvy in this arena, he could and would include a commutation for Manafort within a list of dozens or hundreds of other commutations of "regular" offenders.)