By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
A former managing director of PPG Paints Trading Co. in Shanghai, a wholly-owned Chinese subsidiary of U.S.-based PPG Industries was sentenced Thursday to a year in prison for conspiring to illegally export high-performance epoxy coatings to nuclear reactors in Pakistan.
Even as some Senate Democrats push to rewrite the rules governing the filibuster, the chamber's attorneys were in federal court Monday trying to defend the very existence of the filibuster against a legal challenge that says it is an affront to democracy.
A federal appeals court overturned a prison sentence of more than four years given to a local investment consultant on money-laundering charges, saying the judge in the case was improperly involved in plea talks.
"I would probably be just as consistent here," said Judge Sullivan. "I'm not going to do one thing in one case where the facts are similar and do something completely different here. I'm just not going to do it. I'm going to be consistent to the extent I can."
At that point, court records show, Judge Sullivan said he accepted a guilty plea months earlier from a 63-year-old man who embezzled about $100,000 from an employee pension plan.
