Trump investigation designed to 'impeach or embarrass' president, furious leading Republican claims amid fury at Manafort sentence

Hello and welcome to The Independent's rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration.

The news that President Trump's ex-campaign manager Paul Manafort was sentenced to just 47 months in prison out of a possible 24 years has Democrats spitting feathers this morning.

Manafort, 69, was found guilty of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one count of failing to declare a foreign bank account last year but was given an extremely lenient sentence by US District Court judge TS Ellis III in Alexandria, Virginia, yesterday.

The judge's contention that Manafort - sitting before him in a wheelchair as he recovered from the after-effects of gout - had "lived an otherwise blameless life" provoked particular fury.

Here's our report from Andrew Buncombe and Clark Mindock.  

Meanwhile, Georgia congressman Doug Collins, the most senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, has written a scathing letter to the panel's chairman, Jerrold Nadler, over its newly-announced investigation into whether the president abused his powers of office and obstructed justice in discrediting FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into possible Russian election meddling.

The body sent out letters to 81 members of Donald Trump's family, business associates and administration staff requesting information on aspects of his conduct.

"Your requests are part of a concerted effort to target and punish associates of the president," Mr Collins wrote to Mr Nadler in a 7 March letter released by the Republican's office.

"This effort to intimidate those who choose to associate with the president 'through actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction' violates the First Amendment."

"Your 81 letters appear to be little more than a deep-sea fishing expedition with the purpose of exposing private matters and airing alleged dirty laundry rather than legislating."

"Such an investigation serves only one of two possible purposes: either you intend to impeach the president, for alleged crimes that have yet to be discovered, or you intend to embarrass him."

"It is my hope that your draconian inquisitions are not returning this committee to the dark days of 16th-century England," he concluded.

But back to Manafort for a second.

Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal was among the most dismayed at the light sentence, telling CNN's OutFront with Erin Burnett: "My takeaway is much the same, that the American people would be justified in feeling that there has been some miscarriage of justice here in the leniency of this sentence." 

"It has to be a disappointment to the prosecution," he said. 

House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff was equally indignant.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the verdict was indicative of a "broken system".

Presidential candidate and senator Cory Booker told The Late Show with Stephen Colbert he was "really ticked off" and, more damningly, that: "We have a criminal justice system that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent".

Monica Lewinsky and Edward Snowden also tweeted their outrage, the former saying she was threatened with 27 years over her efforts to conceal an affair with President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Here's Washington journalist Ed Krassenstein on what the Manafort sentencing tells us about Donald Trump.

Further outrage on Twitter to the Manafort sentencing takes up Cory Booker and Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez's criticism of the Dickensian US criminal justice system, with users pointing out the wildly disproportionate sentencing of African-Americans.

The cases of Crystal Mason of Texas, given five years in jail for voting in the 2016 presidential election after being convicted of tax fraud, and Kelontre Barefield of Ohio, given 34 years in prison for shooting a police dog, are being offered as unfavourable points of comparison with the wealthy, white-collar Manafort.

A little more on the significance of all this to Donald Trump.

The House of Representatives yesterday finally heard and passed its resolution to condemn antisemitism and all other forms of racial prejudice following a row stirred by Democrat Ilhan Omar, who criticised the influence of lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington.

President Trump gloried in the political advantage handed to him by the spat, taking the moral high-ground to call for Ms Omar to resign from Congress or step down from the House Foreign Affairs Committee and branding her apology insincere.

Here's Andrew Buncombe.

The vote passed in the House by a resounding 407-23.

In case you were interested, the 23 representatives to vote against the condemnation of antisemitism and racial prejudice were all Republicans and are listed below.

Andy Biggs (Arizona)

Mo Brooks (Alabama)

Ted Budd (North Carolina

Ken Buck (Colorado)

Michael Burgess (Texas)

Liz Cheney (Wyoming)

Chris Collins (New York) 

Mike Conaway (Texas)

Rick Crawford (Arkansas)

Jeff Duncan (South Carolina)

Louie Gohmert (Texas)

Paul Gosar (Arizona)

Tom Graves (Georgia)

Pete King (New York)

Doug LaMalfa (California) 

Thomas Massie (Kentucky)

Steven Palazzo (Mississippi)

Mike Rogers (Alabama)

Chip Roy (Texas)

Greg Steube (Florida)

Mark Walker (North Carolina) 

Ted Yoho (Florida)

Lee Zeldin (New York)

The aforementioned Ms Ocasio-Cortez has meanwhile sent an email to her supporters drawing their attention to an apparently threatening line from a New York Times interview with Stephen Fiske of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the body criticised by Ilhan Omar.

“They are three people who, in my opinion, will not be around in several years," Mr Fiske said, presumably alluding to Ms Omar, Ms Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, a fellow Democrat who has backed the former on the lobbying issue.

"Rashida, Ilhan, and Alexandria have at times dared to question our foreign policy, and the influence of money in our political system. And now, lobbying groups across the board are working to punish them for it," Ms Ocasio-Cortez's team wrote in the email.

"Some members of Congress have even gone so far as to claim that 'questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable.' But that’s not how our legislative process is supposed to work," it continues, alluding to the tweet below by California respresentative Juan Vargas.