We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges...

[VOX]

24. Thanks, friend. The matter needs to be drilled repeatedly.

Democrats/progressives should have seen this coming from miles off. Every warning siren, flashing light and whistle on Judge Ellis was perceptible long before this week’s Manafort “sentencing.”

Glowing sore-thumb examples were abundant, such as this piece found in The NY Times LAST AUGUST:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/us/politics/judge-ellis-manafort-trial.amp.html
Manafort’s Judge, T.S. Ellis, Is a ‘Caesar’ in His Own Rome
The New York Times
By Emily Cochrane and Sharon LaFraniere
Aug. 9, 2018
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Judge T. S. Ellis III had dismissed the jury for the day, but he was not quite finished opining about what he saw as irrelevant and repetitive questioning of a witness in the financial fraud trial of Paul Manafort.

Standing up so as to loom even larger over the courtroom, he angrily confronted Greg D. Andres, the lead prosecutor.

“Look at me,” the judge demanded, slamming his hand on the wooden ledge. “When you look down, it’s as if to say, you know, that’s B.S., I don’t want to listen to any more from you.”

“Don’t look down. Don’t roll your eyes,” he told Mr. Andres.

And so for the second time that afternoon, the prosecutor had to try to convince the judge that he only looked down because otherwise, he said, he would “be yelled at again by the Court” for his facial expression when “I’m not doing anything wrong, but trying my case.”

Judge Ellis, 78, is the formidable ringmaster of the greatest show in the United States District Court in Alexandria, Va., demanding both precise questioning and a breakneck pace in the trial of Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman.

He has routinely broken in on questioning, limited admission of evidence and exhorted lawyers to “expedite” — all the while entertaining spectators with humorous asides about his age, his wife, his Navy past, his lack of an email address, the jury’s lunch menu, split infinitives and the noise produced by a machine intended to keep bench conferences from being overheard (like “the sound of waves crashing”).

An appointee of President Ronald Reagan, he has pushed the customary limits of judicial intervention so far that Mr. Andres at one point seemed to suggest the prosecution had grounds to appeal. After the prosecutor complained Monday about the number of times “your honor stops us and asks us to move on,” the judge declared that he would stand by the record.

“I will stand by the record, as well,” Mr. Andres responded.

“Then you will lose,” Judge Ellis said.
<snip>
Whatever criticism he has faced does not seem to have fazed Judge Ellis at all in his conduct of Mr. Manafort’s trial, the first to consider charges stemming from the investigation led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel.

“I am a Caesar in my own Rome,” he said at one point...
<snip>
To the jurors, the judge could not be more solicitous, joking about the plain lunch menu (“You won’t find baked alaska”). At least the meal is free, he told the jurors on opening day, saying he hoped no one had a fleeting urge to “slit their wrists” because they had been unfortunate enough to be picked from the jury pool.

He has clearly reveled in his captive audience. “My hearing is not what it once was,” he said last week, pausing for a beat with comic effect. “Nothing is what it once was.” Born in Bogotá, Colombia, he took the opportunity during a sentencing to display his fluency in Spanish, questioning the defendant himself while an interpreter stood by.
<snip>
During the Manafort trial, his exchanges with Mr. Andres have repeatedly escalated into barbed remarks and angry retorts — a tense dynamic that has riveted spectators.

“I’m never patient, but you must be,” Judge Ellis warned the prosecutor last week.

“No comment,” Mr. Andres said.

“That was a comment,” the judge said. “I have a long memory.”

When Mr. Andres was looking for a document, Judge Ellis suggested he was several steps ahead of him. “I didn’t need to have it. At least not as much as you do.”

He also expressed disappointment when Mr. Andres took over questioning from Uzo Asonye, an assistant federal prosecutor on Mr. Andres’s team. “I was hoping you would stick with that,” he said as Mr. Asonye ceded the floor to Mr. Andres...

“That’s a great question, judge,” Mr. Andres said Tuesday after the judge rephrased one of his questions to the prosecution’s marquee witness, Rick Gates. “Thank you.”

Judge Ellis’s response to the compliment was barbed, but only mildly. “They don’t pay me nearly as much as they pay you,” he said.