thank you good afternoon your hono sentence on two bases first that's just a court improperly calculated the the benefit of the last calculation under to be one point one and secondly that the that the way in which judge judge  changing sentence the defendants created a unwarranted disparity between the defendants who were certainly situated the district court improperly increased mr solomon space offense figure by sixteen levels based on a factual finding that was simply against the manifest weight of the evidence that is as good as trusts are going to let me just put it this way when i read in your brief pages twenty one and twenty two  no evidence to support this treating the two thousand and thirteen twenty million contract as part of the case i have chivas terrible then i look at the district judge has written explanation where he goes through in considerable detail the circumstantial evidence that he relied upon and i don't see that addressed by you into your reply brief my question was why shouldn't we treat that issue was waived given the failure to engage with the district with the evidence that this record relied upon well the i and i think this is this is brought out in the government's brief as well that i think with all due respect to my colleagues at the u s attorney's office that they they relied on evidence and said that supported the conclusion of the twenty million dollar contract when in fact it did for example that that's not my point and with the question my question was why did you save all of that debate for your reply brief when the district judge laid out his thinking both orally and in writing on the question about the evidence he relied upon well i i was it's we were addressing the government's great thoughts while you were on the job knowing about your blue brief no i understand and your blue brief that's your chance to say the twenty point five million dollar contract didn't belong there and the reasons a b c d and e that the district court judge gave for including it are not well sounded but that right and you had everything you needed to attack his reasons he laid them out of this judge hamilton said both in his we have in the transcript and we have it in his additional written statement so why didn't you and the reason sound quite rational to me by the way that you didn't really delve into them i think we were trying not to make the government's argument for it and i think the government really did how do you make the government's argument for it by trying to convince us that the judge was wrong to look at the twenty point five one because when gage with what the district judge relied upon to start with the government did that's what the judge d well that's a matter of how you read the e mails for sure and how you look at the timing and how you look at the context of the e mails and the the kinds of things that district judge is looking at obviously it's circumstantial evidence she doesn't send an e mail saying oh good now we have a twenty point five million protract the real direct evidence in this is the testimony of barbara bennett and she testified in the grand jury that that there that the twenty million dollar contract was not part of the scheme she never expected to get any kickback from the twenty million dollar contract and her only expectation and that is what mr varanus pled to in his his was that it was the five hundred thousand dollars for the two million dollars i understand that the evidence then evolved as time went on and it was a pre sentence report and for whatever it's worth by the time she gets to her own sentencing she concedes that the two contracts are linked so it's i mean i'm not relying on that necessarily then just giving it as an example that what she said the grand jury was of an early stage of this proceeding and more happened well that got cooperation credit she got the five k letter but i mean that look i have a lot of sympathy for your point that you know the fact that mr solomon winds up with eighty four months and she winds up with fifty four may seem a little inside out there's a long body of case law that says that the government isn't title to decide when to file these five k motions and that the discount for co i mean she actually starts out with a higher guideline r right but the government's allowed to reward cooperation that way maybe this is all a bad idea and we should go to congress and the supreme court and everybody else and tell them not to do that but right now the law does permit that and mr solomon disparity mean does it mean national does it mean well right or but the district judge here actually does look right down to the level of the co defendants and you know he has since heard bennett at the point he sentencing m dropped thirty nine percent from the government's recommendation for a robert bennett he only dropped twenty two percent for mr solomon it basically eliminated the public corruption adjustment for her because because she was she was so much lower for it makes no sense that it sort of rewrites the guidelines in that regard it unless there's a significant difference in terms of their cooperation would it solomon do whatever he proffered for fifteen hours proffers and during her initial f b i interview without counsel so there is no if the question is a matter of someone came in first and made the case that is not what happened i think the government acknowledges that everyone basically came in at the same time with this case really is about is ultimate fairness i mean mr solomon was not the public official in this case he and he do we have some m please the court that afternoon your arse let me have the united states your honor as a district court correctly calculate the loss now in this case based on the evidence which showed a standing agreement for barbara bennett to throw c p s business and contracts mails that were deleted in response to the inspector general investigation where any of those deleted e mails related to the twenty point five million dollar contract or at least e mail sent between solomon byrd then ran us around the time of the twenty point five million dollars contract you're out of the record is unclear as to whether any of those e mails that were deleted specifically referenced the twenty point five million in addition the police grievance not the police specified that either what the district court relied on was the circumstantial evidence that in addition to the the e mails that were deleted throughout the course of the investigation the e mails develop and find around the time of twenty point five million dollar contract the specific i'm not sure there are specific evidence as to that specific time what the evidence showed was that with regard to the development fund the payments into that fund started occurring on a continual basis from approximate fall two thousand and twelve through the spring of two thousand and fourteen and that during that time the defendant as well as mr verandah set aside anywhere from four to nine percent of all incoming payments they the standing agreement here is what big point was made about the fact that the october twenty fourth contract was supposed to be a ten percent kickback so to speak for mr bennett when she came back to supes so if you say when i looked at those the last calculation actually looks fairly conservative to me given the twenty million dollars contract in the profits that were expected to accrue from them and can you explain to me the basis for the last calculation from the government's point of view yes you are the last calculation was determined based off of the profits that received by soups from c p s so the way again leave two point nine million dollars that was how the loss was determined but they provided services for the chicago public schools they did these training programs and they did stuff so it wasn't just straight again to  the bird bennett or others was this relationship i'm asking about that me i was my understanding and that that actually part of the argument for more favorable treatment was that supes was in fact providing useful services for the chicago public schools they were are however think with just record correctly determined was that what that argument boils down to was that what the defendant was trying to do was to guarantee a promise from her bennett to kick these contracts and each of these payments towards him while c p s may have been inclined to provide those services provided to sign those contracts with supes getting bird bennett on board with defendant guaranteed those contracts so let me just let me  just see if i understand this right the two point nine million figure was actual cash that changed hands that you estimated was profits to simpson correct so they distributed among the three defendants to defendant suit sorry but that's the part that struck me as conservative with if that is the term that's the calculation that was made them could you summarize from for us mr bond from your perspective the differences in the different defendants cooperation that underlay surface here but i'd like to understand what's behind it she provided information regarding her own criminal conduct the conduct of her co defendants she acknowledged previous last investigators there's no there's no question and we don't mince no words that she did come in live initially when she proffered but she came back and owned up to that and provided valuable information and made up for the initial lies and she provided to investigators she also a participant in numerous proffers with the government and she testified in front of a grand jury funds from c p s into his bank account into the soup's entities bank account words of mr bennett's who had also that all she had was future promises of a substantial payment to be sure but that's all she had her future promises in addition to regarding the twenty million dollars contract is there is nothing in the record to demonstrate that any emails related to the twenty million dollars contract i think that's significant secondly with respect to the services that judge would you asked just admitted to everything including his his own participation in the scheme that that is a i mean i've proffered and many people in fifteen hours is a long time for proffering so to say that she somehow did something significantly more than he did this isn't a matter of the prosecutor likes one personality or another's a matter about what were they doing to assist in the investigation and they assisted equally in the investigation for that reason we ask  in having recent thank you all right thank you very much thanks to both counsel we will take the case under advisement and the court will be in re