I think you may need to familiarise yourself with US federal sentencing guidelines. Unlike being found guilty of breaking state laws, where many state judges will be endowed with discretionary authority to impose a sentence within a wide range and reflecting the facts found/pleaded, my man is pleading to a federal crime involving defrauding the US government and federal judges are largely beholden to a matrix of crime/sentence with a teeny bit of wiggle room for facts and circumstances.