Manafort case stopped in tracks
Ruling bars N.Y. charges for former Trump campaign chief
NEW YORK — The Manhattan district attorney’s attempt to prosecute former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman was dealt a final blow when New York’s highest court said quietly last week that it would not review lower court rulings on the case.
The court’s decision brings to an end the district attorney’s quest to ensure that the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, will face state charges for mortgage fraud and other state felonies, crimes similar to those for which he was convicted in federal court and then pardoned by Trump.
When the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, first brought charges against Manafort in March 2019, it was widely understood that he was doing so to make sure that Manafort would face prosecution even if Trump decided to pardon him.
At the time, Manafort was serving a sentence of 7 1/2 years in a Pennsylvania federal prison after being convicted at a 2018 financial fraud trial by prosecutors working for special counsel Robert Mueller.
In October, a New York appeals court found that Vance’s efforts to try Manafort violated the state’s double jeopardy law. Vance took the case to the Court of Appeals.
Then, in December, Trump did pardon Manafort, 71, who had been released to home confinement in Northern Virginia, after his lawyers argued that he was at risk of contracting the coronavirus.
A lawyer for Manafort, Todd Blanche, said that he had received the high court’s one-paragraph decision Monday and that he was happy with the ruling. “Mr. Manafort is similarly pleased with the result,” he said.
A spokesman for Vance’s office declined to comment.
The charges that Vance brought against Manafort were the result of an investigation, started in 2017, into loans the campaign chairman had received. Vance ultimately accused Manafort of having falsified business records in order to obtain the loans.
At the time, Vance said that Manafort had not “been held accountable” for the charges at hand. But in a ruling in December 2019, a judge threw out the charges, finding that they violated the double jeopardy law, which says a defendant cannot be tried twice for the same offense.
The judge, Justice Maxwell Wiley, said at the time that “the law of double jeopardy in New York state provides a very narrow window for prosecution.”
Vance’s office has taken action against other associates of Trump whom the former president has pardoned in federal cases. Last week, The New York Times reported that Manhattan prosecutors had opened an investigation against Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist who Trump pardoned during the president’s final hours in office.
But the double jeopardy defense is unlikely to help Bannon in the same way it helped Manafort, because Bannon had not yet been tried, let alone convicted.
“The basis for the prosecution being improper doesn’t in any way apply to Mr. Bannon as far as I can tell,” Blanche said.
In 2019, the state Legislature in New York passed a measure that lawmakers argued was necessary to check Trump’s pardon power and to ensure that his associates were not permitted to escape justice. The law, signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in October 2019, allows state prosecutors to pursue charges against individuals who have been granted presidential pardons for similar crimes.
State Sen. Todd Kaminsky, a Democrat and former federal prosecutor who sponsored the bill, said the Manafort case drove home the need for the legislation.
“It really underscored why we had to take legislative action that we did so that states can pursue their own path even if there is a federal pardon,” he said. The law would make it easier for state prosecutors to pursue those on Trump’s pardon list.
The law passed too late to apply to Manafort’s case. The result, Kaminsky said, was that Vance’s office had to contort itself to try to show that the acts that Manafort had been charged with in federal court were not the same as those they were pursuing.
It is possible, though unlikely, that Manafort may still face federal charges. Last month, Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor from the special counsel’s office, argued that the wording of Trump’s pardons had been “oddly” drafted.
Rather than relieving those who had been pardoned from all potential liability for their actions, Weissmann argued, the language only narrowly covered their convictions.
In Manafort’s case, that might leave the door open to new charges, including on crimes that Manafort admitted he was guilty of as part of a plea deal. Those include 10 counts of financial crimes, as well as other offenses.