Manafort loses bid to move D.C. trial

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort’s second trial will remain in the District of Columbia, a judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman’s attorneys had failed to show that thorough jury questioning and careful instructions couldn’t ensure that both sides could pick an impartial jury in Washington.

Manafort’s attorneys had argued that the trial should be moved to Roanoke, Va., because the intensity of publicity in Washington made it impossible for him to receive a fair trial. But Jackson said the request appeared to relate more to concerns about the political affiliation of Washington residents, rather than a unique amount of pretrial publicity.

Jackson’s ruling clears the way for Manafort to be tried later this month on several felony charges related to his lobbying and political consulting work on behalf of Ukrainian political interests. It was the second time Manafort had been denied a change of venue from the Washington metropolitan area.

Manafort had made a similar unsuccessful request in his bank fraud and tax evasion trial in northern Virginia. A jury there convicted him on eight counts of filing false tax returns, failing to report foreign bank accounts and bank fraud. Jurors deadlocked on 10 other counts.

In ruling against Manafort’s request for a change of venue, Jackson said she could reconsider if they are unable to qualify enough jurors to proceed to jury selection in the case, scheduled to begin Sept. 17.

Jackson announced her decision during a hearing in which prosecutors revealed that they are unsure whether Manafort’s longtime deputy and fellow Trump campaign aide, Rick Gates, will testify at trial. But if he does testify, the government asked Jackson to bar the defense from questioning Gates about his cooperation with the ongoing investigation, noting that many aspects of the more than 20 meetings he’s had with prosecutors don’t relate to Manafort’s case.

Jackson also ruled that Manafort’s defense couldn’t introduce evidence about Gates’ extramarital affairs, a topic that came out in his testimony during Manafort’s trial last month in Virginia.

Gates, who worked directly for Manafort for years, took a plea deal earlier this year and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Manafort’s defense spent a considerable amount of the Virginia trial painting Gates as a liar, philanderer and embezzler as they sought to attack the government’s case.

After the verdict last month, a juror in the case told news outlets that the jury agreed to throw out Gates’ testimony because they found him unreliable. The juror, Paula Duncan, told Fox News that the jury relied largely on the paper evidence presented at trial, which was enough for her to vote to convict Manafort on all charges. The jury ultimately returned a split verdict because one juror held out due to reasonable doubt, she said.

In the Washington case, Manafort is accused of acting as an unregistered foreign agent, conspiring to launder money and lying to the FBI and Justice Department about the nature of his work. He is also accused of tampering with witnesses in the case.

The charges do not relate to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and jurors are expected to hear only limited references to Manafort’s role in the campaign.

Prosecutors have argued in court filings that jurors need to know Manafort’s campaign role to understand why he is accused of lying to the government to conceal his Ukrainian lobbying work in August 2016, nearly two years after the advocacy had ended. They said Manafort was seeking to keep that past work from becoming a campaign issue after Trump accepted the GOP nomination and turned to the fall election run.

Manafort resigned from the campaign amid news accounts of his Ukrainian lobbying. Having lied to the press, prosecutors say, Manafort then continued to lie to government investigators, they allege, saying he “either had to admit these falsehoods publicly or continue telling a lie.”

Defense lawyers say they want to suppress mention of Manafort’s role in the campaign because jurors “will be unable to separate their opinions and beliefs about those matters from the charges to be tried before them in this case.”

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