Judge orders Manafort to be jailed before trial
Witness tampering charges spur decision to keep Trump’s former campaign chairman incarcerated
WASHINGTON — A federal judge revoked Paul Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail Friday to await trial, citing new charges that Manafort had tried to influence the testimony of two government witnesses after he had been granted a temporary release.
Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, had posted a $10 million bond and was under house arrest while awaiting his September trial on a host of charges, including money laundering and mak-
ing false statements.
But Manafort cannot remain free, even under stricter conditions, in the face of new felony charges that he had engaged in witness tampering while out on bail, said Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “This is not middle school,” she said during a 90-minute court hearing. “I can’t take away his cellphone.”
The judge’s order was the latest in eight months of legal setbacks for Manafort, as prosecutors have steadily added charges since he was first indicted in October. Trump and members of his team lashed out against the judge’s move, an attack that renewed talk about whether the president might issue pardons to curb a prosecutorial process in the special counsel’s Russia inquiry that he describes as stacked against him.
“Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday in which he appeared to confuse the judge’s action with a sentence handed down after conviction. “Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!”
Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, said the judge had gone too far. He also said in an interview that Trump should not pardon anyone while the special counsel inquiry is still going on, but “when the investigation is concluded, he’s kind of on his own, right?”
Jackson’s decision that Manafort could not be trusted to abide by the law unless he was behind bars makes it harder for the White House to dismiss the case against him as the work of overzealous prosecutors. The situation is particularly fraught for Trump because he is under investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, for one of the same offenses for which prosecutors have accused Manafort: obstruction of justice.
The judge went out of her way to dismiss the suggestion that Manafort was a victim of anything but his own actions. “This hearing is not about politics,” she said. “It is not about the conduct of the special counsel. It is about the defendant’s conduct.”
In a superseding indictment filed last week, the prosecutors working for Mueller claimed that Manafort and a close associate had contacted two witnesses this year, hoping to persuade them to testify that Manafort had never lobbied in the United States for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russia president of Ukraine until 2014.
The government says Manafort violated the law by failing to report his domestic lobbying efforts to the Justice Department and by lying to the federal authorities about his activities.
The day after he was indicted in February in connection with those offenses, prosecutors claim, Manafort began trying to influence the accounts of two members of a public relations team who had worked with him. The prosecutors said he had reached out to the two by phone, through encrypted messages and through Konstantin Kilimnik, a close associate in Russia.
Greg Andres, a prosecutor on Mueller’s team, said Manafort’s efforts were “not random outreaches,” but part of “a sustained campaign over a five-week period” aimed at getting the witnesses to back up a false story that he had lobbied only in Europe.