MANAFORT SEEKS change of venue for 2nd trial.
WASHINGTON — Attorneys for Paul Manafort are asking to have his upcoming money laundering and conspiracy trial moved from Washington, D.C., to Roanoke, Va., arguing his fraud convictions in Alexandria, Va., this month worsened pretrial publicity in the nation’s capital.
In court filings Wednesday, his defense team also claimed a more pro-Republican jury, as they believe would be found in Roanoke, would decide his case more fairly. That repeats an argument the Manafort defense made, and lost, in asking to move his Virginia case out of Alexandria.
The defense for President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman told a federal judge in the District that Manafort “has become an unwilling player in the larger drama” between Trump and special counsel Robert Mueller and asserted that nowhere are potential jurors more biased against him than in the District because of its partisan makeup and saturation of political news.
“This may be the rare case where a juror’s predisposition may directly tie to their vote in the last presidential election,” Manafort’s attorneys wrote, arguing “it is not a stretch to expect” voters for Trump would look less favorable on Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Jury selection in Manafort’s trial in the District is set to begin Sept. 17 with openings to start Sept. 24.
Manafort’s defense complained that “intensely negative” news coverage reached new heights last week, when a federal jury in Alexandria convicted him on eight of 18 tax- and bank-fraud charges brought by Mueller’s prosecutors.
Also Wednesday, prosecutors faced a deadline in Virginia set by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III to declare whether they would retry Manafort on the 10 counts on which the Alexandria jury couldn’t agree. The judge declared a mistrial on those counts. But prosecutors asked Ellis for more time to make their decision, noting Manafort’s attorneys haven’t filed their post-trial motions and Ellis hasn’t ruled on them, which could change how many of Manafort’s convictions stand.
The prosecutors asked Ellis to extend the date for their decision to one week after the judge rules on Manafort’s post-trial rulings and said Manafort’s lawyers did not object to the time extension. Ellis on Wednesday did not immediately issue a ruling on the deadline extension request.
The venue request resurrected many of the defense arguments raised earlier in Virginia where Ellis had ruled there was no evidence jurors in the northern Virginia were biased and said Manafort was not entitled to a completely ignorant jury or one with as many Republicans as Democrats.
Media attention had not risen to the “carnival or circus atmosphere,” Ellis said July 17.
After the trial, the one juror who spoke to news outlets said she was a Trump supporter and had thought Manafort should have been convicted on all counts.
Manafort, 69, has pleaded innocent to all charges, which relate to his political work and alleged attempts to hide income from 2006 to 2017. Prosecutors contend that during that time, he laundered $30 million as a consultant for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine.
At a hearing Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson set arguments on Manafort’s motion to change the trial site for Sept. 5, but repeated Ellis’ skepticism.
“You can file what you want to file. I won’t prejudge it,” she said, while adding, “This court has heard high-profile cases before. We have been able to find impartial jurors” through questionnaires and routine pretrial vetting of potential jurors.
In their filing to Jackson, Manafort attorneys Kevin Downing, Thomas Zehnle and Richard Westling renewed arguments they made in Alexandria.
They said the federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., draws from a jury pool whose voters heavily favored Trump’s 2016 Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, 91 percent to 4 percent.
By contrast, they said, the Roanoke area of the western district of Virginia favored Trump over Clinton, 63 percent to 37 percent.