Mueller’s team suggests Manafort get up to 25 years
Ex-chair of Trump campaign lost plea deal by telling lies.
WASHINGTON — Federal prosecutors recommended Friday that Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, serve up to 25 years in prison and pay up to $25 million in fines for a fraud scheme they said spanned more than a decade and showed that he believed “the law does not apply to him.”
The prosecutors, who work for special counsel Robert Mueller, recommended a sentence that would most likely ensure Manafort, 69, spends the rest of his life behind bars. They said that a tax and bank fraud scheme allowed Manafort to hide millions of dollars in “ill-gotten gains” from political consulting work in Ukraine and to defraud American banks in an attempt to “maintain his extravagant lifestyle.”
The prosecutors filed their recommendation Friday in one of two criminal cases against Manafort that are now grinding to a close.
Manafort, who worked for Trump’s campaign during a critical five months when he became the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2016, is awaiting sentencing in Northern Virginia on eight felony charges related to the financial fraud scheme and on two conspiracy charges in a related case in U.S. District Court in Washington.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the federal judge handling the Washington case, ruled this week that Manafort had deliberately deceived prosecutors after he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in September and agreed to cooperate with them in hopes of a lighter sentence. In a transcript of that hearing released Friday night, Jackson said, “My concern isn’t with nonanswers or simply denials, but times he affirmatively advanced a detailed alternative story that was inconsistent with the facts.”
She found Manafort had deceived investigators about three issues, including his dealings with Konstantin V. Kilimnik, a Russian associate who prosecutors say has ties to Russian intelligence. At one point, Jackson said, Manafort’s actions seemed to constitute “an attempt to shield his Russian conspirator from liability,” adding, “it gives rise to legitimate questions about where his loyalties lie.”
Mueller’s team has been investigating whether Kilimnik played any role in Russia’s covert campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Prosecutors had told the judge that Manafort had lied about the fact he had shared Trump campaign polling data with Kilimnik months before the 2016 election — possibly because he believed Trump would be less likely to pardon him for his crimes if his release of campaign data became known.
Defense lawyers had argued that the only real proof Manafort ordered the data transfer came from Rick Gates, Trump’s former deputy campaign chairman, who is awaiting sentencing on charges of conspiracy and lying to federal investigators.
The lawyers said Gates was not a credible witness and that emails supposedly backing up his account were ambiguous, at best.