Manafort gets more jail time and a set of new charges.
Judge says Trump’s ex-aide spent years ‘gaming the system’
WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, has been ordered to serve a total of 7½ years in prison after a second federal judge added more time to his sentence on Wednesday, saying he “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system.”
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court in Washington sentenced Manafort, 69, on two conspiracy counts that encompassed a host of crimes, including money laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to disclose lobbying work that earned him tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade.
“It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved,” she said, reeling off Manafort’s various offenses, rapidfire. “There is no question that this defendant knew better and he knew what he was doing.”
Each charge carried a maximum of five years. But Jackson noted that one count was closely tied to the same bank and tax fraud scheme that a federal judge in Virginia had sentenced Manafort for last week. Under sentencing guidelines, she said, those punishments should largely overlap, not be piled on top of each other. Manafort was also expected to get credit for the nine months he has already spent in jail.
Soon after the additional sentence was handed down, Manafort was charged in state court in New York with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other felonies, an effort to ensure he will still face prison time if Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.
Manafort asked the judge in Washington not to add to his time in prison. “This case has taken everything from me, already,” he said, running through a list of his financial assets that now belong to the government. “Please let my wife and I be together,” he added, hunched over in a wheelchair because of a flare-up of gout.
Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing told the judge that while he was not accusing the office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, of mounting a politically motivated prosecution, “but for a short stint as campaign manager in a national election, I don’t think we would be here today.”
But the judge firmly rejected the argument that the prosecution was somehow “misguided or invalid,” saying it showed Manafort did not fully accept responsibility for his crimes. She suggested that defense lawyers kept repeating it not because they hoped to influence her thinking, but “for some other audience” — an apparent reference to Trump, who has commented repeatedly on the Manafort case.
Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s top deputies, said Manafort had squandered his education and a wealth of opportunities to lead a criminal conspiracy for more than a decade. Once caught, he obstructed justice by tampering with two witnesses, he said, and then repeatedly lied to prosecutors and to a grand jury after he agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office in September.
“He served to undermine — not promote — American ideals of honesty, transparency and playing by the rules,” Weissmann said.
Manafort’s case stood out in many ways, not the least of which is because it was brought by the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. It is also rare that the government reaches a plea deal and then pulls out, claiming that the defendant has deceived them instead of cooperating.
Jackson ruled earlier that Manafort breached his plea agreement by lying, but prosecutors have not publicly disclosed why they consider those lies important, saying they wanted to protect an open investigation. That was expected to make it harder for Jackson, who takes pride in explaining herself in terms that ordinary people can understand, to describe how she arrived at her sentence.
In another oddity, Manafort’s prosecution was divided into two cases — the one before Jackson, and the related case overseen by Judge T.S. Ellis of U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. Last week, Ellis sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison for eight felony counts of tax evasion, bank fraud and failure to disclose a foreign bank account.
Ellis’ sentence set off a firestorm of criticism from commentators who complained it was overly lenient for a defendant who had orchestrated a multimillion-dollar fraud over a decade. Much of the legal world considered the sentencing guidelines in the Virginia case, which called for a prison term of 19 to 24 years, far too harsh.
Hanging over the entire case has been the chance that Trump could pardon Manafort. Asked about that possibility, Trump’s answers have varied. He said late last year that he “wouldn’t take it off the table.” More recently, he said, “I don’t even discuss it.”
Asked about a pardon on Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “The president has made his position on that clear, and he’ll make a decision when he is ready.”
The judge sentenced Manafort to five years on the first conspiracy count, but said 30 months of that would be served concurrently with the Virginia sentence because of the overlap between the two cases. On the second conspiracy count, which involved obstruction of justice, she sentenced him to 13 months.