Sharon Lafraniere

The Russian government was clearly “the primary wrongdoer” for hacking into Democratic computers and funneling purloined documents to WikiLeaks to disseminate, found Judge John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. But as a foreign sovereign, he wrote, Russia was immune from any liability.

Koeltl ruled that the First Amendment protected the actions of WikiLeaks in publishing the documents. The same protections covered Trump campaign officials, who did not release any stolen documents but were eager to benefit from their publication, he found.

“There is a significant legal distinction between stealing documents and disclosing documents that someone else had stolen previously,” Koeltl wrote. Like a news outlet, he said, WikiLeaks could not be held liable for releasing the documents so long as it did not “participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place.”

The judge’s ruling came several months after special counsel Robert Mueller concluded his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The inquiry did not find evidence to establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia’s effort to influence the election results.

Koeltl refused the Trump campaign’s request to penalize the national committee for filing the lawsuit last year. He said the complaint was not “so objectively unreasonable” that the plaintiffs should be disciplined for it.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/politics/dnc-trump-russia-lawsuit-dismissed.html" id="b4a2789a-5f0b-37c7-a625-ccea26e22447">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday dismissed a lawsuit by the Democratic National Committee that had accused President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks and Russia of illegally conspiring to damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential run.

Democrats' Lawsuit Alleging Trump-Russia Conspiracy Is Dismissed

Minutes later, the Manhattan district attorney filed a raft of state criminal charges, including mortgage fraud, that could ensure Manafort remains behind bars even if Trump decides to pardon Manafort for his crimes. Convictions for state crimes are not subject to federal pardons.

The proceedings amounted to a wrenching defeat for the 69-year-old Manafort, who came to his sentencing confined by gout to a wheelchair and pleading for probation so he could spend his final years with his wife.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court in Washington expressed scant sympathy for his plight. Rather, she closed out the highest-profile prosecution brought by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, with a blistering critique of Manafort’s character and a rapid-fire litany of his legal and ethical transgressions.

She said Manafort had used his many talents as a strategist to evade taxes, deceive banks, subvert lobbying laws and obstruct justice — all so he could sustain an “ostentatiously opulent” lifestyle with “more houses than a family can enjoy, more suits than one man can wear.”

Ever since his initial bail hearing, she said, he had misled her and the prosecutors, part of what she called his determined efforts to obscure the facts. Even on his sentencing day, she said, he appeared to be making a play for a presidential pardon by wrongly suggesting he was merely the victim of overzealous prosecutors who had hoped to prove the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government to tilt the 2016 election.

“The defendant is not public enemy number one, but he is also not a victim either,” Jackson said.

But she stopped short of giving Manafort the maximum 10-year term she could have levied, adding 3 1/2 years to the nearly four-year term Manafort received last week in a related prosecution in Alexandria, Virginia. Explaining why she was not harsher, she cited guidelines designed to limit punishment in overlapping cases and the fact Manafort’s effort to tamper with witnesses who could testify against him had been “nipped in the bud.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/politics/paul-manafort-sentence-washington.html" id="c5a0fa8c-3290-3c8f-ae22-593d07dd0e73">The New York Times</a>.

Manafort's Prison Sentence Is Nearly Doubled to 7.5  Years

WASHINGTON — A federal judge nearly doubled the prison sentence of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort to 7 1/2 years on Wednesday, denouncing him as a man who “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system.”

Minutes later, the Manhattan district attorney filed a raft of state criminal charges, including mortgage fraud, that could ensure Manafort remains behind bars even if Trump decides — as he has appeared to hint — to pardon Manafort for his crimes. Convictions for state crimes are not subject to federal pardons.

Her attitude was a far cry from that of U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Northern Virginia, who said last week that Manafort had “led an otherwise blameless life” in sentencing him to 47 months for eight felonies, a punishment that some legal experts described as startlingly low.

In an apparent reference to Ellis, Jackson noted that she was bound strictly by the case in front of her. “What is happening today is not and cannot be a review and a revision by a sentence imposed by another court,” she said.

But she described the evidence as overwhelming. “It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved,” she said. “There is no question that this defendant knew better and he knew what he was doing.”

Outside the courthouse, Manafort’s lead lawyer Kevin Downing described Jackson’s decision as “such a callous, harsh sentence that is totally unnecessary.” Downing, who was repeatedly interrupted by protesters, called it was a “very sad day.”

Manafort’s defense lawyers had repeatedly suggested that their client would be a free man had he not worked for the Trump campaign for five months in 2016, implying that Mueller’s investigators pursued him for crimes unrelated to the campaign only because they hoped to use him as a steppingstone in the Russia inquiry.

Jackson firmly dismissed that argument, noting investigators often find evidence of unrelated crimes in the course of inquiries, and “the perpetrators uncovered that way do not get a pass.” She said the argument was aimed at “some other audience,” not her.

The judge accused Manafort of a pattern of sleight of hand throughout the criminal proceeding against him, including wrongly inflating his assets in a bail hearing and exaggerating the harshness of his conditions in jail. She suggested he had sought to outmaneuver prosecutors by agreeing to plead guilty to conspiracy and cooperate with them, then backtracking and lying to the special counsel’s office and a grand jury.

“Was he spinning the facts beforehand to get a good deal, or was he spinning them afterwards to protect others?” she asked. “We don’t know.”

Even his apology for his crimes rang somewhat hollow, she said, because it appeared to be prompted by Ellis’ criticism that he did not seem sufficiently contrite during last week’s sentencing.

Each conspiracy charge considered at Wednesday’s hearing carried a maximum prison term of five years. But because the underlying conduct for one conspiracy count was much the same as the bank and tax fraud scheme for which Manafort was convicted in Northern Virginia, Jackson cut his punishment for that charge in half, to 30 months. “He cannot be sentenced for those components twice,” she said.

She sentenced him to 13 months on the second conspiracy charge, which involved obstruction of justice, saying his efforts to influence the testimony of witnesses had largely come to naught because the witnesses had rebuffed him.

In requesting probation, Manafort noted that he will turn 70 in two weeks and had already been stripped of his wealth. “Please let my wife and I be together,” he said. “I am a different person than the one who came before you in October 2017,” when he was first indicted.

Much of the hearing in Washington focused on Manafort’s violations of the law requiring foreign lobbyists to disclose their activities in the United States — probably because the other charges had been aired at length in the Virginia case.

Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor, said Manafort and others, at his behest, secretly lobbied for the government of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president who led Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. Manafort hired a team of people, including former European politicians, who lobbied for the interests of Yanukovych’s government while presenting themselves as independent experts.

“This deliberate effort to obscure the facts undermines our political discourse,” Jackson said.

Jackson tends to be relatively lenient on convicted criminals who appear before her. In the five years that ended in 2017, she handed down an average prison sentence of just 32 months, below both the Washington district’s 46-month average and the nationwide average of 47 months, according to court data maintained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

But she also has gone out of her way to make clear that being well-connected earns no chits in her court. “She knows who commits white-collar crime,” said Heather Shaner, a Washington lawyer who represented an embezzler in her court. “And she thinks it’s perfectly fine to punish them if they commit a crime and hold them to a higher standard because they have the education, and because they have the wealth.”

The prospect that Trump could pardon Manafort has hung over the proceedings for many months. Late last year, Trump said he “wouldn’t take it off the table.” More recently, he said, “I don’t even discuss it.”

Asked again after Wednesday’s sentencing, Trump said: “I have not even given it a thought, as of this moment. It’s not something that’s right now on my mind.” He added, “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort,” saying “certainly, on a human basis, it’s a very sad thing.”

The new charges filed in New York, in an indictment secured by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., apparently designed to ensure Manafort would be punished even if he is pardoned. They were rooted in the same financial fraud that led to Manafort’s downfall in federal courthouses. He is charged with falsifying business records to obtain millions of dollars in loans from two banks.

“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Vance said. He said his investigation had “yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable.”

While a spokesman for Manafort said he had no comment, some legal experts predicted that Manafort would challenge the new charges on the grounds of double jeopardy.

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, rapid-fire. “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, Virginia. 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. But some public defenders and former prosecutors said a 47-month sentence exemplified the sentencing disparities in a criminal justice system that favors wealthy, white-collar criminals.

Instead, some predicted, she would most likely allow Manafort to serve his sentences simultaneously, which would cap his prison term at 10 years.

“What is happening today is not and cannot be a review and a revision by a sentence imposed by another court,” Jackson said Wednesday, referring to the sentence Manafort received last week.

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.”

Last June, when Jackson revoked Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail after prosecutors filed new charges of witness tampering, Trump said Manafort was being treated like a mafia boss.

“Who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and ‘Public Enemy Number One,” or Paul Manafort, political operative &amp; Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement — although convicted of nothing?” Trump wrote on Twitter.

After the sentencing, Downing told reporters outside the courthouse that the judge had handed down a “callous, harsh sentence that is totally unnecessary.” Jackson conceded that the prosecutors brought no evidence of a conspiracy with Russia’s election interference, he said, omitting that she also noted that the Kremlin’s campaign was never part of the Manafort case and she was not responsible for ruling on it.

Jackson is comfortable with complex decisions, said Robert P. Trout, a defense lawyer who runs the law firm where she worked for a decade before President Barack Obama appointed her to the bench in 2011. “If anyone can get their head around the complexities and sensibilities of the sentencing considerations in play here, it is Judge Jackson,” Trout said.

The special counsel has not requested a specific sentence in any criminal case it has brought. In the case before Jackson, prosecutors said that Manafort had “repeatedly and brazenly” violated a host of laws and did not deserve any breaks. Even though sentencing guidelines recommended a prison term of up to 22 years, the maximum sentence was governed by the statutes, not the guidelines, and so was limited to 10 years.

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, saying that his efforts to influence witnesses had “largely been nipped in the bud.”

But Jackson has gone out of her way to make clear that being well-connected earns no chits in her court. “She knows who commits white-collar crime,” said Heather Shaner, a Washington lawyer who represented an embezzler in her court. “And she thinks it’s perfectly fine to punish them if they commit a crime and hold them to a higher standard because they have the education, and because they have the wealth.”

Six years ago, she sentenced the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Jr., the former Illinois congressman and son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, to 30 months in prison for stealing $750,000 from his campaign to pay personal expenses. He had asked for probation. But she told him: “How would I explain a probationary sentence to those troubled youths who are locked up, who didn’t start where you started, and were not given what you were given?”

“It would be read one way and one way only, as a clear statement that there are two systems of justice: one for the well-connected, and one for everyone else,” she added. “I cannot do it. I will not do it.”

Paul Manafort Sentenced to 3.5 More Years in Prison

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, has been ordered to serve a total of 7 1/2 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.”

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.

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, Virginia. 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.

Paul Manafort Is Sentenced to 3.5 More Years in Prison

State prosecutors in Manhattan are said to be preparing charges against Manafort to help ensure he will serve prison time even if Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Federal 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,” Jackson said of Manafort’s case. She added, “A significant portion of his career has been spent gaming the system.”

Each charge carried a maximum of five years. But Jackson noted that one count was closely tied to 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 asked the judge not to add to his time behind bars. “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, speaking from a wheelchair because gout has made it difficult for him to stand.

But 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,” he 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 rare than the government reaches a plea deal and then pulls out, claiming that the defendant has deceived them instead of cooperating.

The judge 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 a related case overseen by Judge T.S. Ellis of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. 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.

Hanging over the entire case has been the chance that President Donald 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.”

The special counsel has not requested a specific sentence in any criminal case it has brought. In the case before Jackson, prosecutors said that Manafort had “repeatedly and brazenly” violated a host of laws and did not deserve any breaks. Even though sentencing guidelines recommended a prison term of up to 22 years, the maximum sentence is governed by the statutes, not the guidelines, and so is limited to 10 years.

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman who was sentenced last week to nearly four years in prison, was ordered on Wednesday to serve an additional 3 1/2 years for conspiracy, closing out the special counsel’s highest-profile prosecution.

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.

Hanging over the entire case has been the chance that President Donald Trump could pardon Manafort.

Closing out the special counsel’s highest-profile prosecution, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court in Washington will sentence Manafort, 69, on two conspiracy counts that each carry a maximum term of five years. The charges, to which Manafort pleaded guilty last fall, encompass a host of crimes including money laundering and obstruction of justice.

Jackson will be weighing an unusual set of circumstances. She is expected to consider not only the conspiracy charges but also the fact that Manafort lied to prosecutors after he agreed in September to cooperate with their inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether any Trump associates conspired.

The judge has ruled 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 might 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 a related case overseen by Judge T.S. Ellis III of U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. 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.

Because one of the conspiracy counts in Washington stems from the same criminal scheme as the Virginia case, some legal experts say they doubt that Jackson will sentence Manafort to the maximum term of 10 years to run consecutively with the Virginia prison term. Instead, some predicted, she will most likely allow Manafort to serve his sentences simultaneously, which would cap his prison term at 10 years.

Asked about a pardon 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.”

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, who was sentenced last week to 47 months in prison, faces the prospect of even more time behind bars when a federal judge in the District of Columbia sentences him Wednesday for conspiracy.

Manafort Faces Up to 10 Years in Conspiracy Cases

Jackson is comfortable with complex decisions, said Robert P. Trout, a defense lawyer who runs the law firm where she worked for a decade before President Barack Obama appointed her to the bench in 2011.

“If anyone can get their head around the complexities and sensibilities of the sentencing considerations in play here, it is Judge Jackson,” Trout said.

The office of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, has not requested a specific sentence in any criminal case it has brought. In the case before Jackson, prosecutors said that Manafort had “repeatedly and brazenly” violated a host of laws and did not deserve any breaks. Even though sentencing guidelines recommended a prison term of up to 22 years, the maximum sentence is governed by the statutes, not the guidelines, and so is limited to 10 years.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Federal District Court in Washington will sentence Manafort, 69, on two conspiracy charges to which he has pleaded guilty and which encompass crimes including money laundering and obstruction of justice. Each carries a maximum term of five years. His case is one of the special counsel’s highest-profile prosecutions.

Jackson will be weighing an unusual set of circumstances. She is expected to consider not only the conspiracy charges, but also the fact that Manafort lied to prosecutors after he agreed in September to cooperate with their inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether any Trump associates conspired.

In another oddity, Manafort’s prosecution was divided into two cases — the one before Jackson, and a related case overseen by Judge T.S. Ellis III of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. 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.

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, faces the possibility of a substantially longer prison term than the one he received last week when a federal judge in the District of Columbia sentences him on Wednesday for conspiracy.

In another oddity, Manafort’s prosecution was divided into two cases — the one before Judge Jackson, and a related case overseen by Judge T.S. Ellis III of Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. 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.

Of the half-dozen former Trump associates prosecuted by Mueller, Manafort garnered the harshest punishment yet in the case that came to a conclusion Thursday — the first of two for which Manafort is being sentenced this month. But Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to follow advisory sentencing guidelines that would have effectively put Manafort, who turns 70 next month, in prison for the rest of his life.

For nearly two years, prosecutors pursued Manafort on two tracks, charging him with more than two dozen felonies, including obstruction of justice, bank fraud and violations of lobbying laws. But while they won a jury conviction and a guilty plea, Mueller’s prosecutors have yet to provide a full public account of what information they gleaned from Manafort’s case regarding Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the degree of involvement by Trump associates.

The evidence in the case tried last summer before Ellis showed that Manafort hid millions of dollars of income in overseas accounts and lied to banks to obtain millions more in loans — a financial scheme that prosecutors said was rooted in greed and in Manafort’s sense that he was above the law.

They described him as a hardened, remorseless criminal who never fully accepted responsibility for his offenses and who continued to lie to federal prosecutors even after he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in a related case in Washington and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel’s office last fall.

While they asked for no specific punishment, the prosecutors cited sentencing guidelines that recommended a prison term of 19 to 24 years. Defense lawyers asked for leniency, citing Manafort’s age, health problems and lack of criminal record.

Manafort was a prime target for Mueller, who is believed to be winding down his 22-month investigation and is expected to deliver a report soon to Attorney General William P. Barr. While the prosecutions against Manafort did not involve his five months of work for the Trump campaign, prosecutors clearly hoped for the collateral benefit of winning his cooperation with the Russia inquiry.

But Manafort’s value as a witness ultimately proved limited. Prosecutors abandoned their plea agreement with him in November, saying Manafort had repeatedly lied to them. The federal judge overseeing the Washington case agreed that Manafort had deceived investigators about three matters, including his interactions with a Russian associate who prosecutors have said is linked to Russian intelligence.

Manafort will be sentenced next week in the Washington case.

The Manafort saga is drawing to a close amid lingering questions. Through an inadvertent mistake in a court filing in January, it became clear that Manafort had lied to the prosecutors about his interactions with a Russian associate, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who has been identified by prosecutors as having ties to Russian intelligence. Those interactions included Manafort’s transferring campaign polling data to Kilimnik.

The special counsel’s office had wanted that information kept out of the public eye to protect an open investigation. It remains unclear why Kilimnik would want such polling data, what exactly he did with it and whether the data transfer might have helped inform the Russian government’s covert operation to interfere with the U.S. election.

As proof of Manafort’s financial fraud scheme, prosecutors put forward exhaustive evidence of how he illegally concealed his work on behalf of political parties in Ukraine that were aligned with Russia and of how he hid more than $55 million in payments from that work in more than 30 overseas bank accounts.

Once his income from Ukraine dried up, their evidence showed, Manafort deceived banks to obtain loans to sustain a lavish lifestyle. At the same time, he worked for the Trump campaign for free, apparently hoping his status as campaign chairman would attract deep-pocketed foreign clients. He was fired from the campaign after five months when the scandal over his hidden income from Ukraine broke in August 2016.

Manafort’s lawyers repeatedly implied that the special counsel’s office pursued their client with unusual vigor because of his importance to the Russia inquiry. They said his political consulting work for four American presidents, including Trump, spoke to his high ideals. And they argued that the special counsel’s office has vilified him for what are essentially garden-variety crimes that for other defendants merited only limited time behind bars.

But prosecutors said that Manafort had been under criminal investigation before Mueller was appointed in May 2017, that his fraud scheme lasted a full decade and that he committed new crimes by tampering with witnesses after he was indicted. Those new offenses led a federal judge to revoke his bail and jail him in June.

“The defendant blames everyone from the special counsel’s office to his Ukrainian clients for his own criminal choices,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.

Manafort was indicted on 18 counts in the Northern Virginia case, but the jury convicted him on only eight: five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. Because of one holdout juror, the panel deadlocked on the other charges. Manafort admitted that he was guilty of those as well, though, as part of his plea agreement.

Next week, Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia will sentence him for the two conspiracy charges, which each carry a maximum penalty of five years. Whether the sentences run consecutively or concurrently is a major issue for both sides.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/politics/manafort-sentencing.html" id="6e42cce4-7ff4-3d4e-a9a3-8abf3f55b3a3">The New York Times</a>.

Manafort Is Sentenced to Less Than 4 Years in 1 of 2 Cases Against Him

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Paul Manafort, the political consultant and Trump presidential campaign chairman whose lucrative work in Ukraine and ties to well-connected Russians made him a target of special counsel Robert Mueller, was sentenced to 47 months in prison Thursday in the financial fraud case that left his grand lifestyle and power-broker reputation in ruins.

Of the half-dozen former associates of Donald Trump who have been prosecuted by Mueller, Manafort most likely faces the harshest punishment. In the case coming to a conclusion on Thursday — the first of two for which Manafort will be sentenced this month — Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, will decide whether to follow advisory sentencing guidelines that could effectively put Manafort, who turns 70 next month, in prison for the rest of his life.

WASHINGTON — Paul Manafort, the political consultant and Trump presidential campaign chairman whose lucrative work in Ukraine and ties to well-connected Russians made him a target of the special counsel, Robert Mueller, faces sentencing on Thursday in the financial fraud case that left his grand lifestyle and power-broker reputation in ruins.

Paul Manafort to Be Sentenced Thursday in 1 of 2 Cases Against Him

<h1>WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Wednesday nearly doubled the prison sentence of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort to 7 1/2 years, denouncing him as a man who “spent a significant portion of his career gaming the system.”</h1>

Minutes later, the Manhattan district attorney filed a raft of state criminal charges, including mortgage fraud, that could ensure Manafort remains behind bars even if the president decides — as he has appeared to hint — to pardon Manafort for his crimes. Convictions for state crimes are not subject to federal pardons.

The proceedings amounted to a wrenching defeat for Manafort, 69, who came to his sentencing in a wheelchair because of gout and pleaded for probation so he could spend his final years with his wife.

“The defendant is not public enemy No. 1, but he is also not a victim either,” Jackson said.

She stopped short of giving Manafort the maximum 10-year term she could have imposed, adding 3 1/2 years to the nearly four-year term Manafort received last week in a related prosecution in Alexandria, Virginia. Explaining why she was not harsher, she cited guidelines intended to limit punishment in overlapping cases and the fact Manafort’s effort to tamper with witnesses who could testify against him had been “nipped in the bud.”

Her attitude stood in stark contrast to that of Judge T.S. Ellis III of U.S. District Court in Northern Virginia, who said last week that Manafort had “led an otherwise blameless life” in sentencing him to 47 months for eight felonies, a punishment that some legal experts described as startlingly low.

But she said the scale of Manafort’s crimes was remarkable. “It is hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the amount of money involved,” she said. “There is no question that this defendant knew better and he knew what he was doing.”

Outside the courthouse, Manafort’s lead lawyer Kevin Downing described Jackson’s decision as “such a callous, harsh sentence that is totally unnecessary.” Downing, who was repeatedly interrupted by protesters, called it a “very sad day.”

Jackson firmly dismissed that argument, noting that investigators often find evidence of unrelated crimes during inquiries and that "the perpetrators uncovered that way do not get a pass.” She said the argument was aimed at “some other audience,” an apparent allusion to the White House, not at her.

The judge accused Manafort of a sleight of hand throughout the criminal proceeding against him, including wrongly inflating his assets in a bail hearing and exaggerating the harshness of his conditions in jail. She suggested he had sought to outmaneuver prosecutors by agreeing to plead guilty to conspiracy and cooperate with them, then backtracking and lying to the special counsel’s office and a grand jury.

Even Manafort’s apology for his crimes rang somewhat hollow, she said, because it appeared to be prompted by Ellis’ criticism that he did not seem sufficiently contrite during last week’s sentencing.

In requesting probation, Manafort noted that he would turn 70 in two weeks and had already been stripped of his wealth. “Please let my wife and I be together,” he said. “I am a different person than the one who came before you in October 2017,” when he was first indicted.

Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor, said Manafort and others, at his behest, secretly lobbied for the government of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president who led Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. Former European politicians and other members of Manafort’s team presented themselves as independent experts, disguising their true client.

Jackson tends to be relatively lenient on convicted criminals who appear before her. In the five years that ended in 2017, she handed down an average prison sentence of 32 months, below both the Washington district’s average of 46 months and the nationwide average of 47 months, according to court data maintained by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

But she also has gone out of her way to make clear that being well-connected earns no chits in her court. “She knows who commits white-collar crime,” said Heather Shaner, a Washington lawyer who represented an embezzler in her court. “And she thinks it’s perfectly fine to punish them if they commit a crime and hold them to a higher standard because they have the education and because they have the wealth.”

He said again that the special counsel’s investigation was “a hoax.” In remarks that appeared aimed at the president, Downing said outside the courthouse that “two courts have ruled no evidence of any collusion with the Russians.”

In fact, Jackson and Ellis simply noted that the evidence against Manafort was not related to Russia’s election meddling.

The new charges filed in New York, in an indictment secured by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, were apparently meant to ensure Manafort would be punished even if he was pardoned. They were rooted in the same financial fraud that led to Manafort’s downfall in federal courthouses. He is charged with falsifying business records to obtain millions of dollars in loans from two banks.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9f7b1a14-2590-4409-862b-4f83d8818eab" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/us/politics/paul-manafort-sentence-washington.html">The New York Times</a>.

The proceedings amounted to a wrenching defeat for Manafort, 69, who came to his sentencing in a wheelchair because of gout and pleaded for probation so he could spend his final years with his wife.

Manafort's prison sentence is nearly doubled to 7.5 years

<h1>ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Paul Manafort, the political consultant and Trump presidential campaign chairman whose lucrative work in Ukraine and ties to well-connected Russians made him a target of special counsel Robert Mueller, was sentenced Thursday to nearly four years in prison in the financial fraud case that left his grand lifestyle and power-broker reputation in ruins.</h1>

The sentence in the highest-profile criminal case mounted by the special counsel’s office was far lighter than the 19- to 24-year prison term recommended under sentencing guidelines. Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, said that although Manafort’s crimes were “very serious,” following the guidelines would have resulted in an unduly harsh punishment.

A team of Mueller’s prosecutors sat glum-faced while Ellis delivered his decision. Manafort, who has gout and came to the hearing in a wheelchair with his foot heavily bandaged, had asked the judge for compassion. “To say I feel humiliated and ashamed would be a gross understatement,” he said in a barely audible voice, reading from a prepared statement.

Of the half-dozen former Trump associates prosecuted by Mueller, Manafort garnered the harshest punishment yet in the case that came to a conclusion Thursday — the first of two for which Manafort is being sentenced this month. While prosecutors sought no specific sentence, some legal experts said a prison term that amounts to one-fifth of the lightest punishment recommended had to disappoint them.

“It’s atrociously low,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney who teaches law at the University of Michigan and watched much of Manafort’s trial last summer. While “many judges do sentence leniently in white-collar cases,” she said, “dropping all the way from 19 years to four years is absurd.”

Manafort’s allies had long thought that Manafort had a chance of leniency from Ellis, a Reagan appointee who sparred repeatedly with the special counsel’s team during the trial and has publicly voiced concerns that independent prosecutors have too much power. Within minutes of the start of the three-hour hearing, Ellis, unprompted, noted that Manafort was “not before this court for anything having to do with collusion with the Russian government to influence this election,” the core of Mueller’s inquiry.

Although Ellis seemed swayed by the defense’s arguments, Manafort may face a less sympathetic reception next week when he is sentenced in the District of Columbia on two conspiracy counts by Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court. Those charges each carry a maximum of five years. Kevin Downing, one of Manafort’s lawyers, asked Ellis to order that Manafort serve both sentences simultaneously. But Ellis said that was up to Jackson.

For nearly two years, prosecutors pursued Manafort on two tracks, charging him with more than two dozen felonies, including obstruction of justice, bank fraud and violations of lobbying laws. They ultimately won Manafort’s pledge to cooperate after he was convicted of eight felonies in the Northern Virginia case and faced a second trial in Washington.

But although he met with the special counsel’s office for a total of about 50 hours, prosecutors said Thursday that Manafort provided little information of value for their inquiry into how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 presidential race and whether any Trump associates conspired with them.

Most of what Manafort told the office of the special counsel “we already knew or was already in documents,” Greg D. Andres, the lead prosecutor in the case, said in court. “It certainly wasn’t 50 hours of information that was useful.”

The evidence in the case before Ellis showed that Manafort hid millions of dollars of income in overseas accounts and lied to banks to obtain millions more in loans — a financial scheme that prosecutors said was rooted in greed and in Manafort’s sense that he was above the law.

But defense lawyers cited Manafort’s age, health problems and lack of a criminal record. He will turn 70 next month.

Manafort was a prime target for Mueller, who is believed to be winding down his 22-month investigation and is expected to deliver a report soon to Attorney General William Barr. While the prosecutions against Manafort did not involve his five months of work for the Trump campaign, prosecutors clearly hoped for the collateral benefit of winning his cooperation with the Russia inquiry.

At a closed hearing in February, Andrew Weissmann, one of Manafort’s top deputies, told Jackson that it was highly unusual for the government to strike a plea deal with a defendant like Manafort who had already put the government through a trial. He alluded to the government’s motives for making such a pact, citing “enormous interest” in “the intelligence that could be gathered in having a cooperating witness in this particular investigation.”

But prosecutors abandoned the plea agreement in November, saying Manafort had repeatedly lied to them. In a recent ruling, Jackson agreed that Manafort had deceived investigators about three matters.

One was revealed through an inadvertent mistake in a court filing in January that showed that Manafort had lied to the prosecutors about his interactions with a Russian associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, who has been identified by prosecutors as having ties to Russian intelligence. Those interactions included Manafort’s transferring campaign polling data to Kilimnik.

It is also unclear why Manafort lied about it; prosecutors appeared to suggest that Manafort might have feared that the revelation that he had turned over polling data would have lessened his chances of receiving a presidential pardon for his crimes.

Before Ellis, Manafort’s lawyers repeatedly suggested that the special counsel’s office pursued their client because of his importance to the Russia inquiry. They said his political consulting work for four U.S. presidents, including Trump, spoke to his high ideals. And they argued that the special counsel’s office has vilified him for what are essentially garden-variety crimes that for other defendants merited only limited time behind bars.

“Most importantly what you saw today is the same thing that we have said from day one,” Kevin Downing, one of Manafort’s lawyers, said in a short statement outside the courthouse. “There is absolutely no evidence that Paul Manafort was involved in any collusion with any government official or Russia.”

While Ellis faulted Manafort for not apologizing for his criminal conduct, he also noted that the special counsel’s office had not requested a specific prison term.

During the trial, prosecutors put forward exhaustive evidence of how Manafort had illegally concealed his work on behalf of political parties in Ukraine that were aligned with Russia and of how he hid more than $55 million in payments from that work in more than 30 overseas bank accounts.

Once his income from Ukraine dried up, the evidence showed, Manafort deceived banks to obtain loans to sustain a lavish lifestyle. At the same time, he worked for the Trump campaign for free, apparently hoping his status as campaign chairman would attract deep-pocketed foreign clients. He was fired from the campaign after five months when the scandal over his hidden income from Ukraine broke in August 2016.

This article originally appeared in <a id="910d0b73-8a00-4a9a-b7f7-cb194d799048" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/us/politics/manafort-sentencing.html">The New York Times</a>.

A team of Mueller’s prosecutors sat glum-faced while Ellis delivered his decision. Manafort, who has gout and came to the hearing in a wheelchair with his foot heavily bandaged, had asked the judge for compassion.

Manafort is sentenced to less than 4 years in 1 of 2 cases against him

<h1>They said Manafort, who has been jailed since June, had already suffered greatly for his crimes. At age 69, plagued by health problems, he poses no risk of recidivism, they said.</h1>

Their sentencing memorandum, the second they filed this week, was submitted to Judge T.S. Ellis III of U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Viriginia. Ellis will sentence Manafort on Thursday for tax fraud, bank fraud and other financial crimes. The next week, he will be sentenced by Judge Amy Berman Jackson in a related conspiracy case in U.S. District Court in Washington.

Advisory sentencing guidelines set Manafort’s punishment at 19 to 24 years in the financial fraud case. While they recommended no specific sentence, prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert Mueller, have said they agreed with that calculation by the federal probation office.

But Manafort’s lawyers argued that such a punishment would be far too severe, asking for a sentence “significantly below the advisory guidelines.” They cited a string of cases of other defendants who were sentenced to probation or imprisoned for less than a year for similar schemes involving millions of dollars of income hidden away in overseas bank accounts.

Prosecutors have described Manafort as a bold, hardened criminal motivated purely by greed. The special counsel’s office has also asked that Ellis take into account the recent finding by Jackson that Manafort lied to prosecutors after he pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charges in September and agreed to cooperate with them.

Earlier this week, citing new information from a cooperating witness, prosecutors appeared to correct one element of their allegations that Manafort had lied to them about his contacts with a Russian business associate whom they have linked to Russian intelligence.

Manafort’s lawyers seized upon that apparent admission of an error, telling Ellis that the prosecutors’ revised account of their evidence cast Manafort in a more favorable light.

But just as they filed their pleadings, Jackson ruled that she stood by her conclusion that Manafort had lied about his interactions with the Russian associate, Konstantin Kilimnik, as well as about two other matters.

Lawyers seek lenient sentence for manafort

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, asked a federal judge in Northern Virginia on Friday to show leniency when he sentences Manafort next week, casting him as a loyal, compassionate, idealistic man who has learned a “harsh lesson.”

Lawyers seek lenient sentence for Manafort

<h1>WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, fought back Monday against the government’s portrait of their client as a hardened criminal, suggesting that he was facing the prospect of dying in prison only because he had been unfairly caught in the scandal over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race.</h1>

In a sentencing memorandum to the federal judge who will decide his punishment next month for two felonies to which Manafort pleaded guilty last year, his legal team said his crimes did not warrant a substantial prison term, especially given his age. Manafort will turn 70 in early April.

Disputing the prosecutors’ damning characterization of Manafort in a court filing last week, his lawyers insisted that Manafort was not only deeply remorseful but “has suffered almost unprecedented public shame” for what they called garden-variety offenses. The memos are previews of the oral arguments that both sides will make before Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S.District Court for the District of Columbia, who will sentence Manafort for the two conspiracy charges on March 13.

Jackson’s sentence will come five days after Manafort is sentenced for eight more felonies he was found guilty of last year in a related financial fraud case before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. A key question for both sides is whether Manafort will be allowed to serve the prison terms simultaneously, or whether they will be stacked atop each other.

Manafort’s lawyers asked that Jackson’s sentence be “significantly below” the 10-year maximum prison term she could impose. But whatever punishment she decides upon, they asked that Manafort be allowed to serve it concurrently with his sentence in the Virginia case. Under advisory sentencing guidelines, Manafort could be sentenced to more than 24 years in prison for the financial fraud scheme.

The defense team argued that had the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, never been appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election, “Mr. Manafort might never have been indicted in the District of Columbia.”

Even though Manafort has admitted his guilt in the conspiracy crimes, they said, Mueller’s team had pursued him with unusual vigor because he led Trump’s campaign during a critical period in 2016. He is one of the few defendants, they noted, to have ever been charged with a crime for failing to register as a foreign lobbyist with the Justice Department.

In their sentencing memo, unsealed Saturday, Mueller’s prosecutors asked for no specific sentence. But they said that Manafort had “repeatedly and brazenly” violated a host of laws for more than a decade, that he had admitted to leading a conspiracy that encompassed serious crimes including money-laundering and obstruction of justice, and that he should be sentenced to a substantial prison term.

The defense lawyers dismissed the prosecutors’ argument that Manafort was likely to commit new crimes unless he received a lengthy sentence. “The special counsel’s attempt to portray him as a lifelong and irredeemable felon is beyond the pale and grossly overstates the facts,” they said. Manafort has been “vilified in a manner that this country has not experienced in decades,” they said.

They also suggested that Manafort should not be punished more harshly than Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former lawyer and longtime fixer. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison after he pleaded guilty to lying to Congress, five counts of tax evasion, one count of false submissions to a bank and two campaign finance violations.

This article originally appeared in <a id="724810ad-aeb5-458a-95db-b4ce307b3d19" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/us/politics/paul-manafort-sentencing-memo.html">The New York Times</a>.

Paul Manafort's lawyers argue he has been unfairly 'vilified' before sentencing

In a sentencing memorandum to the federal judge who will decide his punishment next month for two felonies to which Manafort pleaded guilty last year, his legal team said his crimes did not warrant a substantial prison term, especially given his age.

Sharon Lafraniere

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