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

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 The New York Times.