Paul Manafort Is Sentenced to 3.5 More Years in Prison

“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.

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 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.

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 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.”

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 & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement — although convicted of nothing?” Trump wrote on Twitter.

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.

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 is governed by the statutes, not the guidelines, and so is limited to 10 years.

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 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.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.