Paul Manafort’s surprisingly well-illuminated first sentence in his legal battle with special counsel Robert Mueller shocked experts and energized President Donald Trump’s promoters.
But Manafort, who ran Trump’s presidential campaign for several months in 2016, could face a less-lenient judge in his final sentencing next week.
The 69-year-old longtime Republican operative was given a 47-month penitentiary sentence Thursday night, after being convicted in Virginia federal court on eight criminal counts counting tax and bank fraud.
That was much shorter than the 19-to-24 years in prison recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.
Manafort was also smacked with a $50,000 fine. That was the bare minimum recommended by federal guidelines, which had suggested a fine of up to $24 million.
The rap was immediately viewed as a crushing loss for Mueller’s prosecutors.
While Judge T.S. Ellis had been widely expected to steadily down a sentence below what the guidelines suggested, few had predicted he would give Manafort such a light correctional institution term.
Mueller’s team clearly wanted a more severe punishment.
They had blasted Manafort in recent court filings as an remorseless felon and liar who gave no indication that he would avoid committing crimes in the future. And while they did not make attractive a specific sentence, they did not dispute the hefty prison term suggested by the guidelines.
Most of the charges against Manafort linked to income earned from his work as a political consultant for Ukraine’s Russia-backed former president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Manafort was accused by Mueller of robbing the U.S. and its financial institutions after Yanukovich lost power in Ukraine, which dried up Manafort’s consulting operation there.
Mueller’s group accused Manafort of hiding millions of dollar in income from the U.S. government in overseas accounts, and lying to banks to obvious millions of dollars in loans. Much of that money, prosecutors argued, was used to maintain Manafort’s opulent lifestyle.
Regard for that long-term misconduct, Ellis said before delivering his sentence that Manafort has “lived an otherwise innocent life.”
Manafort has “been a good friend to others, a generous person,” Ellis added.
While many judiciary experts were surprised by the leniency in Virginia, they predict that he will be slapped with a harsher ruling next Wednesday, when he appears in Washington, D.C., federal court before Judge Amy Berman Jackson.
After being lagged at trial in Virginia last August, Manafort struck a plea deal with prosecutors on the eve of his second trial in D.C., which desire have dealt with crimes related to the Virginia case, as well as to witness tampering.
But that cooperation unity imploded several months later, when Mueller’s team accused Manafort of breaking the deal by lying to investigators.
Because of statutory greatest rules, Jackson cannot give Manafort a prison sentence in the Washington case greater than 10 years.
Permissible observers say Jackson is likely to apply the harshest sentence possible.
Jackson, who is also presiding over Mueller’s trunk against political dirty trickster Roger Stone, has been viewed by many as a tougher audience for Manafort’s defense band than Ellis.
That was made clear in June when Jackson ordered Manafort to jail pending whirl after Mueller accused him of tampering with potential witnesses in his case.
Jackson “has a different perspective and judicial temperament” than Ellis, defense attorney and latest federal prosecutor David Weinstein told CNBC.
Manafort has been held in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail for adjacent to nine months. He will get credit for that time against his 47-month sentence from Ellis and whatever Jackson sponges him.
Weinstein said he expects Jackson to make Manafort’s sentence in the Washington case consecutive, rather than concurrent, to what he received for the Virginia example in any event.
Despite that expectation, Weinstein said Mueller’s team “needs to use what happened” during the sentencing aspect of the Virginia case “to strengthen their arguments” before Jackson.
Weinstein said he was “shocked” by Manafort’s low sentence, racket it “a tremendous defeat for the special counsel’s office.”
Even before sentencing, Ellis had drawn scrutiny from legitimate experts for his dismissive attitude toward Mueller’s prosecutors during the trial last summer.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law Way of life professor and Trump critic, noted that Ellis previously accused the special counsel of lodging tax and finance names against Manafort merely as a fishing expedition to get more information for Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential vote.
Tribe TWEET Manafort’s 47-month sentence in ED Va is outrageously lenient. Judge Ellis has inexcusably perverted justice and the guidelines. His pretrial opines were a dead giveaway. The DC sentence next week had better be consecutive.
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank phony,” Ellis fumed to prosecutors last May.
And Ellis’ justification for handing Manafort a relatively light sentence immediately excited a backlash from Tribe and others.
Tribe said that Ellis “has inexcusably perverted justice and the guidelines.”
Last U.S. attorney Harry Litman called Ellis’ sentence “a totally crazy and exorbitant departure” and “a black eye for the justice structure” in a tweet.
Harry Litman TWEET Even for this judge— who is known as an arbitrary and capricious sentenced and prone to moving down departures in white collar cases— this is a totally crazy and exorbitant departure. Aberrations like this are what led to Guidelines in sooner place.A black eye for the justice system.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a presidential candidate, called out Ellis in a tweet, saying that Manafort “led far from a ‘faultless life.'”
Klobuchar TWEET My view on Manafort sentence: Guidelines there for a reason. His crimes took place over and beyond years and he led far from a “blameless life.” Crimes committed in an office building should be treated as seriously as crimes consigned on a street corner. Can’t have two systems of justice!
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, echoed that use in her own tweet, which pointed out a disparity between how white-collar offenders are sometimes treated compared to perpetrators of blue-collar felonies.
“The words above the Supreme Court say “Equal Justice Under Law”—when will we start acting like it?” Warren tweeted.
Warren TWEET Trump’s manoeuvres manager, Paul Manafort, commits bank and tax fraud and gets 47 months. A homeless man, Fate Winslow, helped dispose of $20 of pot and got life in prison. The words above the Supreme Court say “Equal Justice Under Law”—when will we start act out like it?
In his own tweet Friday morning, the president claimed incorrectly that “both the Judge and the lawyer in the Paul Manafort happening stated loudly and for the world to hear that there was NO COLLUSION with Russia.”
Tweet
Ellis actually had averred that Manafort’s crimes in that case were unrelated to the question of collusion with Russia. But the judge did not say that there was no collusion between the Trump contest and the Kremlin.
Trump, talking to reporters at the White House on Friday, said, “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort.”
“I over recall it’s been a very, very tough time for him,” the president added.