As reported in this Politico article, a "federal judge should consider giving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort a sentence that would send him to prison for at least 17 and a half years, special counsel Robert Mueller said in a court filing made public Saturday." Here is more from the article about the filing and the legal context now:
Manafort faces a pair of sentencing hearings in the coming weeks in Virginia and in Washington where judges will determine what punishment he should face in two separate criminal cases brought by Mueller’s office involving tax fraud, bank fraud, unregistered lobbying for a foreign government and witness tampering.
The latest submission from Mueller accuses Manafort of a bold, brazen and wide-ranging series of crimes carried out over decades and continuing while Manafort was managing the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016, although prosecutors seemed to avoid mentioning the president directly in their new filing....
The new court submission in Washington released on Saturday makes no explicit recommendation about how much prison time Manafort should serve, but urges U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson to consider making the longtime political consultant and lobbyist serve a total sentence in the roughly 17-to-22-year range by making her sentence consecutive to one a Virginia judge is expected to impose ahead of her early next month.
Jackson has the power in her case to sentence Manafort to up to ten years: the maximum allowed by law for the conspiracy and obstruction of justice crimes he pleaded guilty to before her last year as part of plea deal.
Last week, Mueller’s prosecutors told U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria that sentencing guidelines applicable to Manafort’s case there call for him to serve between 19 and a half and 24 and a half years in prison. The prosecution team also made no explicit recommendation for a sentence in that case, beyond urging that the punishment be “serious” and adequate to deter others from similar conduct.
In theory, Ellis could sentence Manafort to as long as 80 years in prison on the charges of tax fraud, bank fraud and failing to report foreign bank accounts that he was convicted of at a high-profile jury trial last August.
The full 25-page filing (with a few redactions) is available at this link. Here is part of its introduction:
Based on his relevant sentencing conduct, Manafort presents many aggravating sentencing factors and no warranted mitigating factors. Manafort committed an array of felonies for over a decade, up through the fall of 2018. Manafort chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law— whether the laws proscribed garden-variety crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, or more esoteric laws that he nevertheless was intimately familiar with, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). His criminal actions were bold, some of which were committed while under a spotlight due to his work as the campaign chairman and, later, while he was on bail from this Court. And the crimes he engaged in while on bail were not minor; they went to the heart of the criminal justice system, namely, tampering with witnesses so he would not be held accountable for his crimes. Even after he purportedly agreed to cooperate with the government in September 2018, Manafort, as this court found, lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), this office, and the grand jury. His deceit, which is a fundamental component of the crimes of conviction and relevant conduct, extended to tax preparers, bookkeepers, banks, the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice National Security Division, the FBI, the Special Counsel’s Office, the grand jury, his own legal counsel, Members of Congress, and members of the executive branch of the United States government. In sum, upon release from jail, Manafort presents a grave risk of recidivism. Specific deterrence is thus at its height, as is general deterrence of those who would engage in comparable concerted criminal conduct.
Some prior related posts:
- Appreciating ugly sentencing realities facing Paul Manafort and Rick Gates after federal indictment
- Paul Manafort has bail revoked ... and has not (yet) gotten rescued from jail by Prez Trump's clemency pen
- Paul Manafort found guilty of 8 of 18 counts ... and now faces real possibility of spending many years in federal prison
- Reported sentencing details in Paul Manafort's plea deal to wrap up his various federal prosecutions
- Paul Manafort's DC plea agreement has a calculated guideline range of 17.5 to 22 years (though he can only get 10)
- Paul Manafort seemingly poised to get "senior discount" at upcoming sentencing
- Special counsel saying Paul Manafort is breaching his plea agreement by lying "on a variety of subject matters"
- Paul Manafort facing potentially longer sentence after judge concludes he failed to comply with plea deal
- Special Counsel's office files sentencing memorandum for Paul Manafort seemingly supporting guideline range of 235 to 293 months' imprisonment
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