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 The New York Times.