Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Federal District Court in Washington sentenced Manafort, 69, on two conspiracy counts that encompassed a host of crimes, including money-laundering, obstruction of justice and failing to disclose lobbying work that earned him tens of millions of dollars over more than a decade.
“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 the 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.
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.
Hanging over the entire case has been the chance that President Donald Trump could pardon Manafort.
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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.