Judge Amy Berman Jackson of U.S. 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,” she said, reeling off Manafort’s various offenses, rapid-fire. “There is no question that this defendant knew better and he knew what he was doing.”
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 was also expected to get credit for the nine months he has already spent in jail.
Soon after the additional sentence was handed down, Manafort was charged in state court in New York with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other felonies, an effort to ensure he will still face prison time if Trump pardons him for his federal crimes.
Manafort asked the judge in Washington not to add to his time in prison. “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, hunched over in a wheelchair because of a flare-up of gout.
The judge firmly rejected the argument that the prosecution was somehow “misguided or invalid,” saying it showed Manafort did not fully accept responsibility for his crimes. She suggested that defense lawyers kept repeating it not because they hoped to influence her thinking, but “for some other audience” — an apparent reference to Trump, who has commented repeatedly on the Manafort case.
Manafort’s prosecution was divided into two cases — the one before Jackson, and the related case overseen by Judge T.S. Ellis of U.S. 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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.