Tag: Paul Manafort

Manafort indicted by Manhattan DA on mortgage fraud charges

The Manhattan District Attorney on Wednesday indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in connection to a mortgage fraud scheme, announcing the charges within minutes of his sentencing in federal court in Washington, D.C.

District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced 16 charges against Manafort, including residential mortgage fraud, attempted mortgage fraud, falsifying business records and conspiracy. Prosecutors said Manafort engaged in the scheme over the course of roughly a year, from December 2015 until January 2017.

The 11-page indictment, filed in New York Supreme Court in New York City, alleges that Manafort falsified business records to obtain millions of dollars in mortgage loans.

View the complete March 13 article by Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

Second Manafort sentencing brings total to 7.5 years

A federal judge on Wednesday added 43 months to Paul Manafort’s prison term, bringing the former Trump campaign chairman’s overall sentence to 7 1/2 years.

Manafort, 69, appeared before District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington, D.C., wearing a suit with a light purple tie and seated in a wheelchair.

He faced sentencing for conspiracy charges that he pleaded guilty to as part of a deal with prosecutors in September. He faced a maximum of 10 years in prison for those crimes.

View the complete March 13 article by Morgan Chalfant and Lydia Wheeler on The Hill website here.

Former CIA director explains why he is certain Trump will pardon Paul Manafort

Paul Manafort, having received a surprisingly low sentence last week from a judge in Virginia last week, will face another sentencing hearing on Wednesday that could add up to 10 years on to his 47-month prison term.

But even after the second sentence comes down, the former campaign chair for President Donald Trump will have a remaining hope to avoid prison time: a presidential pardon. Former CIA Director John Brennan argued Monday on MSNBC that Trump will certainly pardon Manafort, even if it doesn’t happen immediately.

“Personally, I don’t have any doubt that Mr. Trump is going to pardon Paul Manafort at some point,” Brennan said. “The question is when. But then if he’s also convicted of state charges, Donald Trump is not going to be able to pardon him for that. So I do believe Paul Manafort will be able to get out of the federal charges because — what does Donald Trump have to lose if he pardons him?”

View the complete March 11 article by Cody Fenwick on the AlterNet website here.

Manafort sentenced to nearly 4 years in prison

A federal judge on Thursday sentenced former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to 47 months in prison, well below the amount recommended by the sentencing guidelines.

The sentence imposed by Judge T.S. Ellis III, a Reagan appointee, was significantly less than the 19 1/2 to 24 years Manafort could have received under the advisory recommendations.

In remarks from the bench, Ellis described Manafort’s crimes as “very serious” but said the guideline range was “not at all appropriate.” He pointed to significantly more-lenient sentences handed down in similar cases.

View the complete March 7 article by Lydia Wheeler, Morgan Chalfant and Tal Axelrod on The Hill website here.

Manafort doesn’t deserve leniency, Mueller filing argues

Special counsel Robert Mueller says in a new filing that he’s not taking a position on how much time Paul Manafort should spend in prison for charges in Washington, D.C., but told the judge presiding over his case that he doesn’t deserve leniency.

“Nothing about Manafort’s upbringing, schooling, legal education, or family and financial circumstances mitigates his criminality,” Mueller said in a heavily redacted sentencing memo released Saturday, which details Manafort’s crimes.

In the document, originally filed under seal on Friday night, Mueller said that the onetime Trump campaign chairman agreed in his plea deal that anything less than the government’s 17.5 to 22-year estimated sentence is not warranted.

View the complete February 23 article by Lydia Wheeler, John Bowden and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

Graham: Senate Will Investigate FBI ‘Bias Against Trump’

Credit: Brian C. Frank, Reuters

Lindsey Graham is back at it again, using his position as chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee to try and run defense for his buddy Donald Trump.

One day after a judge ruled that former Trump campaign Chairman Paul Manafort violated his plea agreement when he lied to federal agents, Graham announced he’s going to conduct an investigation into a conspiracy theory surrounding former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

Trump and his defenders on Fox News have tried to claim that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant used to wiretap Page — an energy consultant who has documented Russian ties and has given bizarre interviews on cable news — is evidence of some kind of bias against the Trump campaign by the FBI.

View the complete February 14 article by Emily Singer on the National Memo website here.

Federal judge finds Paul Manafort lied to Mueller probe about contacts with Russian aide

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had a meeting with Russian political operative Konstantin Kilimnik, just blocks away from Trump Tower on Aug. 2, 2016. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort lied to prosecutors with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about matters close to the heart of their investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

The judge’s finding that Manafort, 69, breached his cooperation deal with prosecutors by lying after his guilty plea could add years to his prison sentence and came after a set of sealed court hearings.

Manafort’s lies, the judge found, included “his interactions and communications with [Konstantin] Kilimnik,” a longtime aide whom the FBI assessed to have ties to Russian intelligence.

View the complete February 13 article by Spencer S. Hsu on The Washington Post website here.

How Manafort’s 2016 meeting with a Russian employee at New York cigar club goes to ‘the heart’ of Mueller’s probe

Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had a meeting with Russian political operative Konstantin Kilimnik, just blocks away from Trump Tower on Aug. 2, 2016. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

The 2016 nominating conventions had recently concluded and the presidential race was hitting a new level of intensity when Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, ducked into an unusual dinner meeting at a private cigar room a few blocks away from the campaign’s Trump Tower headquarters in Manhattan.

Court records show that Manafort was joined at some point by his campaign deputy, Rick Gates, at the session at the Grand Havana Room, a mahogany-paneled space with floor-to-ceiling windows offering panoramic views of the city.

The two Americans met with an overseas guest, a longtime employee of their international consulting business who had flown to the United States for the gathering: a Russian political operative named Konstantin Kilimnik.

View the complete February 12 article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger on The Washington Post website here.

Manafort continued Ukraine work in 2018, prosecutors say

Prosecutors allege that Paul Manafort was working on Ukrainian political matters in 2018, after his indictment in the special counsel’s investigation, and also revealed that a former business associate of his who was assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence attended President Trump’s inaugural, according to new court filings.

The details came in a partially redacted transcript released Thursday of a sealed hearing between prosecutors and the defense team for Trump’s former campaign chairman in the ongoing legal battle over whether Manafort lied and breached his deal to cooperate in Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The transcript contained some new elements.

View the complete February 7 article by Spencer S. Hsu, Rosalind S. Helderman and Matt Zapotosky on The Washington Post website here.

Manafort developments trigger new ‘collusion’ debate

The revelation that President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort allegedly shared polling data with a Russian suspected of ties to Kremlin intelligence during the 2016 presidential race has triggered fresh debate about “collusion” in Washington.

Democrats on Capitol Hill see the detail as perhaps the starkest signal yet that the Trump campaign may have coordinated with Moscow to interfere in the election.

But their Republican counterparts, along with the president’s attorney, say that’s not the case.

View the complete January 13 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.