WASHINGTON, DC — Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has been sentenced to an additional 43 months in prison on top of his original 47-month sentence last week at a second sentencing hearing in the District of Columbia on Wednesday, meaning his total prison sentence will be seven and a half years. And his day got even worse when a New York prosecutor filed more charges against him.
Manafort received 73 out of a possible 120 months for witness tampering and conspiracy related to his illegal Ukrainian lobbying and money laundering. However, 30 of those months will run concurrent to his previous sentence, meaning he won’t serve them.
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The new sentencing comes about a week after he received 47 months in prison for tax and bank fraud in a separate case.
Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. announced charges there on Wednesday just after Manafort’s latest sentencing. A Manhattan grand jury has indicted Manafort on charges including residential mortgage fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records, the DA’s office said.
This time, Manafort was sentenced on charges of conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Both counts carried a maximum of five years in prison.
“Let me be very clear, I accept the responsibility for the acts that caused me to be here today,” he told the court Wednesday morning, according to CNN. “While I cannot undo the past, I can assure the future will be very different.”
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that it wasn’t her job to review or revise what many saw as a lenient sentence from a Virginia judge a week ago. And she showed little sympathy for Manafort as he noted he’s lost his properties, trusts set up for his family and other assets.
“This defendant is not public enemy No. 1, but he’s not a victim either,” she said, according to Politico.
Manafort’s 47-month sentence last week triggered an outcry from critics who argued that it was a very light sentence considering the charges, and that people go to prison far longer for far less. He pleaded guilty to the two counts back in September, opting to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller instead. But the government claimed Manafort violated the plea agreement in November by lying to federal investigators, and a judge agreed that the deal would be voided.
Manafort, who spoke four about four minutes from a wheelchair at last week’s hearing, asked the judge to be “compassionate.” He said he felt “humiliated and shamed,” but did not specifically express remorse for his crimes.
Manafort could have faced up to 24 years in prison. Manafort, 69, was convicted by a jury last August of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two bank fraud charges. The charges stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, but the case in Virginia wasn’t related to Trump’s campaign. Instead, it stemmed from Manafort’s overseas work advising politicians in Ukraine.
Manafort lost a house he owns in Arlington — in addition to two New York City properties and one in the Hamptons — as part of a reported plea deal that includes his cooperation with the investigation of Russian election interference. The federal government will seize Manafort’s Carroll Gardens brownstone and SoHo condominium now that he’s pleaded guilty to conspiracy and witness-tampering in Washington, D.C. federal court, a court filing indicates.
Prosecutors in 2017 first accused Manafort of using money from secret offshore bank accounts to buy the homes at 377 Union St. in Brooklyn and 29 Howard St. in Manhattan. He also lied to a bank to get a $5 million loan to renovate the Carroll Gardens property, prosecutors have said.
A Virginia jury convicted Manafort of eight tax and bank fraud charges, but couldn’t reach a verdict on 10 other counts in the first case brought in Mueller’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
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Additional reporting by Patch editor Emily Leayman