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Manafort should get no leniency for his crimes, Mueller prosecutors tell court in scathing memo

Mueller's team says Trump's one-time campaign manager "chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law."

Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, seen here in Cleveland, Ohio at the Republican National Convention in July 2016.   CREDIT: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, seen here in Cleveland, Ohio at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. CREDIT: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Prosecutors detailed a litany of crimes spanning more than a decade by Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, in a scathing memo released Saturday that laid out why the court should show him no leniency when he is sentenced on conspiracy charges next month.

Manafort, 69, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy in connection to the expansive probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. A March 13 sentencing date has been set at district court in Washington, D.C.

In the heavily-redacted memorandum that accompanied an 800-page court filing, prosecutors made no recommendation with respect to the severity of the penalty Manafort should face for his crimes.

They did, however, detail a long list of “aggravating” factors that the court should weigh before imposing its sentence.

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“Manafort committed an array of felonies for over a decade, up through the fall of 2018,” prosecutors said in the government’s sentencing memorandum.

“Manafort chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law — whether the laws proscribed garden-variety crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, or more esoteric laws that he nevertheless was intimately familiar with, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).”

“His criminal actions were bold, some of which were committed while under a spotlight due to his work as they campaign chairman and, later, while he was on bail from this Court.”

Manafort’s crimes also included witness tampering “so he would not be held accountable for his crimes.” And among the government entities he attempted to scam or defraud, prosecutors said, were the Treasury Department, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and Congress.

Prosecutors said that Manafort, who violated a plea deal, would have been given a far more lenient sentence had he abided by the terms of the agreement.

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The 25-page summary made no mention of Russia, conspiracy, or collusion, but did give a summation of other crimes he was convicted of at his trial in Virginia last year, including failure to register as a lobbyist for Ukraine.

Following a ruling earlier this month that Manafort lied repeatedly to investigators, Mueller filed a sentencing memo requesting that Manafort spend 19.5 years to 24.5 years in prison for his financial crimes.

That sentencing memo, however, pertained only to Manafort’s court battle in Virginia, where he was convicted of eight charges of financial crimes, including bank fraud and tax fraud.

Both sets of cases are related directly to Manafort’s work on Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and his links to Russian satellite officials and operatives dating back many years.