Washington: Paul Manafort, the longtime political consultant who once led Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, asked a federal judge for leniency Monday as he faces the potential of spending the rest of his life in prison in criminal cases stemming from the Russia investigation.
In a new court filing, Manafort’s attorneys described the 69-year-old as a victim of circumstance, prosecuted by special counsel Robert Mueller only because the government couldn’t make the case that he colluded with the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
They also dismissed prosecutors’ characterisation of Manafort as a hardened criminal and said he was merely a wealthy consultant who committed ‘garden variety’ crimes by illegally lobbying for Ukrainian interests and hiding millions from the IRS.
“The Special Counsel’s attempt to portray him (Manafort) as a lifelong and irredeemable felon is beyond the pale and grossly overstates the facts before this Court,” the attorneys argued, noting that the prosecution has ‘devastated him personally, professionally, and financially’.
The lawyers’ arguments echoed much of the criticism leveled at the Russia investigation by Trump, who has increasingly cast the probe as a politically motivated ‘witch hunt’ even as Mueller has methodically brought charges against six of his associates, including his former personal lawyer, his one-time national security adviser and a longtime confidant.
In the filing Monday, Manafort’s lawyers asked judge Amy Jackson to choose a sentence that is ‘significantly below the statutory maximum’ of five years on each count.
They also asked that any sentence run at the same time as any prison time in the separate case in Virginia, where he faces the possibility of more than 19 years behind bars.
Even as Manafort’s lawyers said their client takes responsibility for his actions, they sought to downplay his crimes, noting that his conduct, ‘while certainly illegal, unquestionably fall on the less serious end of the spectrum of federal felonies.”
In the witness tampering allegations, for example, the attorneys agreed it was improper, but they stressed that Manafort didn’t offer the witnesses bribes or threaten them with physical harm to give false testimony.
Regarding the illegal lobbying, the attorneys argued that such cases are rarely prosecuted and, but for Mueller, their client likely would have avoided indictment. Manafort’s case ‘involves a magnitude of harshness previously unknown in the enforcement’ of the statute known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act, they wrote.
AFP