A federal judge ordered Paul Manafort to jail Friday over charges he tampered with witnesses while out on bail — a major blow for President Trump’s former campaign chairman as he awaits trial on federal conspiracy and money-laundering charges next month.
“You have abused the trust placed in you six months ago,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson told Manafort. “The government motion will be granted, and the defendant will be detained.”
The judge said sending Manafort to a cell was “an extraordinarily difficult decision” but said his conduct — allegedly contacting witnesses in the case in an effort to get them to lie to investigators — left her little choice.
“This is not middle school. I can’t take away his cellphone,” she said. “If I tell him not to call 56 witnesses, will he call the 57th?” She said she should not have to draft a court order spelling out the entire criminal code for him to avoid violations.
“This hearing is not about politics. It is not about the conduct of the office of special counsel. It is about the defendant’s conduct,” Jackson said. “I’m concerned you seem to treat these proceedings as another marketing exercise.”
Manafort was led out of the courtroom by security officers. He turned and gave a last look and wave to his wife, seated in the well of the court. She nodded back to him.
His attorney Richard Westling had urged the judge not to send him to jail, saying that it was not required by law and that doing so “will create more challenges for the defense, which already faces trial in two courts.”
The order to incarcerate Manafort capped a months-long fight over the terms of his bail. He had been confined to his home on electronic monitoring and other restrictions since he was first indicted Oct. 27 during special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Manafort had been asking to post a $10 million bond and end the seven months of home detention.
It was not immediately clear where Manafort would be jailed.
The order marked the latest fall for the political power broker and confidant of Republican presidents dating to Ronald Reagan.
Prosecutors alleged that by committing a new crime while on release, Manafort violated the terms of his home confinement in Alexandria, Va., and they asked the judge to revoke or revise it.
Manafort, 69, has pleaded not guilty to all charges in what prosecutors say was a broader conspiracy to launder more than $30 million over a decade of undisclosed lobbying for a pro-Russian former politician and party in Ukraine.
The case against him includes failing to register in the United States as a lobbyist for a foreign government. On June 8, he and a Russian business associate were charged with obstruction of justice after prosecutors say they tried to persuade two potential witnesses to tell investigators the Ukraine lobbying effort did not include activity in the United States.
Manafort’s attorneys have denied the tampering allegations and accused prosecutors of conjuring charges to pressure him to flip his plea and turn against Trump and his associates.
Manafort was arraigned Friday on the obstruction counts and is set for trial in Washington in September over the allegations of secret lobbying. He also faces a federal trial in Virginia in July for related tax- and bank-fraud charges brought as prosecutors reviewed his financial dealings.
Most of the criminal counts relate to activity that preceded Manafort’s time as Trump’s campaign manager from March to August of 2016, when he resigned amid news reports that he had received secret cash payments for his Ukraine consulting.
Prosecutors had previously complained to the judge about Manafort’s behavior as he awaited trial. In December, they accused him of violating a court’s gag order by helping ghostwrite an op-ed piece defending his work in Ukraine for an English-language newspaper in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
Jackson, the judge, declined to punish Manafort then but warned she would probably consider similar actions in the future as a violation.
In asking for Manafort to be jailed, prosecutor Greg Andres said in court that there was a danger Manafort would continue to commit crimes.
Andres summarized what he called “a sustained campaign over a five week period” by Manafort to reach the two witnesses and influence their testimony.
In addition to the texts and phone calls cited in the government’s earlier filing, Andres said one of the witnesses had provided an affidavit through his lawyer about one call from Manafort that was completed.
“We learned about it because a witness in this case brought forward information about the tampering. That’s when we started investigating,” Andres said, adding: “There is no way to monitor Mr. Manafort’s communications. At the least, he has shown he is adept” at making them.
As both sides discussed the witness-tampering allegation, Westling urged the judge to consider options short of jail that could be added to the existing terms of his release “that can prevent this from occurring in the future.” He said a no-contact order with others in the case could achieve that result and said the current release terms had not explicitly included that restriction.
- Spencer S. Hsu, Ellen Nakashima and Devlin Barrett
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