Washington, .- The former president of the campaign, Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, will serve more than 7 years in prison after being sentenced today in a second case for tax and banking fraud, in a process related to the so-called Russian plot.
“It is difficult to exaggerate the number of lies, the volume of fraud and the money involved,” said District Judge Amy Berman Jackson at the sentencing hearing after a trial in which the opulent lifestyle was patent of the accused.
Jackson sentenced Manafort to three and a half years in prison that will be added to the previous sentence to almost four years in prison he received in another judicial process last week in the state of Virginia.
The judge remarked that Trump’s former campaign chief had spent much of his career dedicated to “cheating the system.”
Manafort, 69, must return, in addition, 6 million dollars.
Before the judge, the accused apologized for his behavior.
“I’m sorry for what I’ve done, let me be clear, I accept responsibility for the acts that have brought me here today,” he said, at the same time he asked to be with his wife.
The bad news for Trump’s former campaign manager did not end with the ruling in the District of Columbia, since minutes after the ruling was heard, the New York Prosecutor’s Office formally accused him of sixteen counts of tax and banking fraud.
The new incriminations have been raised by New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance, “for a one-year mortgage fraud, whereby Manafort and others falsified business records to illegally obtain millions of dollars,” according to accusation.
The charges of the state of New York would avoid an eventual presidential pardon.
The current president, who has repeatedly defended his former adviser, has the ability to grant presidential pardons in federal crimes, but could not if the sentence is handed down in a state court.
“I feel very bad for Manafort,” Trump said at an act at the White House after the sentence was announced.
However, he said he had not “thought” about a possible pardon.
The process network against Manafort is the product of the investigation of the “Russian plot”, led by the special prosecutor Robert Mueller, but it is not related to the activities he carried out within the Trump campaign.
Mueller accuses Manafort of having created a “network of entities and bank accounts” in different countries to hide 75 million dollars that they obtained mainly from the pro-Russian government of Ukraine and Russian oligarchs.
Manafort, who led the campaign Trump between May and August 2016, had to resign after it was discovered that he had received $ 12.7 million for secretly advise Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich (2010-2014), linked to Moscow.
When in May of 2017 the Department of Justice appointed Mueller to investigate the alleged interference of the Kremlin in the elections to the White House of the previous year, this put the magnifying glass in the finances of Manafort to force him to collaborate in the investigation.
Fenced by the accusations against him, Manafort ended by signing a collaboration agreement with Mueller prosecutors investigating the Trump campaign in exchange for receiving a reduced sentence in their proceedings.
However, Mueller broke the deal by considering that Manafort had lied to him repeatedly, something Judge Jackson considered proven and what could have aggravated the sentence.
The fall from grace of Manafort joins that of Michael Cohen, personal ex-Trump, sentenced to 3 years in prison for crimes on campaign financing, sentences with which Mueller narrows the siege on the US president. (EFEUSA)
