Trump pardons former campaign chairman Paul Manafort along with Charles Kushner, other allies
Kristine Phillips , Kevin Johnson | USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump pardoned his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Wednesday, making the former globe-trotting political operative the latest ally of the president's to receive a grant of clemency during Trump's last days in office.
The pardon once again highlighted the long shadow cast on the White House by the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, which resulted in the prosecution of six former aides to the president. Trump pardoned his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in November, ending a three-year legal odyssey for the retired Army general who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian ambassador before Trump's inauguration in 2017.
Manafort's pardon came as part of the latest batch of clemency grants which also included Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, who is the president's son-in-law and senior advisor. Charles Kushner was convicted of preparing false tax returns, witness retaliation, and making false statements to the FEC.
Trump granted a pardon to Roger Stone, a Republican operative convicted of lying to Congress to protect the president's campaign from an investigation into Russian election interference. Trump had commuted Stone's sentence in July .
Manafort was sentenced last year to more than seven years in prison in a pair of criminal cases that resulted from former Russia special counsel Robert Mueller's two-year investigation. The cases in federal courts in Virginia and Washington, D.C. centered on Manafort's decade-long work as a lobbyist in Ukraine.
Manafort thanked Trump on Twitter.
"Mr. President, my family & I humbly thank you for the Presidential Pardon you bestowed on me. Words cannot fully convey how grateful we are," he wrote.
Manafort was sentenced to nearly four years in prison in Virginia, where he was convicted of defrauding banks and taxpayers out of millions of dollars he had amassed through illicit lobbying. He was sentenced to a little over three years in prison in Washington, D.C., where he pleaded guilty.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson – who presided over the criminal case of Roger Stone, another Trump ally – delivered a withering rebuke from the bench during Manafort's sentencing in Washington. She said that Manafort spent much of his career "gaming the system" and that he cheated taxpayers to maintain an extravagant lifestyle.
"It's hard to overstate the number of lies and the amount of fraud and the extraordinary amount of money involved," Jackson said.
Trump said after Manafort was sentenced that he felt "very badly" for his former campaign chairman. "It's a very sad situation," he told reporters.
A voluminous report released last summer by the GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee found that Manafort's role as Trump campaign chairman, his longstanding ties to people affiliated with Russian intelligence services and his willingness to share information with them "represented a grave counterintelligence threat" during the 2016 presidential race.
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"The Committee found that Manafort's presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign," according to the nearly 1,000-page report .
Manafort, 71, has been serving his sentence in his home in Northern Virginia after the Bureau of Prisons moved him to home confinement as the coronavirus pandemic spread in the federal corrections system.
His attorneys asked prison officials to allow him to serve the rest of his sentence at home, saying his old age and health conditions put him at "high risk" of COVID-19 infection. They said Manafort suffers from several health conditions, including high blood pressure, liver disease and respiratory illness, and he was hospitalized for a heart condition, flu and bronchitis while in prison.
Trump has also granted clemency to longtime ally Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress to protect Trump and his campaign from the Russia investigation. The president commuted Stone's 40-month sentence just days before he was set to report to prison last summer.
Contributing: John Fritze
Via PakapNews