Paul Manafort was once President Trump’s campaign manager. By the fall of 2018, he was expected to face at least a decade in prison for 10 felony counts. Those counts included financial fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice. “Mr. Manafort is disappointed of not getting acquittals all the way through. He is evaluating all of his options at this point.” In the hopes of getting a more lenient punishment, Manafort agreed to fully cooperate with the special counsel, Robert Mueller. Now, federal prosecutors are saying he violated his plea deal by repeatedly lying during their investigation. Manafort’s lawyer also allegedly passed information to President Trump’s legal team. But this isn’t Manafort’s first scandal. Controversy has trailed the veteran Republican adviser since his earliest work as an international lobbyist and consultant. In the 1980s, Manafort testified before Congress and admitted to using his political influence to win millions of dollars in contracts from federal low-income housing programs. “The technical term for what we do and what law firms, associations and professional groups do is lobbying. For purposes of today, I will admit that in a narrow sense some people might term it influence peddling.” That same decade, Manafort advised the Philippine dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, on improving his image in the U.S. Manafort allegedly received $10 million in cash from a Marcos confidante. It was apparently money intended for Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign. But the campaign said it never received that money. Foreign contributions to U.S. presidential elections are illegal. Also in the 1980s, Manafort was linked to the prime minister of the Bahamas at a time when the island nation had alleged ties to drug traffickers. Manafort’s company said that the goal of its work was to help the Bahamas obtain more U.S. aid to help curb the drug smuggling. Decades later, Manafort would run Trump’s presidential campaign. “We want America to understand who Donald Trump the man is. Not just Donald Trump the candidate. The composite of his career. Not just from a business standpoint or a political standpoint, from a human standpoint as well.” But he resigned five months into the job in August 2016, in the wake of reports that he received more than $12 million from Viktor Yanukovich, the former Ukrainian president and pro-Russia politician. Yanukovich and his political party relied on advice from Manafort and his firm, which helped them win several elections. The Times uncovered that Manafort and others close to Trump met with the Kremlin-linked Russian lawyer in June 2016. That lawyer claimed to have damaging political information about Hillary Clinton. As for this latest brush with controversy, Manafort’s lawyers insist that their client has been truthful. But they acknowledge that Manafort and Mueller’s team are at an impasse.<doc-sep>Paul Manafort arrives for a hearing at US District Court on June 15, 2018 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP) (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images) Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort leaves Federal Court on December 11, 2017 in Washington, DC. In October, Trump's one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates were arrested on money laundering and tax-related charges. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Paul Manafort, advisor to Donald Trump, is seen on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 19, 2016. CLEVELAND, OH - JULY 17: Paul Manafort, campaign manager for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, is interviewed on the floor of the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena July 17, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. The Republican National Convention begins tomorrow. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) After a judge revoked his bail this afternoon the van carrying Paul Manafort arrived at the Northern Neck Regional Jail, Warsaw, Virginia. (CNN) — Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort will await his trial for foreign lobbying charges from jail. Two weeks after special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors dropped new accusations of witness tampering on him, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday revoked Manafort’s bail, which had allowed him to live in his Alexandria, Virginia, apartment under house arrest. The order marked an end to almost eight months of attempts by Manafort to lighten his house arrest restrictions after he was charged and pleaded not guilty to foreign lobbying violations. “The harm in this case is harm to the administration of justice and harm to the integrity of the court’s system,” Berman Jackson told Manafort in court. The judge emphasized to Manafort how she could not make enough rulings to keep him from speaking improperly with witnesses, after he had used multiple text messaging apps and called a potential witness on an Italian cellphone. “This is not middle school. I can’t take his cellphone,” she said of Manafort. “I thought about this long and hard, Mr. Manafort. I have no appetite for this.” Manafort also entered a not guilty plea to two additional charges levied against him last week, of witness tampering and conspiracy to obstruct justice. In total, he faces seven criminal charges in DC federal court. Three US marshals led Manafort out of the packed courtroom into the prisoner holding area immediately after the judge’s ruling. He was not placed in handcuffs. Before he disappeared through the door, he turned toward his wife and supporters and gave a stilted wave. Minutes later, a marshal returned to give Manafort’s wife, Kathleen, still standing in the courtroom’s front row, his wallet, belt and the burgundy tie he wore Friday. Court marshals held Manafort in the bowels of the courthouse for several hours following the hearing as they considered how to keep him protected from other inmates behind bars. He arrived about 8 p.m. at the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, 90 miles south of Washington. In a tweet, President Donald Trump said the decision to revoke Manafort’s bail was “tough,” although he referred to it as a “sentence.” “Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!” In her wind-up to her order, Berman Jackson also gave a brief nod to the bitter environment around the case: “This hearing is not about politics, is not about conduct of the office of the special counsel.” ’Danger to the community’ When Manafort was first arraigned and pleaded not guilty in October, a magistrate judge set a $10 million bail price and placed him under house arrest, confiscating his passports. Manafort then attempted to find assets of his own and through real estate and family members’ accounts. In December, the judge signed off on his plan – provided he could supply the correct documentation. It didn’t come through, according to the court filings. Prosecutors have argued all along that the jet-setting political consultant was a significant flight risk. As the process to negotiate his bail dragged on, prosecutors discovered possible mortgage fraud related to some of the properties he hoped to use as bail. That’s when they finalized additional federal criminal charges against him in Virginia. In the past month, Manafort finally came up with a plan to post some of his own and others’ properties for his bail. The prosecutors appeared to agree with the plan, according to court filings. Then, last week, Mueller’s team alleged they found evidence Manafort had tried to coach potential witnesses. On Friday, they told the judge Manafort was a “danger to the community” and that he had committed a crime while out on release: obstruction of justice. Prosecutor Greg Andres described the following scene to the court from February 24, a day after Manafort’s co-defendant, his longtime deputy Rick Gates, flipped: A man was driving with his wife through rural Italy when his phone rang. Manafort identified himself to the man, Alan Friedman, a public relations consultant he once worked with. “I need to give you a heads up about Hapsburg,” Manafort told him three times. “Have you seen any article about Hapsburg?” Manafort was referring to a project he and Friedman had worked on years ago to bring influential Europeans to the US to push pro-Ukrainian politics while the group posed as independent experts. The project, dubbed the Hapsburg group, was among Manafort’s efforts to skirt foreign lobbying laws, prosecutors allege. Friedman turned down the radio as Manafort spoke, Andres said, then hung up the phone a minute and a half into the call. Manafort tried several more times to reach him in the following days. Andres said prosecutors now know Manafort used multiple ways to communicate with former colleagues like Friedman and Konstantin Kilimnik, a Moscow-based associate who’s also charged in the alleged witness tampering: In addition to phone calls and half a dozen encrypted messaging apps, Manafort uses a system with email called “foldering,” where multiple people have access to an account and write messages to one another as drafts,but the emails are never sent. “This was a sustained campaign over a five-week period to use multiple numbers, applications and people,” Andres said in court about the witness tampering allegations. Manafort’s lawyer Richard Westling argued that Manafort had no way to know Friedman would be a witness in the case. Westling asked the judge to simply issue a more specific order for Manafort to follow while out on bail. “This will not happen again,” Westling said. But the witness tampering allegations, which also resulted in new criminal charges, were enough Friday for Manafort to lose his house arrest privileges. 01:44 - Source: CNN Trump on Manafort: I feel a little badly about it ’Shellshocked’ He faces another 18 criminal charges for financial fraud and false reporting allegations in Virginia federal court. That case is set to go to trial earlier than the DC case, with a late July start date. His DC trial is set to begin in September, meaning he could spend the next three or more months imprisoned. Manafort has maintained his innocence and vowed to fight the charges since he was indicted alongside Gates in late October. Gates has since changed his plea to guilty and agreed to help prosecutors, because of the significant cost of his legal fees and attention bearing down on him and his family. Another associate of Manafort’s, Kilimnik, was charged with witness tampering and has not yet appeared in court. Prosecutors haven’t tied Manafort, Gates and Kilimnik’s alleged wrongdoings to the actions of the Trump campaign, which is at the core of Mueller’s investigation. However, prosecutors have said in several previous court filings that they are looking into Manafort’s contacts with Russians and Ukrainians – including Kilimnik – and possible coordination he may have orchestrated with them while he oversaw the campaign. Manafort had spent his days since October stuck in his apartment under court order.<doc-sep>WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Friday ordered former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort to jail to await separate trials on money laundering and fraud charges following allegations that he sought to obstruct the Russia inquiry while he was on house arrest. Immediately after U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson revoked Manafort's bail, he was led from a packed courtroom by U.S. marshals. Meanwhile, Manafort’s wife, Kathleen, left the courthouse, forced to walk a gauntlet of photographers to the door of a black SUV. The family made no comment. If convicted at trial, Manafort faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in custody. In a lengthy preamble to her ruling, the judge expressed clear frustration with Manafort’s conduct, saying that there appeared to be no terms of release that she believed the defendant would follow. “This is not middle school,” Jackson said at one point. “I can’t take his cell phone....I have thought long and hard about this. I don’t think I can draft a clear enough order” setting out conditions of Manafort’s continuing release. Manafort, who just two summers ago was celebrating then-candidate Donald Trump's nomination at the Republican National Convention, was charged last week along with Russian business associate Konstantin Kilimnik as part of an alleged scheme to tamper with two witnesses in the existing cases against him. Prosecutors have asserted that the alleged obstruction effort, in which Manafort and Kilimnik sought to coach the testimony of the two unidentified witnesses, required the revocation of Manafort's bail, sending him to jail to await a July trial in Alexandria, Va., on bank fraud charges and a separate September trial in Washington, D.C., where he faces a vast money laundering and fraud conspiracy. Investigators have claimed that the "repeated" contacts occurred while Manafort was under house arrest in Virginia, as a condition of his release. The witnesses worked with Manafort in organizing a group of former European officials who lobbied within the United States without registering as required by law. The witnesses told investigators that they "understood" that Manafort was reaching out to influence the testimony, according to court papers. More:Ex-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort, Russian associate hit with obstruction charges More:Prosecutors: Paul Manafort tried to coach witnesses in criminal case Earlier Friday, federal prosecutors representing Russia special counsel Robert Mueller and Manafort’s attorneys clashed in court, with prosecutors arguing that the former Trump aide deserved to be jailed for “committing a crime while on bail.” “The danger is that Mr. Manafort will continue to commit crimes,” prosecutor Greg Andres told the judge. Manafort attorney Richard Westling said his client had "no way of knowing" that his contacts involved potential trial witnesses, and he asked that Manafort be provided a list of witnesses so that he would know who to avoid. "A clear no-contact rule will solve the problem," Westling argued. "This will never happen again." Andres countered that it was "inconceivable" that Manafort would not know who would be witnesses against him. President Trump, meanwhile, sought to distance himself Friday from his former adviser. “Manafort has nothing to do with our campaign,” Trump told reporters gathered at the White House. “I feel a little badly about it. They went back 12 years to get things that he did 12 years ago? “I don’t think it’s right,” Trump said. But the president declined to say directly whether he believes Manafort or others who are part of Mueller’s probe should be pardoned. “I don’t want to talk about that,” the president said. “I do want to see people treated fairly.” Later, Trump took to Twitter to lament Manafort's jailing. "Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns," Trump tweeted. "Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!" Contributing: John Fritze<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump’s former election campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was sent to jail pending trial on Friday after being charged with witness tampering, the latest episode in his long fall from grace. Manafort, a long-time Republican operative and businessman, is a target of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election, and has been indicted on mostly financial-related charges, including conspiring to launder money and defraud the United States. He pleaded not guilty on those charges and had been on home confinement in Virginia, required to wear an electronic monitoring device. Mueller last week charged him with witness tampering in the case. Manafort pleaded not guilty to that charge on Friday but U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington revoked his bail, sending him to jail. “I have no appetite for this ... But in the end, I cannot turn a blind eye,” she said. “You’ve abused the trust placed in you.” Manafort turned around briefly to wave to his wife before heading out a door at the back of the crowded courtroom, witnesses said. Manafort’s spokesman did not respond to requests for comment on the decision. Manafort’s legal defense fund asked in a Twitter post, “Why is he the target of a partisan investigation?” echoing a theme of Trump and his supporters that the Mueller inquiry is a political witch hunt. Trump said it was unfair to send Manafort to jail. “Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort,” Trump wrote on Twitter even though Manafort has not been sentenced - he has not been convicted on any of the charges. “Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob,” Trump wrote. “Very unfair!” Mueller, whose investigation has overshadowed Trump’s presidency, is looking into whether any Trump campaign associates coordinated with Russia and if Trump unlawfully sought to obstruct the probe. Moscow denies U.S. intelligence agency allegations that it interfered in the election and Trump denies collusion. Manafort is due to go on trial in Washington in September and faces another trial on related charges in Virginia in July. Slideshow ( 6 images ) None of Manafort’s charges refer to the allegations of Russian meddling and largely pre-date the two months he worked as Trump campaign head during which the businessman and former reality TV star won the Republican Party nomination. Manafort has ties to a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin. The charges against him in Washington include failing to register as a foreign agent for the pro-Russia Ukrainian government under former President Viktor Yanukovych. Slideshow ( 6 images ) Manafort resigned in August 2016 following a news report he had received possibly illegal payments from Yanukovych’s political party. Hours after Manafort’s bail was revoked on Friday, Mueller’s office told the court it would introduce evidence at trial that Manafort sought to circumvent Ukrainian public procurement law by masking the size of payments to a U.S. law firm that wrote a report aimed at discrediting Yanukovych’s chief political rival. A June 8 indictment accused Manafort and a longtime aide, Konstantin Kilimnik, with tampering with witnesses about their past lobbying for Ukraine. Kilimnik, whom Mueller’s office says has ties to Russian intelligence, could not be reached for comment. The indictment accused them of attempting to call, text and send encrypted messages starting in February to two people from a political discussion group - the so-called Hapsburg Group - that worked with Manafort to promote Ukraine’s interests in a bid to sway their testimony. Manafort’s lawyers have argued that the evidence suggesting he tampered with witnesses is thin. Mueller’s filing said he may also introduce evidence showing that Manafort falsely represented business expenses on his tax returns and that Manafort, his business partner Richard Gates and Kilimnik structured loans between Cypriot companies they controlled to avoid recognizing those funds as taxable income. Legal experts say Mueller wants to keep applying pressure on Manafort to plead guilty and assist prosecutors as Gates did and is cooperating with the probe after cutting a plea deal. “Either he can double down in his resolve to fight it or it’s the last straw and it breaks his will and he decides to work out a plea bargain,” Michael Zeldin, a former federal prosecutor, told Reuters.