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By Tom Winter and Phil McCausland
For over a decade, Paul Manafort “repeatedly and brazenly violated the law,” according to a redacted sentencing memo released Saturday by special counsel Robert Mueller’s office. The document added that his behavior “remarkably went unabated even after indictment.”
The memo, filed in the Washington, D.C., district court, states that Manafort, 69, continued to knowingly break laws well into the fall of 2018, “whether the laws proscribed garden-variety crimes such as tax fraud, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and bank fraud, or more esoteric laws that he nevertheless was intimately familiar with, such as the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
Foreign Agents Registration Act requires people acting on behalf of a foreign country in a political capacity to disclose those activities as well as the related finances.
“His criminal actions were bold, some of which were committed while under a spotlight due to his work as the campaign chairman and, later, while he was on bail from this Court,” the memo says.
President Donald Trump hired Manafort as his campaign chairman during the 2016 election. Manafort served in that position from June to August 2016.
While federal prosecutors say that they do not take a position with respect to a particular sentence that the judge should impose, they do note that the sentencing guidelines that could apply to Manafort range from more than 17 years to nearly 22 years in prison.
Manafort faces sentencing hearings in D.C. and Virginia next month.
NBC News previously reported that Manafort could face approximately 19 to 24 years in the Virginia case and be required to pay fines and restitution totaling more than $28 million.
The sentencing memorandum is 25 pages in length, but has over 800 pages in attachments. Most of the additional pages are filings or documents that have been made public before.
This could be one of the last major filings in the two-year special counsel case.
The federal judge in the case entered an order that allowed federal prosecutors to file a redacted copy of Manafort’s sentencing memo for the public and an unredacted version that would remain under seal.
