For the second time in less than a week, President Donald Trump‘s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is set to be sentenced in a criminal case lodged by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Manafort, 69, faces a maximum possible sentence of 10 years in prison from Judge Amy Berman Jackson at his final sentencing hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
Jackson has the option of making her sentence consecutive or concurrent with the 47-month prison term Manafort received last Thursday from Judge T.S. Ellis in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
Both cases were filed by Mueller, and primarily relate to crimes connected to Manafort’s consulting work for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine.
That work predated his tenure of several months on Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016.
Manafort was convicted at a trial in the Virginia case of eight criminal counts, including bank fraud, tax fraud and failing to file a foreign bank account report.
Federal sentencing guidelines had suggested that Manafort spend anywhere between 19 and 24 years in prison for those crimes. While legal observers did not expect Ellis to impose such a long sentence, his decision to lock up the longtime Republican operative for slightly less than four years nonetheless shocked many experts, who saw it as a relatively light punishment for such a case.
Manafort, on the eve of his second scheduled trial in Washington, struck a deal with Mueller’s prosecutors, agreeing to plead guilty to conspiracy charges.
As part of that deal, Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s probe of Russian interference — and possible collusion by the Trump campaign — in the 2016 election.
Trump denies any wrongdoing, and has called Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”
In November, prosecutors accused Manafort of breaching his plea deal by lying to investigators. Jackson agreed that he lied.
Manafort has been held in jail since last June, when Jackson revoked his bail after prosecutors accused Manafort of tampering with potential witnesses.
