When former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is sentenced for tax and bank fraud, U. S. District Judge T. S. Ellis III will likely issue the same lecture he gives to drug dealers and bank robbers.
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — When former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is sentenced for tax and bank fraud, U. S. District Judge T. S. Ellis III will likely issue the same lecture he gives to drug dealers and bank robbers.
« You write the pages to your own life story, » Ellis routinely tells defendants before pronouncing sentence. He also tells those who appear before him that « life is a series of choices and living with the consequences of those choices. »
Manafort’s choices leave the 69-year-old with the very real possibility he will spend the rest of his life in prison.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, Manafort could receive a 20-year sentence Thursday, though most observers expect he will receive less than that.
Last year, a jury in U. S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, convicted Manafort on eight felonies related to tax and bank fraud charges for hiding foreign income from his work in Ukraine from the IRS and later inflating his income on bank loan applications. Prosecutors have said the work in Ukraine was on behalf of politicians who were closely aligned with Russia, though Manafort has insisted his work helped those politicians distance themselves from Russia and align with the West.
