Trump ex-campaign chief faces second sentencing

U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort will be sentenced by a second judge on Wednesday who will determine whether to add to a surprisingly lenient four-year prison sentence imposed in a separate case last week.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson, of the U.S. District Court in Washington, can give Manafort up to 10 years - five for each of the two conspiracy counts he pleaded guilty to last year in a cooperation deal with prosecutors that later imploded after he was found to have lied.

A judge in Virginia last week sentenced Manafort to 47 months in prison, departing far below sentencing guidelines that allowed for more than two decades in prison and prompting a national debate about disparities in how rich and poor defendants are treated by the criminal justice system.

The hearing may offer a window into tantalizing allegations that aren't part of the criminal cases against him but have nonetheless surfaced in recent court filings — that Manafort shared Trump campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a business associate the U.S. says has ties to Russian intelligence, and that the two men met secretly during the campaign in an encounter that prosecutors say cuts "to the heart" of their investigation.

Wednesday's sentencing comes in a week of activity for the investigation. Mueller's prosecutors on Tuesday night updated a judge on the status of cooperation provided by one defendant, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and are expected to do the same later in the week for Gates.

The Mueller team has prosecuted Manafort in both Washington and Virginia related to his foreign consulting work on behalf of a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. Manafort was convicted of bank and tax fraud in the Virginia case and pleaded guilty in Washington to two conspiracy counts, each punishable by up to five years in prison.

The decision by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III to sentence Manafort to 47 months stunned many who'd been following the case given both the guideline calculation of 19.5 to 24 years in prison and the fact that the defendant was convicted of hiding millions of dollars from the IRS in undisclosed foreign bank accounts. But Ellis made clear during the sentencing hearing that he found the government's sentencing guidelines unduly harsh and declared his own sentence "sufficiently punitive."

"If anybody in this courtroom doesn't think so, go and spend a day in the jail or penitentiary of the federal government," Ellis said. "Spend a week there."

Manafort has been jailed since last June when Berman Jackson revoked his house arrest over allegations that he and Kilimnik sought to influence witnesses by trying to get them to testify in a certain way.