The memo, which was filed in a Washington Court, said that “Manafort committed an array of felonies for over a decade, up through the fall of 2018.”
“Manafort chose repeatedly and knowingly to violate the law — 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,” it reads.
The memo was originally filed on Friday but was publicly released on Saturday after it was reviewed and partially redacted.
READ MORE: Ex-Trump Campaign Official Paul Manafort Lied, Violated Plea Agreement — Judge
In September 2018, Manafort reached a plea agreement with the special counsel probing Russia’s alleged meddling in the US 2016 presidential election, after a jury found him guilty a month earlier on eight charges of tax evasion and bank fraud. Manafort pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. Yet he has not been accused of being involved in alleged Russian interference in the US presidential elections.
Prosecutors didn’t clarify whether the sentence should run consecutively or concurrently with the separate punishment that Manafort faces in a bank and tax fraud case in Virginia. Mueller’s office earlier recommended a 19-24 year jail term with a fine of up to $24 million.
Mueller has been investigating alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election since his appointment as special counsel in 2017. Russia has repeatedly refuted the claims of meddling, saying the allegations are absurd and intended to deflect public attention from actual instances of election fraud and corruption as well as other pressing domestic issues. US President Donald Trump has said on numerous occasions that the Mueller investigation is a political witch hunt that has not produced evidence in two years.
