Paul Manafort was sentenced Thursday to just under four years in prison for a massive fraud scheme tied to his work as a political consultant for Ukraine’s pro-Russian government.
The 47-month sentence imposed by Virginia federal Judge T.S. Ellis III represented a big break from guidelines that recommended 19 ¹/₂ to 24 years, which Ellis called “excessive.”
Ellis also said he thought President Trump’s former campaign chairman had “lived an otherwise blameless life,” according to reports from the courthouse in Alexandria.
During a brief statement, Manafort, who suffers from gout and other ailments, spoke from a wheelchair and told the judge that he felt “humiliated and ashamed.”
“I know it is my conduct that brought me here,” he said.
But Manafort did not offer an apology for his crimes, leading Ellis to say, “I was surprised I did not hear you express regret.”
In addition to the prison time, which will be trimmed by the nine months Manafort has already spent in jail, Ellis ordered Manafort to pay as much as $25 million in restitution to the government and a $50,000 fine, and serve three years of supervised release.
Jurors convicted Manafort last year of evading taxes on tens of millions of dollars in income by stashing the money in overseas accounts, and of lying to banks to secure millions more in loans when his work in Ukraine dried up.
Prosecutors said Manafort, 69, perpetrated the scams to maintain a lavish lifestyle of swank homes, luxury vehicles and custom clothing — most notably a $15,000 ostrich jacket.
The longtime lobbyist and Republican political operative also faces sentencing Wednesday in a separate case in Washington DC, where he pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice and defraud the government following the jury verdict against him.
Those crimes carry a statutory maximum of 10 more years in prison.
Trump has not been implicated in any of Manafort’s wrongdoing.
Manafort has been jailed since June, when DC federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson revoked his $10 million bond for tampering with witnesses in the case against him.
Both prosecutions are the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, but Ellis pointedly noted at the outset of Thursday’s marathon, three-hour hearing that Manafort was “not before the court for anything having to do with colluding with the Russian government.”
Manafort agreed to cooperate with Mueller as part of his September guilty pleas, but Jackson ruled last month that he violated that deal by repeatedly lying to prosecutors about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik — who allegedly has ties to Russian intelligence — during and after Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Manafort shared internal campaign polling data with Kilimnik, according to an inadvertent disclosure in defense court papers filed in January.