Paul Manafort (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Donald Trump may have had a lousy night, but his former campaign manager Paul Manafort hit the jackpot. As Manafort was being released from the hospital after a “cardiac event,” he got news that the Supreme Court of New York had dismissed charges against him brought by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. So now all Manafort needs is a pardon from Trump, and he can be reunited with his magnificent ostrich jacket without fear of being locked up again on state charges.
Ever the showman, Vance had a sixteen-count grand jury indictment for mortgage fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records ready to drop the moment Judge Amy Berman Jackson banged her gavel in Manafort’s second federal sentencing.
“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Vance announced in a press release on March 13, 2019. Which is a hell of a way to send a message that the state of New York isn’t going to let Manafort off scot-free if Trump decides to pardon him like a war criminal, but doesn’t exactly read as a nonpolitical prosecutorial decision.
In August of 2018, Manafort was convicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on eight felony counts of bank fraud, filing false tax returns, and failing to disclose a foreign bank account. The jury hung on the remaining ten counts, which included bank and loan fraud. But in September, when Manafort reached a plea deal during his second trial in D.C. on conspiracy and witness tampering charges, he agreed to admit to the Virginia bank charges if the government promised not to retry him on the ten hung counts.
In March of 2019, Judge Ellis dismissed the hung counts with prejudice, which would strongly imply that they could not be revived under New York’s robust double jeopardy law. But Cy Vance had a point to make, so he argued that if you squint really hard, you can see how New York’s bank fraud statute is somehow different enough from its federal cognate to satisfy one of the jeopardy exceptions in Article 40 of the Criminal Procedure Law.
Spoiler Alert: Justice Maxwell Wiley of the New York State Supreme Court did not care to squint along with the District Attorney and find that New York was trying to root out a whole different type of corruption, so Manafort could be tried twice for the same underlying conduct.
“We will appeal today’s decision and will continue working to ensure that Mr. Manafort is held accountable for the criminal conduct against the people of New York that is alleged in the indictment,” Vance’s spokesman Danny Frost told the New York Times. And good luck to them!
In the meantime, Manafort can turn his attention to working on that pardon. He just needs a guy on the inside of Trumpland to keep pleading his case. Heckuva coincidence that Manafort has been helping Rudy Giuliani with his research into Ukrainian “interference” in the 2016 election, huh? Just doing his civic duty, of course. Maybe he can get early release for good behavior — that is if Donald Trump doesn’t give him a get out of jail free card first.
Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.