NEW YORK — The Manhattan district attorney announced more than a dozen criminal charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Wednesday, just after a federal judge sentenced him to an additional three and a half years in prison.
A Manhattan grand jury has indicted Manafort on 16 counts of residential mortgage fraud, conspiracy, scheme to defraud and other crimes. Manafort and others allegedly falsified business records to rake in millions of dollars illegally through a yearlong scheme, DA Cyrus Vance Jr.’s office said.
The state charges mean Manafort could face prison time even if President Donald Trump pardons him of the federal crimes for which he’s been separately convicted. It’s unclear whether Trump will do so, but he has reportedly said that he felt “very badly” for Manafort.
An investigation the DA’s office started two years ago has “yielded serious criminal charges for which the defendant has not been held accountable,” Vance said in a statement.
“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Vance said, adding that Manafort’s alleged violations “strike at the heart of New York’s sovereign interests.”
A representative for Manafort did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
News of the indictment came less than an hour after Manafort’s sentence to 43 extra months in prison on conspiracy charges. He was also sentenced last week to 47 months for tax and bank fraud charges, meaning he’ll serve a total of seven and a half years behind bars for the two cases stemming from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
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The Manhattan indictment mentions Manafort’s condo on Howard Street in SoHo, one of his two New York City properties that federal prosecutors were to seize as part of a reported plea deal. The other is a brownstone in Carroll Gardens.
Federal prosecutors accused Manafort of using money from secret offshore bank accounts to buy both homes and lying to a bank to get $5 million loan to renovate the Carroll Gardens property.
The Manhattan DA’s office put off its investigation for a time to avoid interfering with Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election, The New York Times reported Wednesday.