New York state attorneys argued in court Thursday that fraud charges against former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort should be reopened.
In March 2019, the Manhattan office accused DA Manafort of falsifying business records to obtain millions of dollars in housing loan.
But in December, a state judge dismissed the charges, calling them a violation of New York’s double law in the double jeopardy, because Manafort had earlier in 2019 already been federally charged with related crimes. were discovered by former special counsel Robert Mueller.
On Thursday, the DA’s bureau appealed the decision, arguing the prosecutors who brought to the center at the state level about various elements of the crimes that were being prosecuted at the federal level.
The DA’s preservation says the prosecutors “contained several elements and were designed to prevent very different types of damage such as the federal crimes of Bank Fraud and Conspiracy to Commit Bank Fraud.”
Manafort was convicted in March 2019 in two federal lawsuits for prosecutors of conspiracy, tax and bank fraud. Both cases came from Mueller’s investigation. The Manhattan DA case was first announced less than an hour after Manafort got his sentence in the second federal case.
The state bill was seen by some legal experts as a way to hold Manafort accountable for his crimes should Trump decide to ignore his federal convictions through pardon.
The longtime GOP operative is currently serving a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence after a jury convicted him in one federal case and pleaded guilty in another. He was transferred from prison to house arrest in May because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Manafort’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
