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Paul Manafort, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, exits the District Courthouse after a motion hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, on Friday, May 4, 2018.
New York prosecutors Wednesday announced the indictment of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, only minutes after his sentencing in a federal case.
The 16 charges unveiled by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance relate to mortgage fraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records.
“No one is beyond the law in New York,” Vance said in a statement. Manafort’s alleged actions “strike at the heart of New York’s sovereign interests, including the integrity of our residential mortgage market,” Vance added.
Click here to read the indictment.
Crucially, Trump does not have pardon power for state charges.
Trump has not explicitly ruled out pardoning his former campaign official. But the president has lambasted the special counsel’s Russia probe as a “witch hunt,” and in recent days has appeared to criticize investigations in New York related to his business empire.
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White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday the president would decide whether to pardon Manafort “when he’s ready.”
Earlier Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced Manafort to 43 months of additional prison time on conspiracy charges lodged by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his probe of Russian election meddling and possible Trump-campaign collusion.
Less than a week earlier, Manafort had received a 47-month prison sentence in another federal case lodged by Mueller. Manafort’s combined prison time in the Mueller cases totals.
A spokesman for Manafort did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment on the state prosecutors’ charges.
Manafort’s charges in Mueller’s cases largely related to consulting work he did for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine years before joining Trump’s presidential campaign. But the New York charges involved Manafort’s conduct between 2015 and 2017, according to the indictment.
