Paul Manafort’s first criminal trial has been postponed a week, to July 31.

U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III agreed Monday to the weeklong delay, pushing back the biggest showdown yet between the former Donald Trump campaign chairman and special counsel Robert Mueller.


But Ellis rejected Manafort's larger request to postpone his trial on bank and tax fraud charges until later this fall, after a separate case goes to trial in Washington, D.C.

Potential jurors will still gather starting Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, when Ellis said he will begin briefing them on the particulars of the first of Mueller's high-profile cases to reach trial.

Delivering his ruling on the start date from the bench, Ellis agreed to give Manafort’s defense attorneys more time to review thousands of pages of evidence that they’ve recently received from Mueller’s prosecutors. That includes materials obtained from Rick Gates, the longtime Manafort business partner who pleaded guilty in February and whose cooperation with the special counsel is expected to factor into the upcoming court case.

Ellis, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, also warned prosecutors for Mueller and Manafort’s defense attorneys that they would not be allowed to quiz potential jurors on whether they supported Trump or Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

“We’re not going to go inquire into how people voted,” Ellis said.

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Mueller’s prosecutors initially filed charges against Manafort last October and have since added new indictments accusing him of making tens of millions of dollars working as an unregistered lobbyist for a Ukrainian political party, channeling his income into offshore accounts, and then using the money in the U.S. to buy houses, cars, sports tickets, jewelry and other goods while lying to tax and banking officials about his earnings and wealth.

Mueller was tapped last year to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates helped, but he can pursue crimes he discovers in the course of that probe. His case against Manafort has been his most attention-grabbing so far, even though it doesn't directly relate to the 2016 campaign.

Ellis on Monday ordered Mueller to release his entire roster of about 30 potential witnesses, including the identities of five people that his prosecutors have granted immunity in exchange for their testimony against Manafort.

A short time later, the lead Russia investigator named the immunized witnesses: Donna Duggan, Conor O'Brien, James Brennan, Cindy Laporta and Dennis Raico. All had indicated plans to invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination had they been forced to take the witness stand.

O’Brien and Laporta both worked on preparing Manafort’s tax returns at the accounting firm Kositzka, Wicks and Company, according to a person with knowledge of the trial. The firm didn’t respond to a request for comment.

One person who is not on Mueller’s list is Tony Podesta, the founder of the Podesta Group lobbying shop and brother of Hillary Clinton‘s 2016 campaign chairman, John Podesta. Fox News host Tucker Carlson cited two unnamed sources last week to report that Tony Podesta would be called in the Manafort trial, but that has not proven to be the case.

Manafort sat upright at the defense table during the Monday morning hearing before Ellis, wearing a green jail jumpsuit. He was clean shaven and frequently read documents and conferred with his team of attorneys. As he exited the chamber, the defendant briefly smiled at his wife, Kathleen Manafort, who was seated in the courtroom's front row and shook hands with his lawyers.

With Ellis’s permission, Manafort did not return to the court for the afternoon session. When he returns for his trial, Ellis told the defendant he was to be dressed in “appropriate clothing.”

The special counsel’s office has already detailed hundreds of pieces of evidence that could be discussed during the trial. But during Monday morning’s hearing, Ellis sounded a skeptical note about the relevance of some of the materials.

“The New York Yankees don’t have anything to do with this case?” the judge asked one of Manafort’s lawyers, who replied that the baseball team could indeed be a topic of discussion since Mueller had listed his client’s season ticket licensing agreements as potential evidence.

Ellis signaled his reluctance to let the trial veer into “irrelevant stuff” that had little to do with the direct charges the longtime GOP operative faces.

“I’m not going to allow this trial to drag on,” Ellis said. “I’m not in the theater business. You have to be better-looking than that.”

During Monday’s hearing on the motion to delay the trial, Manafort’s attorneys argued they were scrambling to review thousands of pages of documents that they’d only recently received from Mueller’s prosecutors, including materials from Manafort’s former bookkeeper and pictures and notes contained on cell phones, an iPad and laptop belonging to Gates.

Reviewing those documents before the trial “is really the heart of the issue right now,” said Manafort attorney Kevin Downing.

Ellis ultimately rejected Manafort’s bid for a delay until after the completion of the Washington trial, which is scheduled to start Sept. 17 and involve allegations of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent in connection with his Ukraine-related lobbying work.

Mueller’s prosecutors, who have been resistant to switching around the order of the trials, have said the Virginia case will likely take three weeks to complete.

Shifting into final pre-trial preparations, Ellis ruled Monday afternoon on several motions spelling out what can or can’t be discussed when the 12 jurors and four alternates are seated. He granted Manafort’s request limiting the details about the defendant’s Washington, D.C. case solely to information about the Gates plea agreement. Jurors also won’t be told Manafort has been jailed since mid-June on witness tampering charges.

But Manafort lost a bid to limit what gets mentioned during the trial about his role in the Trump campaign. While the special counsel’s team again confirmed to Ellis that it didn’t intend to speak broadly about its investigation into any Russian collusion with the Republican White House campaign in 2016, it does plan to describe Manafort’s work for Trump: namely a claim that he succeeded in getting $16 million in loans from Chicago’s Federal Savings Bank in late 2016 and early 2017 in part because the bank’s chairman and CEO, Stephen Calk, was named to the Trump campaign’s economic advisory board and was seeking a top post at the Pentagon.

The Virginia federal court where Manafort first faces trial is widely known as the “rocket docket” because of its speediness. With that reputation in mind, Ellis said that even with a weeklong delay on the trial’s start he would keep the process moving on Tuesday by meeting with the entire jury pool. They will be given a questionnaire to gauge what they know about the details of the case.

Manafort’s attorneys had signaled an interest in finding out whether the jurors had voted in the 2016 presidential election, their main source of news and whether they or immediate family members or friends had ever run for political office.

Prosecutors for Mueller, meantime, have told Ellis they want to ask jurors if they have “strong feelings about the tax system of the United States or the Internal Revenue Service” and whether violations of tax laws should be prosecuted as crimes by the U.S.

They also want to know if there’s anything about Manafort or Mueller “that would prevent or hinder” jurors from reaching a fair and impartial verdict in the case.

Theodoric Meyer and Kyle Cheney contributed reporting.

