Kamala Harris told a crowd at a Myrtle Beach restaurant that white-collar criminals should be held to the same standard as other criminals. | AP Photo/John Locher Legal Kamala Harris calls Manafort’s relatively light sentence unfair

Sen. Kamala Harris on Friday held up Paul Manafort’s relatively lenient prison sentence as evidence that the criminal justice system is “broken in America.”

The California Democrat said during a presidential campaign stop in South Carolina that the former Trump campaign chairman’s nearly four-year sentence for tax and bank fraud was emblematic of major discrepancies in the justice system between punishments for white-collar crimes versus other nonviolent crimes.


The former prosecutor ripped into Manafort, bemoaning that someone “who’s committed fraud, who’s clearly been involved in crimes that should rightly be thought of as against the very being of who we are and what is in our collective best interest, gets off with 47 months” in prison, while others get harsher sentences for marijuana possession.

Manafort’s sentence, of which he has already served nine months, came as a surprise to some, given that federal sentencing guidelines recommended anywhere from 20 years to 24 years behind bars for the crimes Manafort has been convicted of, a punishment that would have amounted to a life sentence for the 69-year-old.

U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III said Thursday he considered those guidelines “excessive” and “way out of whack” with what others faced with similar charges serve.

In Manafort’s case, Harris countered Friday, “One, the sentence does not match the crime. Two, we are looking at further evidence in America’s judicial system of absolute unfairness.”

She told the crowd at a Myrtle Beach restaurant that white-collar criminals should be held to the same standard as other criminals.

“People who commit white-collar crimes, they should be prepared to bring their toothbrush and spend as much time behind bars as anybody else,” she said to raucous applause.

Harris, who’s placed an emphasis on criminal justice reform as part of her campaign, acknowledged that there are too many who are “rightly distrustful” of government institutions, calling the loss of trust a “tragedy.”

“When we have a justice system that does not mete out justice equally that’s the beginning of a real downward slope,” she told the crowd. “And so it’s a statement about what we need to do to restore our concepts of justice in this country and it is a statement that we must be vigilant and speaking loudly whenever we see these injustices occur.”

When a member of the audience yelled out that “white people” and “rich people” should not be exempt from her call to action, Harris responded: “Everyone should be treated equally under the law, no question. That’s right.”

