Paul Manafort is currently set to stand trial on bank fraud, tax evasion and other charges in Alexandria, Virginia, beginning July 25. Judge rejects Manafort's challenge to Mueller's legitimacy

A federal judge on Tuesday rejected former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's challenge to the authority of special counsel Robert Mueller.

The ruling from U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III dashes the hopes of many allies of President Donald Trump's that Ellis would deliver a crippling blow to Mueller's office and undermine the legal legitimacy of his appointment.


During oral arguments last month relating to bank and tax fraud charges against Manafort, Ellis skewered the special prosecutor's team, suggesting they were on a crusade aimed at impeaching Trump. The president leaped on the critique, reading it aloud from a stage during a speech in Texas.

“I‘ve been saying that for a long time. It‘s a witch hunt,“ the president said, praising the judge as "really something special, I hear."

Ellis's 31-page written opinion is rife with skepticism about the special counsel mechanism and about Mueller's pursuit of fraud charges against Manafort. But the judge ultimately concluded that Manafort's attorneys had not made a sufficient legal case to justify tossing out his indictment.

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"The Special Counsel’s appointment was consistent with both constitutional requirements regarding appointment of officers and statutory requirements governing the authority to conduct criminal litigation on behalf of the United States, the Special Counsel had legal authority to investigate and to prosecute this matter and dismissal of the Superseding Indictment is not warranted," the Reagan appointee wrote.

Still, Ellis insisted, "that conclusion should not be read as approval of the practice of appointing Special Counsel to prosecute cases of alleged high-level misconduct."

"Here, we have a prosecution of a campaign official, not a government official, for acts that occurred well before the Presidential election. To be sure, it is plausible, indeed ultimately persuasive here, to argue that the investigation and prosecution has some relevance to the election which occurred months if not years after the alleged misconduct. But in the end, that fact does not warrant dismissal, the judge added.

Ellis, who sits in Alexandria, Virginia, made clear he believes the appointment of special counsels is unwise but said it wasn't his role as a judge to implement that view.

"The Constitution’s system of checks and balances, reflected to some extent in the regulations at issue, are designed to ensure that no single individual or branch of government has plenary or absolute power. The appointment of special prosecutors has the potential to disrupt these checks and balances, and to inject a level of toxic partisanship into investigation of matters of public importance," the judge warned.

Passages in Ellis' ruling echo concerns he aired publicly at the May 4 hearing, including that the goal of Mueller's investigation is to get Trump by prompting Manafort to "sing."

"Given the investigation’s focus on President Trump’s campaign, even a blind person can see that the true target of the Special Counsel’s investigation is President Trump, not defendant, and that defendant’s prosecution is part of that larger plan," the judge wrote. "Specifically, the charges against defendant are intended to induce defendant to cooperate with the Special Counsel by providing evidence against the President or other members of the campaign. Although these kinds of high-pressure prosecutorial tactics are neither uncommon nor illegal, they are distasteful."

Pointing to a POLITICO report on Trump's budget plan, the judge noted that Mueller's team is expected to spend $10 million in the coming fiscal year. Complaining that officials seem to have "forgotten" lessons learned from the widely criticized independent counsel statute that expired in 1999, the judge declared that Mueller's office is "in some ways less accountable" than the prosecutors appointed under that law.

Mueller was appointed in May 2017 by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein under regulations adopted after the independent counsel law passed into the history books.

In a footnote near the end of his decision, Ellis said that he thought concerns about Russian interference in the U.S. election would be better handled through a blue-ribbon panel.

"A better mechanism for addressing concerns about election interference would be the creation of a bipartisan commission with subpoena power and the authority to investigate all issues related to alleged interference in the 2016 Presidential election. If crimes were uncovered during the course of the commission’s investigation, those crimes could be referred to appropriate existing authorities within the DOJ," the judge wrote.

Spokespeople for Manafort and Mueller declined to comment on the ruling.

Manafort is currently set to stand trial on bank fraud, tax evasion and other charges in Ellis' Alexandria courtroom beginning July 25. Manafort also faces a separate trial, set to open Sept. 17, in a case brought by Mueller in Washington, charging the veteran lobbyist and consultant with money laundering, failing to register as a foreign agent and other offenses.

Last month, the judge in the Washington case, Amy Berman Jackson, rejected a similar motion by Manafort's defense seeking to throw out the indictment over issues related to Mueller's appointment and the scope of the investigation.

Jackson also caused more trouble for Manafort earlier this month by ordering him jailed over new witness-tampering charges. He's now being held at a Virginia jail about two hours' drive south of Washington. A hearing on motions in Manafort's Alexandria case is set for Friday, but Ellis excused him from attending after Manafort's defense lawyers said he didn't want to endure four hours driving to and from the session.

Manafort is appealing Jackson's decision to send him to jail to await his trials.