Paul Manafort had been under house arrest at his Alexandria, Va., condo since October, when he was first charged by Mueller’s team with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Manafort jailed after alleged witness tampering Sending the former Trump campaign chairman to jail could boost the pressure on him to cut a deal with special counsel Robert Mueller.

A judge has jailed former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort after prosecutors claimed he attempted to tamper with the testimony of two potential witnesses in a criminal case he faces over a Ukraine-related lobbying campaign.

Manafort arrived shortly after 8 p.m. Friday at the Northern Neck Regional Jail in Warsaw, Virginia, about a two-hour drive south of Washington. Manafort was assigned to the jail's VIP block, a jail database showed.


The move marks a striking, although somewhat expected, turn in the government's long-running case against Manafort, who is facing a series of financial fraud, tax and lobbying charges in cases spiraling out of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.

Sending the 69-year-old Manafort to jail could boost the pressure on him to cut a deal with Mueller, whose main task is to determine whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow on its election meddling efforts. However, it’s unclear what information the former Trump campaign chief could provide that would interest prosecutors enough to offer significant concessions.

The possibility of a pardon from President Donald Trump has also altered the typical plea-negotiation dynamic, seemingly leaving Manafort more willing to risk convictions that could result in the equivalent of a life sentence. Trump on Friday called the ruling "Very unfair!" on Twitter, further fueling speculation about a potential pardon.

Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2018

U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered Manafort remanded into custody following a Friday morning hearing in her Washington courtroom.

"I have struggled with this decision," the judge said, after hearing arguments from prosecutors and the defense. "This is not the first time we've had to talk about him skating close to the line."

Jackson said she eventually concluded that Manafort could not be trusted to abide by any conditions she attempted to impose. "I am concerned you seem to treat these proceedings as just another marketing exercise," the judge said sternly, before announcing she was revoking the house arrest he was placed under last October.

"You have abused the trust the court placed in you six months ago," the judge said. "The government's motion is granted."

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Jackson also flatly rejected claims by Manafort's defense that Mueller's office was being abusive by bringing the alleged tampering to the court's attention, a suggestion she said seemed to be part of a public campaign to sully the Mueller office's reputation.

"This is not about politics," Jackson said. "It is not about the conduct of the Office of Special Counsel. It is about the defendant's alleged conduct."

After the ruling to take Manafort into custody, defense attorney Richard Westling rose to ask Jackson to delay his client's jailing while the defense appealed. The judge denied the request.

With that, marshals stepped in to escort Manafort through one of the back courtroom doors used for defendants being taken to or from jail. He flashed a quick wave to his wife and a couple of friends in the gallery before being led out. He was not handcuffed while in the courtroom.

On Twitter, Trump lamented the decision, which he incorrectly referred to as a "sentence."

Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2018

“Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns. Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!”

While Trump's comments merely generated chatter about a potential pardon, Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani directly floated the possibility of a pardon for the former campaign official when asked about the jailing.

"When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons,” the former New York mayor told the New York Daily News.

Manafort had been under house arrest at his Alexandria, Va., condo since October, when he was first charged by Mueller’s team with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent.

Last week, prosecutors asked the judge to tighten the restrictions on Manafort or send him to jail as a result of his alleged efforts to shape the accounts of two men who advised on the Ukraine-focused public relations campaign — Alan Friedman and Eckart Sager.

Earlier in Friday's hearing, Manafort pleaded not guilty to two new obstruction-of-justice charges a grand jury returned last Thursday against the veteran lobbyist and political consultant in connection with the alleged witness-tampering attempt.

The witness-tampering claims that triggered Friday’s hearing revolve around alleged actions by Manafort and a longtime associate alleged to have ties to Russian intelligence services, Konstantin Kilimnik. Manafort and Kilimnik allegedly reached out Friedman and Sager via phone calls, text messages and encrypted apps beginning in February, soon after a revised set of charges against Manafort included mention of the lobbying effort Friedman and Sager organized.

The messages suggested that Manafort was seeking to have Friedman confirm that the campaign he worked on to polish the image of Ukraine and its then-president Viktor Yanukovych was focused on Europe.

However, prosecutors have alleged that lobbying of lawmakers, think tanks and media outlets in the U.S. was a significant component of the effort, which featured former European politicians and was dubbed the “Hapsburg Group.”

“We should talk. I have made clear that they worked in Europe,” Manafort wrote to Friedman on WhatsApp on February 26, prosecutors claim.

“Basically P wants to give him a quick summary that he says to everybody (which is true) that our friends never lobbied in the U.S., and the purpose of the program was E.U.,” Kilimnik wrote to Eckart on WhatsApp two days later, according to Mueller.

The geographic focus of the lobbying effort could be a critical question at Manafort’s trial in the case since U.S. law only requires that lobbyists for foreign governments or political parties register if their efforts target American government officials or audiences in the U.S.

During Friday’s session, Westling insisted that Manafort has “worked very hard” to comply with the terms of his release. The defense also noted that Manafort was never ordered not to contact witnesses in the case before Jackson.

However, in March, Manafort was ordered by a federal judge in Virginia not to contact individuals involved with the investigation of the case there, which involves charges of bank fraud, tax evasion and failing to report foreign bank accounts. Westling said it is open to interpretation whether that order applied to the charges pending in D.C.

"It's not clear what it meant for this case," Westling said, suggesting that Manafort would have seen the order as applying to calling "bankers."

While the defense has argued that Manafort's outreach to Friedman and Sager did not amount to witness tampering, Westling conceded Friday that his client's behavior in contacting the two men was unwise.

"The best practice clearly is to do that with your lawyer involved. That clearly didn't happen here," Westling said. He also stressed that there's no allegation Manafort threatened anyone or offered anything to the two men.

The defense attorney said Manafort had now been told: "Don't call anyone."

Jackson jumped in at that point saying she was confident Manafort had been told that by his attorneys "a long time ago."

Greg Andres, a prosecutor with Mueller's team, emphasized Manafort’s outreach to the two men was not “random” or driven by momentary impulse.

“This was a sustained campaign over a five-week period,” Andres declared, saying it involved “multiple” phone calls, texts and other messages. "It is inconceivable that he doesn't know they're potential witnesses.

Andres also added some color to the story prosecutors laid out in court filings about the alleged tampering.

The Mueller attorney said Friedman's lawyer reported that his client, who lives in Tuscany, was with his wife driving "in a car on a rural road in Italy" last February when he got a call on his Italian cellphone from an undisclosed number. According to this account, Manafort was on the line and said he needed to give Friedman "a heads up about Hapsburg." Manafort allegedly went on to ask if Friedman had seen anything in the news about the Hapsburg effort, which was first mentioned in public court charges the day before.

Andres recounted that Friedman told Manafort he couldn't talk, citing the noise of the car. "At this point, [Friedman] hung up the phone. [He] wanted to get off the phone," he said. Prosecutors say Friedman regarded the call as an attempt to "suborn perjury."

Andres said it was hopeless to try to prevent Manafort from doing something similar in the future, if he remained at home.

“The notion that there could be any conditions that could keep him from continuing to do that ... I don’t think exists, judge,” the prosecutor said. “He could use his wife’s phone or he could get another phone.”

Prosecutors never explicitly asked for the result they received Friday: the jailing of Manafort pending trial. In court papers, they said the judge should consider revoking Manafort's release or revising its terms. At the hearing, Andres argued that it was Manafort's team who needed to explain the conditions that would prevent future violations.

The two sides also squared off during the hearing about Manafort's use of technology. Andres raised a new allegation that Manafort engaged in a practice knows as "foldering," where two or more people trade messages through draft folders in an email account. The prosecutor provided few details but suggested it was part of "a history of deception on behalf of Mr. Manafort in this case."

Westling didn't address that issue, but said prosecutors were going too far in seeing cloak-and-dagger spycraft in Manafort's use of popular messaging apps, like WhatsApp, that encrypt their contents.

"WhatsApp is being used by 1.2 billion people in the world right now," the defense attorney said. "The idea that there's something special about using that app, which all of my children use, is a little bit of gilding the lily here."

Manafort’s scheduled to go to trial in the Virginia case July 25, followed by the D.C. case on Sept. 17.