A federal judge on Tuesday denied Paul Manafort’s request to move the first of his two criminal trials hundreds of miles away from Washington.

Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, had asked to move his trial to Roanoke, Va., to avoid political bias and intense media coverage.

But Judge T. S. Ellis III of United States District Court ordered that the trial remain in Alexandria, Va., where he said Mr. Manafort could get just as fair of a trial.

In his order, Judge Ellis wrote that left-leaning politics around the nation’s capital was not enough to warrant a venue change. He noted that the Alexandria courthouse selects jurors from across Northern Virginia, an area of about three million people.