Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s lawyer Kevin Downing has requested that his client gets an early release from prison and serves the remainder of his sentence in home confinement because of concerns about the Coronavirus. Manafort is 71 years old and has been in ill health recently, and the virus seems to tend to affect older people more severely. Manafort is currently, without intervention, set for release in November 2024 at the conclusion of a seven-and-a-half year prison sentence for a slew of charges including “tax evasion, failing to report foreign bank accounts, witness tampering and engaging in unregistered lobbying for foreign interests,” POLITICO reports. The crimes, connected to his work for a now defunct pro-Russia government in Ukraine, began well before he joined the Trump campaign.
Downing’s letter is addressed to the Federal Bureau of Prisons and Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. The lawyer writes:
‘Mr. Manafort is at a high risk of contracting COVID-19 at FCI Loretto due to his age and pre-existing health conditions, and it is imperative that Mr. Manafort be transferred to home confinement immediately in order to minimize the likelihood of Mr. Manafort contracting or spreading the potentially fatal disease.’
Manafort is currently held at “a low-security federal prison in Loretto, Pa., about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh,” POLITICO reports. There’s an apparent procedure already in place at the prison for moving inmates out of the facility with concerns about the Coronavirus in mind, which involves a two-week pre-release quarantine to help ensure that Coronavirus symptoms won’t emerge when they’re sent into the community. Manafort was apparently placed into quarantine on March 30, but the prison officials’ plans for the end of that quarantine are unclear. Some prisoners have apparently been placed into quarantine and then brought back into the general population of the facility.
The Coronavirus has not yet been detected at the prison at which Manafort is held, but Downing — taking a markedly different tone than the president himself, who relentlessly insists that there’s little to worry about in the long run after entirely dismissing the virus threat in the past — suggests it’s only a matter of time. He wrote:
‘Given the growing number of cases in Pennsylvania and increasing challenges in testing inmates and staff potentially exposed to COVID-19, it is only a matter of time before the infection spreads to staff and inmates at FCI Loretto, at which time it may be too late to prevent high-risk inmates, such as Mr. Manafort, from contracting the potentially deadly virus.’
Pennsylvania is among the top half a dozen or so states in terms of sheer volume of Coronavirus infections as of early Tuesday. The state has suffered 24,292 cases and 590 deaths and counting.
Manafort has previously been rumored as someone who might get a presidential pardon, but the substance of those rumors has at least so far failed to pan out. Despite his endless complaints about the proceedings, President Trump has not actually pardoned anyone close to the center of the Russia investigation, which shined a spotlight on years of his own team’s operations.
