President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said Friday that former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s four-year sentence for tax and bank fraud was “justice.”
“The reality is, a first-time tax offender, most often you don’t put them in jail. The number here is big enough so that it warrants a jail sentence,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview with The Hill. “The judge was right on target.”
Manafort’s sentence was significantly less than the 19½ to 25 years he faced if given the maximum sentence. In August, a federal jury convicted him on eight counts of financial fraud.
The case was brought by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his ongoing probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Mr. Giuliani said the case was an attempt to get Manafort to flip on the president.
He called Mueller’s prosecutors “overzealous,” saying the case was merely a “white collar crime.”
“The fact is that if we take out their desire to try to crack him, to try to get him to cooperate, this is a tax evasion case — big money, no question about that.”
Manafort will be sentenced Wednesday in Washington, D.C., in a separate but related case.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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