“The Manhattan district attorney’s attempt to prosecute former President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman was dealt a final blow when New York’s highest court said quietly last week it would not review lower court rulings on the case,” the New York Times reports.

“The court’s decision brings to an end the district attorney’s quest to ensure that the campaign chairman, Paul J. Manafort, will face state charges for mortgage fraud and other state felonies, crimes similar to those for which he was convicted in federal court and then pardoned by Mr. Trump.”

Paul Manafort’s fraud case in New York was dismissed, blocking local prosecutors’ effort to undercut a potential pardon from President Trump, the Washington Post reports.

New York Times: “Mr. Manafort had been charged in Manhattan with mortgage fraud and more than a dozen other state felonies. But Justice Maxwell Wiley of State Supreme Court dismissed the indictment, saying the charges violated the legal principle of double jeopardy, which holds that a defendant may not be tried twice for the same conduct.”

Paul Manafort has been hospitalized for a “cardiac event” while serving his over seven year sentence for charges related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, ABC News reports.

“Manafort was scheduled for a court appearance on Wednesday but his attorney was informed that he would not be appearing.”

“Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was sentenced earlier this year to four years in prison for tax and bank fraud related to his work advising Ukrainian politicians, will be transferred later this week from a minimum security facility in Pennsylvania to New York City’s Rikers Island,” a source close to Manafort told Fox News.

“Rikers Island is the famous jail in the shadow of LaGuardia Airport. It has been the temporary home of some of the most high-profile violent criminals in the city, including  David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam; and Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon.”

“A federal judge has signed off on a forfeiture order for President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort to hand over his Trump Tower condo on Fifth Avenue to the U.S. government,” Axios reports.

“Prosecutors suspect Paul Manafort might be trying to secretly claw back about a million dollars he agreed to hand over to the government for his financial crimes — and he could be using the same type of shell company at the core of his legal problems to fake a loan,” CNN reports.

“A mysterious shell company named Woodlawn LLC — which formed in the middle of special cousel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Manafort in August 2017 — claimed in court that it deserves $1 million from Manafort’s forfeiture proceeding. The company says Manafort, who was Donald Trump’s presidential campaign chairman, still owes that amount to pay back a 2017 mortgage loan.”

Franklin Foer takes issue with Paul Manafort’s lenient sentence and the judge’s assertion that the convict “has lived an otherwise blameless life.”

“In an otherwise blameless life, he helped the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos bolster his image in Washington after he assassinated his primary political opponent. In an otherwise blameless life, he worked to keep arms flowing to the Angolan generalissimo Jonas Savimbi, a monstrous leader bankrolled by the apartheid government in South Africa… In otherwise blameless life, he produced a public-relations campaign to convince Washington that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was acting within his democratic rights and duties when he imprisoned his most compelling rival for power. In an otherwise blameless life, he stood mute as Yanukovych’s police killed 130 protesters in the Maidan.”

“In an otherwise blameless life, he attempted to phone a potential witness in his trial, so that they could align their stories… In an otherwise blameless life, he acted with impunity, as if the laws never applied to him… And with Ellis’s featherweight punishment, Manafort managed to bring his life’s project to a strange completion. He had devoted his career to normalizing corruption in Washington. By the time he was caught, his extraordinary avarice had become so commonplace that not even a federal judge could blame him for it.”

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort “is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday on tax and bank-fraud charges that could see the former Trump campaign chairman spend much of the rest of his life in prison,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Sentencing guidelines, which Judge Ellis isn’t required to follow, call for him to spend upward of 19 years in prison, and prosecutors said they agreed with those guidelines. Mr. Manafort’s attorneys, on the other hand, have cited other cases they view as comparable in which defendants received probation or less than one year behind bars.”

CNN: “Prosecutors say that Manafort, 69, deserves between 19 and 25 years in prison as well as millions of dollars in fines and restitution for the crimes, for which a jury convicted him after a three-week trial last summer. Manafort has shown little remorse, they say, and even lied under oath following a plea deal after the trial.”

Paul Manafort asked a federal judge in Virginia to give him a prison term “significantly below” the 19 to 24 years called for under sentencing guidelines, calling that range “clearly disproportionate to” his crimes of bank and tax fraud, the Washington Post reports.

“Lawyers for Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, pleaded on Monday for a federal judge to spare their 69-year-old client from a sentence that would essentially send him to prison for the rest of his life,” Politico reports.

“In a 47-page filing, Manafort’s attorneys described a client who has been ‘personally, professionally, and financially’ broken by special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and who deserves a sentence ‘significantly’ below the statutory maximum of 10 years he faces after pleading guilty in Washington to a pair of conspiracy charges.”

“New York state prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Paul Manafort that they could file quickly if the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign receives a presidential pardon,” Bloomberg reports.

“New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is ready to file an array of tax and other charges against Manafort… something seen as an insurance policy should the president exercise his power to free the former aide. Skirting laws that protect defendants from being charged twice for the same offense has been one of Vance’s challenges.”

New York Times: “They resumed their investigation in recent months, and a state grand jury began hearing evidence in the case… The panel is expected to wrap up its work in the coming weeks and prosecutors likely will ask the grand jurors to vote on charges shortly thereafter.”

CNN: “It is the last major requisite court filing in Mueller’s longest running case, a sprawling prosecution of the former Trump campaign manager that led investigators to gather exhaustive information about his hidden Cypriot bank accounts, Ukrainian political efforts in Europe and the U.S. and into Manafort’s time on the 2016 presidential campaign.”

Prosecutors for special counsel Robert Mueller said in a new court filing that President Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort is facing a sentence of 19.5 to 24.5 years in prison for the financial crimes for which he was convicted in a Virginia court last August.