Paul Manafort latest attempt to be released from conditional home confinement was shot down by a federal judge.
Manafort — the former Trump campaign chairman — had proposed certain properties as collateral to fulfill the $10 million bail set by U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson.
As part of that offering, he included his Alexandra, Va., condominium, which Jackson said in a Thursday afternoon order is “unsatisfactory” because Manafort had already pledged it as a loan on one of his other properties in Long Island, New York.
“The Court has determined that in the absence of additional security or assets pledged by a surety, it will not accept as security the Alexandria property that has already been pledged in its entirety as collateral for the loan on the Bridgehampton property,” Jackson wrote.
If Manafort wants to use one of his two Manhattan properties as “part of the security for the bond in a future pleading,” he must prove he is up to date on mortgage payments, Jackson ordered.
Not mentioned in Jackson’s order was the filing of new charges in the case against Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates.
Those new charges were put under seal Monday, but in court filings Friday, federal prosecutors said they have “substantial evidence” that Manafort secured a mortgage from Federal Savings Bank “through a series of false and fraudulent representations.”
In the filings, federal prosecutors said that at the next bail hearing for Manafort they can produce “additional evidence related to this and the other bank frauds and conspiracies.” That evidence would have an effect on the “bail risk” Manafort poses, prosecutors argued.
It is unclear who those new charges are actually against.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017, charged Manafort and Gates in October 2017 with a handful of charges including conspiracy and money laundering. Both pleaded not guilty, but Gates is reportedly set to take a plea deal that would include testifying against Manafort.
On Tuesday in federal court in Washington, a London-based Dutch attorney named Alex van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to one count of making a false statement to investigators as part of Mueller’s probe. Van der Zwaan worked closely with Gates, prosecutors said.
