The judge who will sentence former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in federal court was appointed by President Barack Obama, backed John Kerry for the White House in 2004, and suggested that George W. Bush stole the presidency in 2000.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the D.C. District Court has ruled for the Obama administration against the Catholic Church and for Hillary Clinton against the families of those killed in Benghazi. She has already sparred fiercely with Manafort’s legal team, setting the stage for a much tougher sentence than the less than four years imposed by Judge T.S. Ellis III,, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
Manafort, 69, faces up to 10 years in prison for the two conspiracy charges Jackson is considering. He is due to be sentenced Wednesday. If Jackson opts for the maximum, that could effectively be a life sentence, especially if she rules that Manafort’s two sentences should run consecutively. While Ellis often criticized special counsel Robert Mueller, Jackson has aligned herself with him.
“I think she’s going to whack it to him,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz remarked this week. “The last thing I’d want is to be sentenced by her.”
Where Ellis signaled sympathy for Manafort throughout his Virginia trial, Jackson has given no indications she is inclined toward leniency. She has revoked Manafort’s bail for witness tampering allegations, imprisoning him during his trial, and agreed with Mueller that Manafort broke his plea deal.
In 2017, she barked at Manafort’s lawyers, “This is a criminal trial, and it’s not a public relations campaign … I expect counsel to do their talking in this courtroom and in their pleadings and not on the courthouse steps.”
Last month, Jackson agreed with the Office of the Special Counsel that Manafort “intentionally made false statements to the FBI, the OSC, and the grand jury.” As a result, Manafort’s plea agreement with the government was nullified, opening him up to a stiff sentence.
She is also presiding over the Mueller case involving longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone. She has expressed great frustration with the self-described “dirty trickster” and imposed a gag order in the case. Stone had posted an Instagram photo with what looked like crosshairs next to her head, which he later deleted and apologized. Jackson told Stone: “I’m not giving you another chance.” She has a separate hearing for Stone on Thursday that could put him in prison for the duration of his trial.
Jackson, 64, was born in Baltimore, and her father was a doctor who practiced at Johns Hopkins University after training in the U.S. Army. Her former husband Darryl Jackson is a Republican who served as an assistant secretary in President George W. Bush’s administration.
Their son Matt became a viral Internet sensation during his 13-episode winning streak on Jeopardy in 2015. Speaking about growing up in a bipartisan and biracial household, he said: “My mom is white, liberal, and Jewish. And my dad is black, Christian, and conservative.”
Whether the Jacksons ever argued about politics at home is unknown. But in 2004, she co-wrote an opinion article in the Legal Times arguing that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry should be elected instead of Bush, who viewed “the legal system with contempt” and secured office “through the legal process rather than the political process” after the 2000 election.
She also wrote that John Ashcroft, Bush’s attorney general, was “an undistinguished politician who could not win against a deceased opponent,” a reference to the 2000 Senate election in Missouri when Ashcroft lost to Gov. Mel Carnahan, who had been killed in a plane crash three weeks earlier.
During her Senate confirmation hearing in 2011, when she was introduced by D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, she said that “in retrospect, the language of the article was too harsh”and she had “a great deal of respect” for Ashcroft.
A Harvard graduate and granddaughter of four immigrants, Jackson paid tribute to one grandmother who “came here, learned the language, became a citizen, and was a suffragette.” She was confirmed in the Senate by 97-0.
As a judge, Jackson has tended to lean liberal. In 2013, she tossed out a challenge made by the Catholic Church to the contraception mandate under Obamacare. In 2017, she ruled in favor of the government and dismissed both cases that were brought in front of her following a data breach in which 21 million federal government employees and prospective employees had their personal information exposed.
Also in 2017, Jackson dismissed a wrongful death lawsuit that had been brought against Hillary Clinton by the family members of those killed in the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012. On an issue of transparency, she ruled against the Obama administration, stating the government could not claim executive privilege in the Fast and Furious scandal, ordering the release of thousands of pages of records.
Before joining the federal bench, Jackson worked for a decade at Trout Cacheris & Solomon, a D.C. law firm. Plato Cacheris, who joined the firm after Jackson, had clients including John Mitchell, attorney general under President Richard Nixon; Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton; and CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI officer Robert Hanssen, who both betrayed the U.S. to Russia.
Perhaps the best clue as to how Jackson might treat Manafort comes from her sentencing of another Mueller defendant, Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who lied to investigators. He received 30 days from Jackson, more than twice as harsh than the two weeks George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide also caught up in the Mueller probe, received from Jackson’s colleague Judge Randy Moss for the same crime.
She criticized van der Zwaan who, like Manafort, lived a privileged life and had entered a plea deal, for failing to express remorse. She said: “While it’s true that he did plead guilty, and while it would not be fair to treat this defendant more harshly because it’s a high-profile investigation, I have come to the conclusion that the offense warrants a period of some incarceration.”
