The federal judge overseeing the case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in Washington, D.C., has rejected an effort by Manafort’s lawyers to suppress some of the evidence seized by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators.
Manafort, who is currently in jail in Virginia, said the evidence was improperly seized when an FBI agent was let into a storage unit in Virginia. The FBI agent should have had a warrant or directly asked Manafort for permission, his lawyers had argued.
But the judge said because an employee let the agent into the storage unit, no warrant was needed.
“Law enforcement agents do not need a warrant to enter a location if they have voluntary consent,” U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in rejecting the argument.
Manafort is facing two indictments in Washington and Virginia stemming from Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, which include conspiracy against the U.S., failing to identify as a foreign agent, money laundering, tax fraud, and bank fraud conspiracy.
“Manafort maintains that it was not reasonable for the agent to rely on the warrant here because it did not limit the records to be seized to any particular time period, and it authorized the seizure of any and all financial records of defendant and his companies,” wrote Jackson on Friday. But, “the warrant is sufficiently particularized, and the criminal offenses under investigation justify a search for records that predated the alleged offense, so it was not objectively unreasonable for the same reasons.”
Last week, Jackson revoked Manafort’s bail and sent him to jail to await trial after Mueller alleged in a superseding indictment that he attempted to tamper with two government witnesses.
[Also read: ABC News apologizes for graphic falsely stating Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to manslaughter]
