His legal team implied his situation was dire. A new Mueller filing suggests … not so much.
The reports sounded dire. Former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort had been jailed last month after a judge ruled he violated his conditions of release while awaiting trial— and now, his lawyers wrote, he had been “housed in solitary confinement” in the Northern Neck Regional Jail. Manafort was “locked in his cell for at least 23 hours per day (excluding visits from his attorneys).”
But a new filing by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team makes Manafort’s time behind bars seem … well, not quite so bad as all that might make you think.
Over the past week, reports based solely on the word of Manafort’s lawyers prompted a flurry of commentary about the allegedly horrendous mistreatment he’s been suffering. Solitary confinement is “basically a deathtrap,” former New York City police commissioner (and convicted felon) Bernard Kerik wrote. “A 12’ x 8’ solid steel or concrete box with a metal bed, stainless steel sink and toilet, and if you’re lucky, a small concrete or metal writing table and stool.”
Other conservative commentators also weighed in:
Even some who are not at all fans of Trump or Manafort weighed in to criticize the practice as a policy. “Solitary confinement is still torture,” Splinter News’s Katherine Krueger wrote, “even if it’s happening to Paul Manafort.”
However, Mueller’s new filing, if accurate, reveals that the Manafort version of solitary confinement comes with certain amenities.
Whether all this is akin to “waterboarding” or a strategy to “torture” Manafort into “madness,” I’ll leave for others to decide.
But whatever the conditions currently are, Manafort’s situation is about to change. On Wednesday, Judge T.S. Ellis III ordered him moved from his current jail in rural Warsaw, Virginia to a detention center in Alexandria, Virginia, to await his trial. That trial — the first of two Manafort will face — is scheduled to begin in just two weeks, on July 25.
You can read the new filing from Mueller’s team below, or by clicking this link.
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