Former Donald Trump campaign director Paul Manafort has been released due to the threat of an emerging coronavirus, his lawyer announced yesterday.
Manafort (71 years) was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, last year, on numerous fraud charges revealed in connection with the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.
The former political advisor, who was imprisoned in a prison in Pennsylvania, suffers from high blood pressure and respiratory problems, which makes him more likely to develop "Covid-19," his lawyer Kevin Downing said in a letter he sent last month to the prison administration.
The lawyer indicated that his client will spend the rest of his sentence at his home in Alexandria, on the outskirts of Washington.
Manafort is one of 2,471 prisoners in US federal prisons who were released (out of about 150,000 inmates) due to the epidemic. President Donald Trump expressed support for Manafort after his conviction, considering him to be a victim of a "conspiracy". Another close associate of Trump, touched by the Russian investigation, his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, asked last month for his release, but to no avail.
Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud, perjury and violating election campaign laws, after he cashed two women in 2016 in order not to talk about their supposed relationship with Trump. According to US media, the man who is presented as a fierce defender of Trump is preparing to publish a book in the coming months about his years of cooperation with his former director.