Because of statutory maximum rules, Jackson cannot give Manafort a prison sentence in the Washington case greater than 10 years.
Legal observers say Jackson is likely to apply the harshest sentence possible.
Jackson, who is also presiding over Mueller’s case against political dirty trickster Roger Stone, has been viewed by many as a tougher audience for Manafort’s defense team than Ellis.
That was made clear in June when Jackson ordered Manafort to jail pending trial after Mueller accused him of tampering with potential witnesses in his case.
Jackson “has a different perspective and judicial temperament” than Ellis, defense attorney and former federal prosecutor David Weinstein told CNBC.
Manafort has been held in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail for about nine months. He will get credit for that time against his 47-month sentence from Ellis and whatever Jackson gives him.
Weinstein said he expects Jackson to make Manafort’s sentence in the Washington case consecutive, rather than concurrent, to what he received for the Virginia case.
Despite that expectation, Weinstein said Mueller’s team “needs to use what happened” during the sentencing phase of the Virginia case “to strengthen their arguments” before Jackson.
Weinstein said he was “shocked” by Manafort’s low sentence, calling it “a tremendous defeat for the special counsel’s office.”
Even prior to sentencing, Ellis had drawn scrutiny from legal experts for his dismissive attitude toward Mueller’s prosecutors during the trial last summer.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and Trump critic, noted that Ellis previously accused the special counsel of lodging tax and finance charges against Manafort merely as a fishing expedition to get more information for Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Ellis fumed to prosecutors last May.
And Ellis’ justification for handing Manafort a relatively light sentence immediately sparked a backlash from Tribe and others.
Tribe said Ellis “has inexcusably perverted justice and the guidelines.”
Former U.S. attorney Harry Litman called Ellis’ sentence “a totally crazy and exorbitant departure” and “a black eye for the justice system” in a tweet.
Democratic senator and presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar called out Ellis in a tweet, saying that Manafort “led far from a ‘blameless life.'”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, echoed that take in her own tweet, which pointed out a disparity between how white-collar offenders are sometimes treated compared to perpetrators of blue-collar crimes.
“The words above the Supreme Court say “Equal Justice Under Law”—when will we start acting like it?” Warren tweeted.
In his own tweet Friday morning, the president claimed incorrectly that “both the Judge and the lawyer in the Paul Manafort case stated loudly and for the world to hear that there was NO COLLUSION with Russia.”
Ellis actually had said that Manafort’s crimes in that case were unrelated to the question of collusion with Russia. But the judge did not say that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Trump, talking to reporters at the White House on Friday, said, “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort.”
“I think it’s been a very, very tough time for him,” the president added.
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