Paul Manafort Sprung From Prison Early Due to Coronavirus Concerns

Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was released from prison early on Wednesday due to coronavirus concerns, his attorney Kevin Downing told CNN.

The 71-year-old, jailed since June 2018, will serve the rest of his seven and a half year sentence in home confinement, Downing said. Manafort, who oversaw Trump’s presidential campaign for roughly three months in the summer of 2016, was convicted last year in two separate cases centered on tax and bank fraud. Downing did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort had already served about a third of his sentence at LCI Loretto, a low-security federal prison in western Pennsylvania, when his attorneys requested a transfer to home confinement due to concerns about the pandemic potential effect on Manafort’s health issues. He will move into a three-bedroom apartment in Northern Virginia where he will live with his wife.

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The federal Bureau of Prisons has moved nearly 2,500 to home confinement in response to the pandemic and the difficulty of maintaining social distancing, CNN reported, though LCI Loretto has no confirmed cases as of this week.

Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who represented porn star Stormy Daniels in her litigation against President Trump, also was granted temporary home confinement as he awaiting sentencing in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. In February, he was convicted of attempting to extort up to $25 million from Nike.

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