Paul Manafort has moved, over his objections, to a new jail with a history of illustrious guests.
Officials confirm the former Trump campaign chairman was booked Thursday morning into the Alexandria Detention Center in Virginia, a complex of low-slung brick buildings just off the Capital Beltway and a few blocks from the federal courthouse where he will be tried later this month on bank and tax fraud charges.
Manafort, who is being prosecuted by the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, had asked for that trial to be continued in large part because he was being held 100 miles away in the Northern Neck Regional Jail.
But he resisted being brought to Alexandria.
His lawyers argued that he was safe in the Warsaw, Virginia facility, where according to prosecutors he had a private phone and laptop and did not have to wear a jumpsuit.
Judge T.S. Ellis rejected those concerns in moving Manafort to Alexandria.
“The professionals at the Alexandria Detention Center are very familiar with housing high-profile defendants including foreign and domestic terrorists, spies and traitors,” he wrote in an order released Wednesday. “All these defendants were housed safely in Alexandria pending their respective trials and defendant’s experience at the Alexandria Detention Center will presumably be no different.”
Among those spies was FBI agent turned Soviet mole Robert Hanssen. He was bumped to a smaller cell after trial to make way for Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person tried in U.S. court for involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
CIA spies Aldrich Ames and Harold James Nicholson were also held in Alexandria. So was New York Times reporter Judith Miller when she refused to cooperate with prosecutors in a leak investigation. United Way of America chief William Aramony and extremist politician Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. both faced fraud charges while incarcerated in the jail.
Manafort was ordered to jail by a federal judge in the District of Columbia, where he faces related charges. Both cases stem from his work for a Russia-backed political party in Ukraine. The longtime lobbyist was out on bond until June, when he was accused of asking people involved in the Ukrainian campaign to lie to investigators.
Manafort’s attorneys have denied the tampering allegations and appealed his detention.
