Judge T.S. Ellis III: Person of the Week

Claim To Fame: Senior United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Why He's The Person of the Week: for questioning whether Robert Mueller had just charged Paul Manafort with 18 counts of bank fraud and other charges to try to “get” President Trump. Ellis, a Ronald Reagan-appointee to the bench, also suggested Mueller shouldn’t have “unfettered power” to do that.

Manafort, who chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, has been indicted in two different venues — in Washington, DC, back in October, and on further charges in Virginia in February.

This was a hearing in the Virginia case, for which the trial is currently scheduled to take place in July. Manafort has filed a motion to dismiss this indictment — arguing that Mueller overreached his mandate by charging him with crimes unrelated to Russian interference with the campaign. When Manafort’s team made this same argument in court in DC, the presiding judge, Amy Berman Jackson, seemed skeptical. (She hasn’t yet ruled on the motion, though she did dismiss an accompanying civil suit filed by Manafort.)

But Manafort may have found a more receptive audience with Judge Ellis. “I don’t see what relation this indictment has with what the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” Ellis said, according to Politico’s Josh Gerstein. “What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

Though Ellis didn’t issue a ruling, Brandi Buchman of Courthouse News reports that he asked to review an unredacted copy of a memo from last August, in which Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized Mueller to investigate crimes related to Manafort’s Ukraine work. Mueller’s team revealed the memo’s existence in court filings, but the vast majority of it is redacted.

If Ellis does in fact end up dismissing Manafort’s Virginia indictment, it wouldn’t get Manafort completely out of the woods, as he’d still face charges in Washington. But it would be a dramatic defeat for the 'honorable' Mueller, with major implications for his strategy as a whole, which, it seems, has relied heavily on bringing or threatening unrelated charges against Trump associates to try to get them to “flip.”