Washington( CNN) Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman embattled by criminal indictments, may no longer fight the charges related to his Ukrainian lobbying operation.
The incentive appears to be to reach a deal ahead of a pretrial motion hearing scheduled for Friday and before jury selection begins Monday in DC District Court. That's also a few weeks before Manafort and prosecutors build new filings in Virginia to discuss the charges and sentences he faces there.
A plea Friday would bring to an end to one of the most active criminal cases in the DC federal court system this year. Manafort's lawyers have filed the thousands of pages in courts to fight prosecutors' accusations and have brought two appeals unsuccessfully, and his legal fees mounted to more than a million dollars, according to two people very well known his case.