Judge refuses to dismiss ex-Trump campaign aide Manafort's criminal case

WASHINGTON - 16 May 2018: A federal judge refused on Tuesday to dismiss criminal charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against President Donald Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort, after Manafort claimed that Mueller had exceeded his prosecutorial powers.

In a sharp rebuke of those claims, Judge Amy Berman Jackson, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, ruled that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had followed all the Justice Department's rules when he hired Mueller and Mueller's case against Manafort is not overly broad or improper.

Rosenstein "expressly approved the Special Counsel’s investigation of the facts alleged in the indictment, so there has been no violation of the regulations, and the Special Counsel did not act without authority," she wrote.