Paul Manafort can expect to get a fair deal from the aggressive lead prosecutor in the case against President Donald Trump's former campaign manager, according to former colleagues and some defense attorneys.
"If there's something to find, he'll find it. If there's nothing there, he's not going to cook something up," Katya Jestin, a former colleague in the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York, told The New York Times in a profile of Andrew Weissmann.
A civil rights lawyer credited Weissmann with ordering a review of hundreds of convictions based on faulty forensic testimony.
"He realized that what had gone on in the past was wrong. He did it. That was transformative," said Peter Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project.
Some defense attorneys who have tangled with Weissmann, who has locked up mob bosses and white-collar criminals, criticized his scorched-earth techniques but did not question his ethics.
"I'm no fan of Donald Trump. Frankly, I can't think of two people who deserve each other more than Andrew Weissman," said Dan Cogdell, who defended clients when Weissmann prosecuted the Enron Corp. scandal in the early 2000s.
However, Sidney Powell, a writer and lawyer, has criticized Weissmann for abusing his power, especially as part of the legal team in the Enron case.
"The Enron Task Force prosecutors ran roughshod over the rights of countless people in their pursuit of convictions rather than justice," he wrote in the Observer.
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