)A federal judge will sentence Paul Manafort on Thursday for defrauding banks and the government and failing to pay taxes on millions of dollars in income he earned from Ukrainian political consulting -- charges that stemmed from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The penalty may be steep enough to keep the longtime lobbyist and former Trump campaign chairman in prison for the rest of his life.

Prosecutors say that Manafort, 69, deserves between 19 and 25 years in prison as well as millions of dollars in fines and restitution for the crimes, for which a jury convicted him after a three-week trial last summer. Manafort has shown little remorse, they say, and even lied under oath following a plea deal after the trial.

"The defendant blames everyone from the special counsel's office to his Ukrainian clients for his own criminal choices," prosecutors wrote in a final court filing this week to Judge T.S. Ellis in Alexandria, Virginia.

In many ways, the Manafort case -- which reached back almost a decade to track the movement of money from his Ukrainian political consulting work, through the time he was broke and working for Trump in 2016 -- has shaped Mueller's actions for almost two years.

Manafort's was the first indictment Mueller announced in late 2017 and it used the criminal prosecution to ratchet up pressure on him throughout 2018 as they sought his cooperation on matters central to their probe. At one point, after securing Manafort's longtime deputy Rick Gates as a witness against him, prosecutors split his case in two, putting the more clear-cut financial crimes indictment in the fast-moving Northern Virginia federal court. Manafort's conviction at trial was a major win for Mueller -- the only official certification from an impartial group of citizens that Mueller had uncovered major crime.