Paul Manafort , President Donald Trump s former campaign chairman and a longtime Republican operative, was sentenced to less than four years in prison on Thursday as part of the special counsels broad investigation into the 2016 election.

Prosecutors had argued that under sentencing guidelines, Manafort, 69, should serve between 19 to 24 years in prison after he was convicted in August on eight counts of tax and bank fraud. Manafort acted for more than a decade as if he were above the law, and deprived the federal government and various financial institutions of millions of dollars, they wrote , stressing that the sentence here should reflect the seriousness of these crimes.

But Judge T.S. Ellis called a decades-long term in prison excessive on Thursday, saying Manafort had lived an otherwise blameless life.

Let me be clear: the guidelines would suggest sentencing is a calculation. It is not, Ellis declared. It is a judgment.

But as many media outlets have reported, Manafort led a long and storied career as a lobbyist for some of the planets most notorious dictators. Some legal experts expressed surprise at the relatively short term, although Ellis noted that Manafort had earned the admiration of a number of people before he handed down his verdict.

Here are some of Manaforts former clients:

His firm was paid $950,000 a year to consult for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

In the 1980s, Manaforts firm represented the dictatorship of the Philippines leader Ferdinand Marcos as he struggled to hold on to power. Marcos had been accused of rampant human rights violations and pilfering an estimated $10 billion from his country. According to a 2016 report from Politico , Manafort helped the Marcos family craft an electoral strategy at home in Manila while using his Washington connections to minimize any concern brewing in America.

Marcos fled his country in 1986 and lived the remained of his life in exile.