WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, has ordered Paul Manafort moved to that city’s jail to prepare for his upcoming trial on bank and tax fraud charges.

Manafort, who was President Trump’s campaign chairman for several months, last week asked for his July 25 trial in Alexandria federal court to be delayed until this fall, saying his incarceration in Virginia’s Northern Neck has made it too difficult to prepare. He also wants the trial moved to Roanoke.

Judge T.S. Ellis gave the special counsel prosecuting Manafort until Friday to respond to those motions. In the meantime, he said Manafort would be moved from the Northern Neck to the jail in Alexandria, in suburban Washington, “to ensure that the defendant has access to his counsel and can adequately prepare his defense.”

The Northern Neck Regional Jail is about 100 miles from Washington, and Manafort lawyers wrote in a filing last week that the two-hour trip and restrictions on electronic or telephone communications “has made meetings . . . to prepare his defense far more infrequent and enormously time-consuming.”

Defense attorneys voiced those concerns in a motion last week asking for the case to be pushed back to this fall, after Manafort goes on trial on related charges in District of Columbia federal court. The judge in that case, Amy Berman Jackson, ordered Manafort to be jailed last month after he was accused of attempting to convince potential witnesses to lie on the stand.

Manafort has also asked for the Virginia trial to be moved to Roanoke, saying northern Virginians were too overwhelmed with news stories about the case and too hostile toward the Trump administration to give him a fair trial.

Between the two cases, Manafort’s lawyers say the government has produced about 2 million pages of documents, tens of thousands of which came in the past few months.

While the charges against Manafort center on his private work for a Russia-backed Ukranian political party, they were brought by the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election/ Prosecutors say he got one favorable loan only because the bank chairman wanted a job in the Trump administration.