Giuliani’s wacko comments

Giuliani’s comments add confusion about possible Manafort pardon

By KYLE CHENEY

While Paul Manafort was on trial for charges of serious financial crimes, President Donald Trump asked his legal team about the prospect of pardoning his former campaign chairman, according to Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.

But Trump ultimately agreed with his legal team to delay the decision until after special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was over, Giuliani told The Washington Post on Thursday.

The acknowledgment that Trump seriously explored such a move contradicts White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ assertion on Wednesday that a pardon for Manafort was “not something that has been up for discussion” — a statement that the president himself countered just hours later, according to Fox News.

“He mentioned pardoning Manafort,” Ainsley Earhardt, a “Fox & Friends” anchor, said Wednesday night after speaking with the president for an interview to air the following morning.

Giuliani’s comments and the Fox exchange reveal the degree to which Trump has considered inserting himself into Mueller’s criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, which netted its first guilty verdicts this week when a jury convicted Manafort on eight counts of bank and tax fraud.

Throughout the trial, Trump made plain his disgust for the prosecution, contending that Manafort was a “good person” who had “refused to ‘break’” under pressure. “Such respect for a brave man!” Trump tweeted after the guilty verdict on Tuesday.

In the Fox interview, the president didn’t deny the possibility of clemency when asked directly whether he would grant a pardon to his former campaign chairman. But he built upon his earlier praise.

“One of the reasons I respect Paul Manafort so much is he went through that trial,” Trump said. “You know, they make up stories. People make up stories.”

Giuliani, however, told the Post that in a discussion weeks earlier, the president agreed with his lawyers’ advice not to pardon anyone tied to Mueller’s investigation. “He said yes,” Giuliani said. “He agreed with us.”

Later on Thursday, counter to what the Post reported, Giuliani told Fox News that Trump never mentioned Manafort by name in that discussion.

Manafort faces a second trial next month in Washington, where he is charged with money laundering and illegal lobbying.

Mueller was appointed last year after Trump fired James Comey as FBI director to oversee the investigation of Russian interference — and whether Trump associates conspired to aid the effort. That investigation has grown to include scrutiny of Trump’s actions, and whether he sought to obstruct the inquiry by pressuring Comey and other executive branch officials.

Trump has denied any suggestion of wrongdoing by his campaign and said that what critics call obstruction, he simply calls “fighting back” against an investigation he considers a “witch hunt.”