Paul Manafort is now beginning to break his silence, and boy, does he ever have a story to tell, one that the anti-Trumpers simply won’t like!
You might recall that Paul Manafort was the campaign manager for Donald Trump, and he is now claiming that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team wanted him to say things about the 45th president that were simply not true while he was being investigated.
Manafort appeared on Fox News and was interviewed by Sean Hannity, his first interview since he was pardoned by President Trump more than a year ago.
“From day one I felt they were targeting me and a few others to get at the then-president,” he said.
Manafort told Hannity that there were even some moments where he felt that the investigators were putting pressure on him to talk about facts that were untrue.
Manafort also described a quid-pro-quo where the investigators were directed to be lenient as long as he told them what they wanted to hear. However, he didn’t take the bait.
“I wasn’t going to lie. There was no way they could force me to give up the president,” he said.
“I felt that as long as I told the truth I had nothing to fear, but I was wrong,” he said.
Manafort pled guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States in federal court and one count of tampering with a witness by obstructing justice.
He pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States in federal court and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice by tampering with a witness.
He described the situation as being like in “the middle of a tsunami” and that he felt that there were moments where it was going to be impossible to get his voice heard due to the onslaught of false information.
Moreover, Manafort described the entire investigation as nothing more than a means to an end, and that going after him and Roger Stone was only so that the investigators could get to President Trump and that is now why he wants to break his silence.
“There was no doubt in my mind from day one that I was a means to an end,” he said.
“After they didn’t succeed with me, they did the same with Roger Stone. They put the gag order on Roger, they indicted him too,” the 72-year-old said.
“Who they cared about was Donald Trump. And without us they didn’t think they could get to him,” he argued.
Manafort called how he had been laughing with his attorneys when they read tabloid news articles that described how he was planning on backstabbing Trump because Manafort was even insisting during that time that he was merely committed to telling the truth.
Manafort has a book that is set to hit store shelves in August and his publishing company, Skyhorse Publishing, continues to defend him, saying that neither Victor Yanukovych or any of Paul’s other clients were known as “pro-Putin” people. They called Paul’s work in Ukraine “100 percent aligned with US interests.”
“Neither was Paul guilty of laundering money, evading taxes or deliberately deceiving the US government by failing to register as a foreign agent—which he wasn’t,” the publisher said.
Skyhorse Publishing said that these charges were politically motivated and were just an effort to get Manafort to testify against his former boss, President Donald John Trump.
Kudos to Manafort for his effort to break his silence and set the record straight.
