Trump told reporters today in the Oval Office that he’s not going to take a potential pardon for Manafort off the table:
NY POST – He’s never discussed a pardon for Paul Manafort, President Trump said Wednesday — but it’s “not off the table.”
“It was never discussed, but I wouldn’t take it off the table. Why would I take it off the table?” the president said during an Oval Office interview on Wednesday.
He also went after Mueller again, explaining in more detail why he accused Mueller of trying to coerce witnesses into lying:
He ripped Mueller’s probe and charged that Manafort, his former political adviser Roger Stone and Stone’s associate Jerome Corsi were all asked to lie by the special counsel.
“If you told the truth, you go to jail,” Trump said.
“You know this flipping stuff is terrible. You flip and you lie and you get – the prosecutors will tell you 99 percent of the time they can get people to flip. It’s rare that they can’t,” Trump said.
“But I had three people: Manafort, Corsi – I don’t know Corsi, but he refuses to say what they demanded. Manafort, Corsi and Roger Stone.”
“It’s actually very brave,” he said of the trio. “And I’m telling you, this is McCarthyism. We are in the McCarthy era. This is no better than McCarthy. And that was a bad situation for the country. But this is where we are. And it’s a terrible thing,” Trump added.
I don’t believe Trump hasn’t discussed it with his legal counsel, at least preliminarily. But it’s probably true that he hasn’t made a decision about it, which is why he won’t take it off the table.
Going by his angry tweets and comments about Mueller, both today and in the past, it’s quite logical that would be seriously considering a pardon for Manafort as well as others. If he really feels that this is a new era of McCarthyism, then it would only make sense that he’d want to use his power as president to undo some of that.
The question becomes what it will do to him politically with 2020 around the corner.
But the other aspect of Trump not taking the pardon off the table is if Manafort is banking on that now. If he did truly lie to Mueller, is he doing it knowing that a Trump pardon would free him in the end?