US President Donald Trump said he would consider pardoning his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted on Tuesday of bank and tax fraud, according to a Fox News reporter who interviewed Trump.<\/p>\n
Fox News reporter Ainsley Earhardt said Trump told her in an interview on Wednesday that \u201che would consider\u201d pardoning Manafort.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he feels bad for Manafort. They were friends,\u201d Earhardt said in an appearance on Fox News\u2019 \u201cHannity\u201d program on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
Fox News has been airing excerpts of the interview with Trump, which is scheduled to be shown in its entirety on Thursday morning. The excerpts have not included a clip of Trump saying he would consider pardoning Manafort.<\/p>\n
Manafort was convicted on Tuesday of two counts of bank fraud, five counts of tax fraud and one charge of failing to disclose foreign bank accounts.<\/p>\n
The White House pushed back forcefully on Wednesday against suggestions that a plea deal struck by Donald Trump\u2019s former lawyer Michael Cohen implicated Trump in a crime.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs the president has said, we\u2019ve stated many times, he did nothing wrong. There are no charges against him,\u201d press secretary Sarah Sanders said at a White House briefing. \u201cJust because Michael Cohen made a plea deal doesn\u2019t mean that that implicates the president on anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohen on Tuesday pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges of tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations. He told a federal court in New York that Trump had directed him to arrange payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election to silence two women who said they had had affairs with Trump.<\/p>\n
In the wake of Cohen\u2019s plea, Senate Democrats on Wednesday demanded that upcoming confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh be delayed, with some calling Trump a \u201cco-conspirator.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president lashed out at his former attorney in a Twitter post and said the campaign finance violations to which Cohen pleaded guilty were not a crime – even though prosecutors and Cohen agreed they were. Trump made the claim without offering any evidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf this was a personal matter, why wasn\u2019t she paid off after the affair or in the intervening decade?\u201d said Paul S. Ryan, the head of litigation at Common Cause. \u201cThe election was what made her story valuable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cohen attorney Lanny Davis said his client had information that would be of interest to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia to influence the election. Davis set up a website to collect donations for Cohen\u2019s legal expenses.<\/p>\n
Asked at the briefing if Trump was concerned about what Cohen might tell Mueller, Sanders replied: \u201cI don\u2019t think the president is concerned at all. He knows that he did nothing wrong and that there was no collusion.\u201d<\/p>\n
New York investigators on Wednesday issued a subpoena to Cohen in connection with a criminal investigation of the Trump Foundation, a state official said.<\/p>\n
Trump has granted pardons to conservative commentator Dinesh D\u2019Souza and former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, but Davis said his client would not accept one.<\/p>\n
\u201cMr. Cohen is not interested in being dirtied by a pardon from such a man,\u201d Davis told National Public Radio.<\/p>\n
The Cohen and Manafort cases ratchet up political pressure on Republicans ahead of November elections in which Democrats hope to take control of Congress.<\/p>\n
Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said at the group\u2019s summer meeting in Chicago that Democrats need to retake power to install \u201cguard rails\u201d against Republican corruption.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump said he would consider pardoning his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted on Tuesday of bank and tax fraud, according to a Fox News reporter who interviewed Trump. Fox News reporter Ainsley Earhardt said Trump told her in an interview on Wednesday that \u201che would consider\u201d pardoning Manafort. \u201cI […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40044,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40042\/revisions\/40044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}