US President Donald Trump said he fired Paul Manafort as his campaign chairman to avoid \u201cpotential conflicts\u201d with \u201ccertain nations,\u201d according to excerpts of an interview released Saturday.<\/p>\n
Manafort and his associate Rick Gates were placed under house arrest this week on money-laundering charges linked to an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.<\/p>\n
The charges relate to allegations that the then Republican presidential candidate\u2019s campaign colluded with Russia in the run-up to the November, 2016 election.<\/p>\n
The US Congress is also conducting three separate investigations into the allegations, which have dogged Trump since his election and which he has strongly denied.<\/p>\n
Asked who recommended Manafort manage the campaign, Trump said \u201cit was a friend of mine who was a businessman — a very successful businessman and a good person, and you know, Paul was not there very long.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we found out something about (how) he may be involved with all — with certain nations, and I don\u2019t even know exactly what it was in particular,\u201d he told Sharyl Attkison\u2019s syndicated television show \u201cFull Measure\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut there was a point at which we just felt Paul would be better off — because we don\u2019t want to have many potential conflicts,\u201d he added in the show which airs in full on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Trump said he has no current plans to fire Mueller.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I hope he\u2019s treating everything fairly, and if he is, I\u2019m going to be very happy, because when you talk about innocent, I am truly not involved in any form of collusion with Russia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBelieve me, that\u2019s the last thing I can think of to be involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n
The president said he was not aware of any plans to be questioned by the special counsel. \u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned, I haven\u2019t been told that we\u2019re under investigation, I\u2019m not under investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty to charges that they allegedly hid millions of dollars gained from work with Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Moscow political party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Donald Trump said he fired Paul Manafort as his campaign chairman to avoid \u201cpotential conflicts\u201d with \u201ccertain nations,\u201d according to excerpts of an interview released Saturday. Manafort and his associate Rick Gates were placed under house arrest this week on money-laundering charges linked to an investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The charges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9439,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9438","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\/9438","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=9438"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9440,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9438\/revisions\/9440"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}