“Why would I take it off the table?” the president said of a pardon for Paul Manafort, who he said had been treated poorly by prosecutors for the special counsel.
WASHINGTON — Escalating his attacks on the special counsel investigation, President Trump said on Wednesday that a presidential pardon for his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is “not off the table,” casting him and other subjects of the inquiry as victims of prosecutorial abuse.
Although Mr. Trump had not discussed a pardon for Mr. Manafort, “I wouldn’t take it off the table,” he said in an Oval Office interview with The New York Post . “Why would I take it off the table?”
He said that prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, had poorly treated Mr. Manafort, who was convicted of eight felonies this summer and pleaded guilty to two more.
Though Mr. Trump is given to loose promises that go unfulfilled, the suggestion of a pardon was nonetheless remarkable. It came as his rhetorical attacks on Mr. Mueller have grown increasingly provocative — the president tweeted on Wednesday that prosecutors were “viciously telling witnesses to lie about facts & they will get relief” — and as leading Republican senators again thwarted an effort to protect Mr. Mueller from being fired.
The president’s declaration also capped a turn of events for Mr. Manafort, who was a cooperating witness for Mr. Mueller until prosecutors declared this week that he had lied to them in breach of his plea agreement. They were said to be frustrated in part because one of his lawyers was updating Mr. Trump’s legal team about the case.
By leaving open the possibility of pardoning a former aide whose lawyer was a source of inside information about an investigation into Mr. Trump himself, the president showed a new willingness to publicly signal that he will intervene to protect people who are in the special counsel’s cross hairs.
And though the president’s advisers have previously dangled the possibility of pardons before targets of the special counsel’s inquiry, pardoning Mr. Manafort could be politically risky for Mr. Trump. Before he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges in September, Mr. Manafort was convicted of financial fraud after a lengthy jury trial. He now faces at least 10 years in prison.
Despite prosecutors’ declaration that Mr. Manafort had lied to them, Mr. Trump claimed that Mr. Manafort had instead refused to make false statements that would advance the special counsel’s investigation. He said Jerome Corsi, a conservative author, had also been pressured to lie and defended Roger Stone Jr., a former Trump campaign adviser and longtime friend of the president’s whom the special counsel is investigating.
“It’s actually very brave,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m telling you this is McCarthyism. We are in the McCarthy era.
