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Paul Manafort says seeing the prisoner transfer reminded him of “Holocaust movies.”
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The former Trump adviser was convicted of numerous federal charges as a result of the Mueller investigation.
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He also revealed that he informally advised people close to the 2020 campaign while hoping for a pardon.
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort said seeing the detainee transfer reminded him of “movies about the Holocaust,” according to a copy of his forthcoming memoir obtained by the Guardian.
Manafort was convicted during special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of multiple federal offenses as a result of his lobbying and consulting work abroad.
A jury in Virginia found Manafort guilty on eight federal charges of tax fraud, bank fraud and failure to report foreign bank accounts in August 2018, separate case and was sentenced to a total of 7 1/2 years in prison in 2019.
Manafort, according to the Guardian, recounted his experience with the federal prison system in the book, writing that at an airport “somewhere in Ohio” he saw “prisoners… herded in long lines and then separated into other buses and beyond. ..transport planes…reminded me of movies about the holocaust.”
Manafort’s memoir, “Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced,” will be released August 16. In the book, he portrayed himself as a victim of the Mueller probe and the justice system.
Manafort also revealed in the book that he informally advised people close to the Trump campaign after he was released from prison to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020. But Manafort kept this advice a secret because he didn’t want to be scapegoated for the loss of Trump and jeopardize his chances of receiving a presidential pardon, according to the excerpt.
“I didn’t want anything to stand in the way of the president’s re-election or, more importantly, a possible pardon,” Manafort wrote, according to the Guardian.
Manafort said he had no communication whatsoever with Trumpworld while in prison, writing, “and I didn’t want any, especially if it could be exploited by the MSM,” or the mainstream media.
“But when the re-election campaign started, I had unofficial contact with friends of mine who were very involved,” Manafort wrote, according to The Guardian. “It killed me not being there, but I advised indirectly from my apartment.”
It remains unclear what Manafort’s informal advice was or which friends he spoke to about Trump’s campaign after he got out of jail and moved into an apartment in northern Virginia.
“I still had no promise of grace, but I had an expectation,” Manafort wrote. “My fear was that if I got in the way of the campaign and Trump lost, he would blame me, and I didn’t want that to happen.”
Manafort received a presidential pardon from Trump in December 2020, writing that he heard the news from “a very good doctor friend, Ron, who is also close to Donald and Melania” and a frequent judge at the Miss Universe pageant.
“It was like a button was pressed,” he wrote of learning he was pardoned and told his wife, according to the Guardian, writing: “We hugged and cried. I was free.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
