- Paul Manafort said he didn't have an "understanding with anybody" about getting a pardon from Trump.
- Manafort claimed he was "targeted" because of his work as chairman of Trump's 2016 campaign.
- His pardon from Trump in December 2020 was "a very emotional moment," Manafort said.
In a rare radio interview, Paul Manafort denied that he struck a "deal" with then President Donald Trump to receive a pardon in exchange for stonewalling Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team during the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
"I never had a deal with Trump," Manafort said in an appearance on the New York-based WABC Radio. "I mean, I hoped and prayed that he would do what I thought would be the right thing. But I didn't have an understanding with anybody."
A jury in Alexandria, Virginia, found Manafort guilty in 2018 on a raft of financial charges, in the first trial win for Mueller's team. Manafort later admitted to separate charges in Washington, DC, tied to his past lobbying work in Ukraine, as part of a plea deal with Mueller's special counsel office.
But the Mueller team accused Manafort of breaching that deal by repeatedly lying to investigators in the Russia inquiry. In the waning weeks of Trump's administration, the former president pardoned Manafort and several other political allies, including Roger Stone and former national security advisor Michael Flynn.
Manafort's determination to fight charges — combined with his alleged lying — fed speculation that he had reached some kind of agreement to shield Trump, with a pardon hanging out as the reward.
Trump, in a 2018 interview with the New York Post, said a pardon for Manafort "was never discussed, but I wouldn't take it off the table.
"Why would I take it off the table?" he asked.
Manafort was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison on charges stemming from the Mueller investigation. During the radio interview — in which he promoted his upcoming book "Political Prisoner: Persecuted, Prosecuted, but Not Silenced" — Manafort remembered feeling disheartened by earlier pardon lists that didn't include him.
"I didn't take that positively," he said. "I was worried that maybe I was going to be bypassed or maybe he'd wait till the second term was over."
Manafort aired grievances about the Mueller investigation and suggested that he was prosecuted on a "technical issue."
But in the same sentence, he said, "I've accepted responsibility for it."
Manafort said the Mueller team pursued him based on information he had turned over to the government years earlier that a lead prosecutor in the investigation, Andrew Weissmann, "dusted off" and "turned into criminal charges."
"But for my relationship with the Trump campaign, there's no way I would have been targeted. I wouldn't have spent two years in jail," he said.
Weissmann did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Because of COVID precautions, Manafort said he was serving his sentence in home confinement when he learned about his pardon from a reporter. Manafort was serving his sentence in home confinement after being released from prison due to COVID
"I was sort of carefully monitoring it until lunchtime when it was on the news everywhere that I was going to be on a list that afternoon," he said. "And, that night, it came out."
"It was a great thing," he added. "It was a very emotional moment."