Paul Manafort considered Fox News host Sean Hannity a White House “back channel” between the July 2017 FBI raid on his home and his October 2017 indictment.
The insight into the former Trump campaign manager’s thinking came from newly released FBI interview notes from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which are being released through a successful Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by BuzzFeed. The 348 heavily redacted pages released Thursday include interviews with 19 different Trumpworld figures, and this is the third of many expected monthly releases of the secretive Mueller memos.
“Manafort did not recall any direct or indirect contact from anyone in the White House,” bureau agents wrote. “He spoke to Hannity, who was ‘certainly a back channel’ but also a personal friend.”
The FBI said the imprisoned Republican operative “knew Hannity was speaking to Trump around then because Hannity would tell Manafort to hang in there, that he had been talking to Trump, that Trump had his back, and things like that” and that “Manafort understood his conversations with Hannity to be a message from Trump.”
Manafort called his communications with Hannity a “natural kind of text messaging” and said they also spoke on the phone, telling investigators, “they sometimes spoke twice a week, some weeks not at all.”
Hundreds of messages between Hannity and Manafort were released in the summer of 2019, focusing mainly on their complaints about special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, which quickly swept up Manafort in 2017. They exchanged information and updates while they complained about Mueller, the way former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn was being treated, British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s anti-Trump dossier, perceived double standards at the Justice Department, and former officials including President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, James Comey, and others.
Other recently revealed FBI notes showed that Manafort deputy-turned-witness Rick Gates told the bureau that Manafort floated the idea that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was “likely carried out by the Ukrainians, not the Russians” sometime during the 2016 presidential election. Trump brought up the debunked conspiracy theory during his controversial July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president.
Manafort was sentenced in 2019 to nearly seven years behind bars for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and committing conspiracy, tax fraud, bank fraud, and obstruction of justice.
