President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, is now walking back a statement he made earlier Thursday regarding Trump’s considering pardoning former campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
“Let me clarify: only conversation about pardon was a generic one that occurred around the time of the commutation for the woman recommended by Kim Kardashian,” Giuliani wrote in a statement issued late Thursday. “Originally I thought it was 4 or 5 weeks ago but it turns out it was in early June.”
[Republicans: Trump pardoning Manafort is a Democratic fiction]
“The conversation came about because there had been several pardons and the press kept asking about pardons and I wanted to give one answer. So I brought it up with the president in early June, latest mid-June, and he said there would be no pardons for anyone involved in the investigation during the pendency of the investigations,” he added. “It was not Manafort specific, rather it was generic.”
Giuliani had told the Washington Post earlier that he and Trump had discussed pardoning Manafort just a few weeks earlier.
He also told the New York Times that he and Trump had talked about the political fallout of a pardon.
Trump has said Manafort has been treated worse than old-school gangster Al Capone, in part because his tax and bank fraud were found as the result of a federal probe into whether the campaign colluded with Russia.
