A juror from Paul Manafort’s trial who supports President Donald Trump is warning the president against pardoning his former campaign chairman.
“Paul Manafort needs to pay the price for what he did,” juror Paula Duncan told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell on Thursday, saying she would be “very disappointed” in Trump if he pardoned Manafort.
Manafort was sentenced on Thursday to a surprisingly light 47 months behind bars. When asked if she had a message for the president, Duncan replied:
I would say, ’President Trump, that’s a big mistake ― or a huge mistake as he would say. That would send a bad message to other people and it would make President Trump look bad, too.
Duncan made headlines after Manafort’s trial last year when she showed off her “Make America Great Again” cap to Fox News and said special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was a “witch hunt to try to find Russian collusion.”
But she said she set her political allegiance aside in the face of the evidence.
“Finding Mr. Manafort guilty was hard for me. I wanted him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent,” she said at the time. “But he wasn’t.”
Although Duncan voted to convict on all 18 charges Manafort faced, she said a holdout juror led to a conviction on eight, including bank fraud and filing a false tax return.
Duncan also said that Trump was “doing a good job” and that she plans to vote for him again.
See her full discussion with O’Donnell above.