Trump-supporting Manafort juror speaks out

One juror in the financial fraud trial of Paul Manafort kept the jury from finding him guilty on all 18 counts, another juror told Fox News on Wednesday. After deliberating for four days, the jury accepted it would not reach a verdict on 10 counts and found Manafort guilty of the other eight, said Paula Duncan, who added that she is a supporter of President Donald Trump but did not let that influence her decision about Manafort’s guilt. “I wanted him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent,” she said, “but he wasn’t”

In an interview with Fox & Friends that aired Thursday, Trump expressed sympathy for Manafort and dodged a question about whether he would pardon his one-time campaign chairman. “I have great respect for what he’s done in terms of what he’s gone through,” the president said.

Another Trump associate in legal hot water, the president’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, faces a new subpoena from New York tax investigators looking into the Trump Foundation. In the Fox & Friends interview, Trump painted Cohen as dishonest and disloyal and said “flipping,” when an accused person pleads guilty to crimes in exchange for testimony about someone else, “almost ought to be outlawed.” Cohen pleaded guilty this week to numerous counts, including campaign finance violations for arranging payments of hush money to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. It’s not clear whether Cohen is going to give prosecutors more information about Trump.