Manafort, Hannity talk Trump, Mueller in previously undisclosed messages

Source: The Hill | June 21, 2019 | Morgan Chalfant and Jacqueline Thomsen

A federal judge has released messages that appear to show former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort discussing special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with Fox News host and Trump ally Sean Hannity in 2017 and 2018.

The logs, which date back to mid-July 2017, show Manafort and a television host named “Sean” leveling repeated attacks on Mueller’s team of prosecutors. They also discuss Manafort’s legal representation, political attacks against Trump and content that appears to come from Hannity’s Fox News evening show.

The messages continued up until early June 2018, before Manafort was convicted of bank and tax fraud in the Eastern District of Virginia and before he pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation –– a deal that ultimately fell apart when a judge ruled Manafort had lied to the special counsel’s team about multiple subjects.

The names of the two men are first redacted in the documents. But logs of the later messages, while blurry, show their names.

Hannity tweeted in response to the messages’ release Friday that his view of Mueller’s investigation and treatment of Manafort “were made clear every day to anyone who listens to my radio show or watches my TV show.”

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The conversation logs released Friday begin roughly two months after Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, and continue up to early June 2018.

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The flurry of messages were originally filed under seal as an attachment to the government’s February sentencing memo detailing Mueller’s objection to the presentence report in Manafort’s case. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the judge overseeing Manafort’s case, ordered them released on Friday.

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