Tucker Carlson Interviews Paul Manafort

2022·0.55 MB·English

by  Paul Manafort, Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson; Paul Manafort
https://rumble.com/v1jhxfl-tucker-carlson-paul-
manafort.html
need short intro
[starts at 25min timepoint after a looong
introduction]

Paul: When Trump tasked me to be his chairman, that all just
merged in with the Clinton stuff which was being managed by a guy
name Victor Pinchuk who was an oligarch from the Ukraine who had
given Clinton a million dollars to speak by phone to his conference
and had I don’t know how many millions invested into the Clinton
Foundation. So there was already a lot of money crossing over to
Clinton from the Ukraine and the Soros thing and the Pinchuk thing
started merging with the DNC thing and the Hillary Clinton for
President thing and then the Peter Strzok and Crossfire Hurricane.
And so what I thought was a conspiracy, because there's just too
many disparate pieces that couldn't really exist, it really was a
conspiracy that existed.

Tucker: Amazing. And when did you realize that you were about to
get entangled in it?

Paul: Well, I worried after when the [Steele] dossier came out,
because, again, the stuff in the dossier about me was 100% false.

Tucker: What did it tell us, some of the things that it alleged?

Paul: Well, the Black Ledger, and it talked about how I was a
backchannel into Putin delivering messages. It had me in a formal
roles that, again, my whole life was against Russia and against Putin
and in the former Soviet Union, all the things that I did in politics. And
so when these things started coming up, I knew there was something
going on that was not meant to finding truth, but it was meant to
make me into a symbol and then a target. And then when Jeff
Sessions recused himself and all things Russia in the campaign,
that's when I knew I needed to hire lawyers that were going to try and
protect me because I was now too much a public figure on this issue
and in as the chairman, they were going to come after me to get
Trump. I mean, I felt and I was right.

Tucker: When did you find out there was a criminal investigation of
you?

Paul: Well, pretty soon after they got there, he was appointed
because this FARA issue that was the basis for everything that
flowed from my fear of violations, which was I didn't register.

Tucker: Foreign Agent Registration Act.
Paul: And the reason I didn't register was because most of my work
was political in Ukraine. I wasn't lobbying Washington. I actually had
hired lobbying firms to lobby in Washington. So Tony Podesta's firm,
and then Mercury, which is a Republican firm, I hired the two of them
to do the lobbying and they were registered. So I never felt I had to
register.

Tucker: So as someone who spent his life in and around
Washington, just give us the two sentence howFARA is now this at
the center of a number of different prosecutions in D.C. But in your
40 or 50 years in Washington was FARA… Do you have a lot of
friends prosecuted under FARA?

Paul: Well, I was the first criminal prosecution since FARA was first
created.

Tucker: Exactly.

Paul: And I had already resolved my FARA case because the FARA
unit in the DOJ, basically FARA is a very opaque law. And so they
don't go after people criminally, but they do go after people for not
filing. And it's a collegial kind of thing. You work it out and if you don't,
then they'll fine you civilly and you then disclose. So when the Black
Ledger hit in the news, the Fair Office called one of my attorneys and
said, “We need to have a conversation because Manafort hasn't
filed.” And so we started a conversation. I explained my position why
I hadn't filed. They understood my position. They didn't agree with
necessarily with all of it, but they understood it. And over the course
of a couple of months, we reached an agreement where I had to file a
certain for a certain number of years, for a certain piece of what I did.
And I filed, no penalties, no slap of hands, no criticism. And it was
basically about to be formalized. Everything was done when
Weisman was appointed. Weisman in one of his first actions was he
calls to the head of the FARA unit and says, “Where's the Manafort
FARA thing?” And she said, “Well, it's resolved,” “No it's not, I'm
taking it over.” And he brought criminal charges.
Tucker: So can I just ask parenthetically, so we the observers of this,
not knowing any details, assume this was the Mueller investigation.

Paul: Correct.

Tucker: But Mueller seems like he had dementia. That's just my
guess from watching him. And it seems like the Andrew Weissman
investigation.

Paul: As far as I was concerned, it was the Weissman investigation.
In fact, interestingly, when I was spending 50 hours with Andrew
Weissman after I did a plea agreement to get out, that goes to the
second trial. There was one time when I was walking down the hall at
the offices of the Special Counsel, and Mueller walked out his door
and was walking towards me. That's coming back from the bathroom.
He was going to the bathroom. And I think and he looked at me and
I'd been in the news. This is probably somewhere around a year and
a half into the process, he knew who I was.

Tucker: Right. So he was the Joe Biden of this operation. He was
just the figurehead, the guy whose name you know, “I remember
Mueller. He's a law and order guy. He seems a reasonable
Republican”, but he doesn't actually exist anymore. It's the Weisman
character who’s running it. That's just my conclusion. Do you think
that’s right?

Paul: I think that's 100% correct.

Tucker: Yes. All the country is run like that now. “Joe Biden. I
remember Biden.”
Okay. So tell us about the raid.

Paul: The raid was interesting. I had just finished a week of
cooperating fully with the Senate Intel committees, giving them all the
documents they needed. My lawyers said if you need any more were
[available], very similar to Mar-A-Lago and I was getting ready to
leave the next day. So I finished up. It was like a Wednesday, I think
Thursday. My wife and I were leaving for Florida, and at 6 in the
morning, pre-dawn dark outside, I was in a condominium on the
fourth floor. I was just getting up. I usually get up around 6. I was
literally just getting up when I hear outside my door, which is 50 feet
into my apartment, so it wasn't like they were at my door. They came
into my apartment down a long hallway and I'm not going to knock on
the door because I heard rustling out there and I didn't know what it
was. And all of a sudden, I hear “FBI. We've got guns. Hands up,
We're coming in.”

Tucker: We've got guns.

Paul: “We’ve got guns pointed, we're coming in.” And at that time, I
had enough people sending hate mail to me and things like that. It
could have been the FBI. It could have been people who were
walking around the streets carrying signs saying Paul Manafort is a
traitor. I didn't know what it was. And they pushed the door open and
in came 15 or 16 flak people in flak jackets. And I told Stone the only
reason he got a CNN reporter and I didn't is because the CNN wasn't
roaming the fourth floor of my condominium at that hour in the
morning, whereas they happened to be roaming in front of his house.
They couldn't justify being on the fourth floor. But they then spent
about 12 hours in my house, going through everything, my wife's
close too, not just [what was on the warrant].

Tucker: I mean, you're from this country. You lived here all your life.
What did you think as this was happening?

Paul: Well, I mean, and I've been in countries where I've been
helping to build democracy, and I'm what the feeling like this is what
I've been telling people they should model after our country, our
sense of law and order and justice. And I'm thinking, what is going on
here, because there was no basis other than what it was for, which
was to intimidate me, scare me into trying to cut a deal. And it didn't
work against Trump. Yes. I mean, there was no reason for the raid.

Tucker: So ultimately they wanted you to say that, yes, Trump was
an agent of Putin.

Paul: Yes. Weissman had his own narrative with motive and contacts
and everything else, none of which were connected to reality. And he
wanted me to confirm facts, independent facts, that he could then slip
into his narrative and I lay it all out in the book, that that would allow
him to then say there was Russian collusion.

Tucker: But bottom line, there just wasn't Russian collusion.

Paul: There is no evidence at all because nothing existed and so you
look at the special counsel's office and there's nothing.

Tucker: So we're jumping ahead a little bit here. Just I hadn't even
seen this tape. This is from August 4th, this month in the Congress.
This is the FBI director being asked point blank by Marsha Blackburn,
“what do you think of the Russia hoax?” I don't know if you've seen
this. This is pretty amazing. It's amazing to watch this.

Marsha: Do you agree that the allegation of secret collusion between
President Trump and Russia was a hoax? Yes or no?

Wray: I don't think that's the terminology I would use, but I think
there's been a lot written on this subject and both in the special
counsel's report, the inspector general's report. So that's not a term I
would use. Okay.

Marsha: Do you agree that the Hunter Biden laptop was not Russia
disinformation?
Wray: Now you're asking about an ongoing investigation that I expect
our folks to pursue aggressively. And I just I can't comment on that.

Marsha: And you possess the laptop, right?

Wray: Again, I can't discuss that ongoing investigation.

Tucker: That's the director of the FBI after a multiyear long
investigation in which people, including you, went to prison on the
basis of the claim that Russia got Trump elected, we now know that's
not true and he will still not admit that's not true. That's shocking to
me.

Paul: Yes. Well, it's not shocking to me anymore

Tucker: How can he be FBI director?

Paul: Well, that's what's shocking to me.

Tucker: I'm sorry. There was no point in that other than to raise your
blood pressure beyond what already is. So sorry that I even brought
up the corruption.

Paul: But it just shows you that the deep state, which I talk about in
the book, they don't care about facts. I mean, he cares about
protecting himself and what agenda he has, whatever that is. And I'm
not surprised that he does it, because he's not demonstrated to me
any of the independence that an FBI director needs to have in order
to do his job.

Tucker: But the red line has got to be destroying people's lives. Like
you may have political views and you debate vigorously on behalf of
those views, but if people are starting to have their lives destroyed,
like their houses taken away, their children attacked, prison terms,
you can't participate in that because that's too immoral, right.

Paul: I've gotten beyond that statement for you.

Tucker: Okay. Well, I'm still easily shocked. I'm still very offended.
It's awkward.

Paul: I'm offended. I'm very offended.

Tucker: Okay, so then they start, without even getting into it, but they
start going after your family, which I didn't even really remember.

Paul: Again, everything that was being done to me was a means to
an end. They didn't care about Paul Manafort, but they were going to
make my life as miserable as they could in order to get me to say,
“what do I need to do to have this stop?”

Tucker: But really, like using like Stalin level police tactics, like
hurting your children, taking your property, it's not just attacking you
on Twitter. It's like they have no boundaries whatsoever, it felt like.

Paul: There were no boundaries and when they indicted me, they put
a gag order on me so that I couldn't defend myself. And then they
started to leak all this stuff into the public arena, most of it wrong, and
created this image of me that there was no way I was going to get a
fair trial in D.C.

Tucker: Zero, and who put a gag order on you?

Paul: Judge Amy Berman Jackson.

Tucker: Who's a fascist. I mean, she did the same thing to [Roger]
Stone. So how can a federal judge tell you that you can't speak when
your right to speak is guaranteed by the Constitution?

Paul: Well, I could have and would probably have won appealing
that. But at that point in time, I was millions of dollars into my legal
fees. I was not in a position where I could get peripheral legal battles
going when I had to concentrate on my freedom. And so I made the
decision that that was an academic exercise that I could win, might
take a year or so to get all the way up to the Supreme Court if it got.
But I could probably win. But I was focusing on the simple things like
I want to be free.

Tucker: Did you think about fleeing the country?

Paul: No, no, no. Look, you know what? At the end of the day, I knew
I was innocent of what they were coming after me for. I felt that this
can't really play out as negatively as it looks like. And in my
intelligence, it is going to. My heart was saying, no, this is not the
country I grew up in. And so even in the end when I was at trial. I
didn't want to give that benefit of the doubt that everything that was
happening to me was so wrong until and I go into this in the book, my
second trial. So now I've been convicted of eight of the 18 charges in
the Virginia court. I have a case which includes the FARA case
where all my properties are going to now be taken from me if I'm
convicted and it's in front of Judge Jackson, who was not going to
give me a fair trial. She was basically sitting next to Wiseman at the
prosecutor's table, my whole trial.

Tucker: Absolutely. The fact that Amy Berman Jackson is a sitting
judge is like an offense against the idea of justice, I think.

Paul: And she was presiding over this. So I move for venue change
because the second trial was going to happen three weeks after the
trial had just ended. That it's been four weeks was the trial of a
century and so everybody knew who I was. Everybody knew I had
been convicted. There was no way I was going to get a fair trial in
D.C. And she said, no, we can't do that. There's no reason you can