“The View” panelist Meghan McCain unleashed on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Tuesday, the day after news broke that Manafort’s plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller had broken down with prosecutors accusing him of lying.
“To that angle, when you’re talking about Putin,” McCain began, after another panelist suggested Manafort may be too afraid of what Russian President Vladimir Putin would do to him to be completely honest with Mueller.
“What we do know is that one of the things that got him in jail was he was an unregistered foreign agent and he was a conduit between Russian oligarchs within Putin’s inner circle,” she said. “So this is what we do know about him.”
{mosads}”As far as I’m concerned, people who do blood money dealings like this, he should rot in jail and then he should rot in hell, as far as I’m concerned with Paul Manafort.”
When another panelist jokingly suggested McCain meant what she said “in a nice way though,” the daughter of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) pushed back.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “I think when you take blood money from foreign adversaries when you’re a United States citizen in the way that he did — the idea that he can be pardoned … it would enter us to a new level of insanity.”
Mueller said in a legal filing Monday that Manafort had violated his plea agreement by lying to federal prosecutors.
“After signing the plea agreement, Manafort committed federal crimes by lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Special Counsel’s Office on a variety of subject matters, which constitute breaches of the agreement,” Mueller’s team said in a joint status report with Manafort’s defense attorneys.
Manafort was convicted on eight counts of bank and tax fraud this summer in Northern Virginia and agreed to work with Mueller to stave off a second federal trial in Washington, D.C.
In doing so, Manafort pleaded guilty to two felony charges tied to his foreign lobbying efforts.
The Guardian reported Tuesday that Manafort held private conversations with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London starting as early as 2013 until as late as the spring of 2016, months before WikiLeaks released a slew of Democratic campaign emails hacked by Russian officials.