President Trump praised Paul Manafort for not breaking under “tremendous pressure” – unlike his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen who flipped on him – after he was convicted of evading millions of dollars in taxes.

“I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. Justice took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ – make up stories in order to get a ‘deal,'” Trump wrote on his Twitter account. “Such respect for a brave man!”

He returned to the social messaging site a few minutes later to call special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation a “Witch Hunt?” because the jury failed to convict Manafort on all 18 charges.

“A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!,” the president wrote.

In a series of tweets about his longtime lawyer and fixer, Trump warned that anyone looking for a “good lawyer” shouldn’t hire Cohen and ridiculed him for pleading guilty to campaign finance violations that Trump said, “are not a crime.”

Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony charges in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, including telling prosecutors that Trump directed him to pay off two women who alleged they had affairs with Trump a decade earlier because their revelations would influence the election.

The favorable language Trump used to defend Manafort raised speculation that the president is weighing whether to pardon his former campaign chairman.

“The language that the president has used in relation to Manafort is very different than what he’s used in relation to Cohen,” Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz told The Hill.

“He talks about it being a tragedy, that he’s a good person, that he’s served many people in many administrations. It sounds like it’s certainly possible that he may be considering a pardon,”
Dershowitz added.

Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor, said Trump is “laying the groundwork” by saying “it’s an unfair prosecution that Manafort was targeted because ‘he worked for me.”

“Trump would be acting like he can decide things, like when to wrap it up,” Rocah, who teaches at Pace Law School, told Bloomberg News.

Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, said Manafort also seems to be holding out for a pardon from the president.

“There’s only one person that can give him what he wants and likely needs – and that is a walk away – and only Donald Trump can do that with a pardon,” Turley told The Hill. “So I think Manafort is sticking with this pardon strategy. He wants to see if he can get the one thing he needs the most.”

Manafort, who ran Trump’s campaign during the summer of 2016, was convicted of eight of 18 charges in federal court in Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday.

The charges brought by Mueller’s prosecutors say Manafort, 69, used off-shore bank accounts to evade paying taxes on $60 million he was paid between 2010 and 2014 when he worked for a pro-Kremlin political party in Ukraine.

He faces another trial in Washington, D.C., next month on similar charges.

Turley warned that Trump would face huge political risks if he pardons Manafort – especially so close to the November midterm elections.

“With the odds of impeachment growing with the possible takeover of the Democratic House, a pardon of Paul Manafort would not go well,” Turley told The Hill, adding that some would take it as trying to obstruct Mueller’s investigation.

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