A juror from the Paul Manafort trial said she believes it would be a “grave mistake” if President Donald Trump were to pardon his former campaign chairman.
When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper why she thought it would be a mistake, Paula Duncan, a Trump supporter, said, “Justice was done.”
“I feel it would be grave mistake for President Trump to pardon Paul Manafort,” Duncan said during an interview that will air on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” Friday at 8 p.m. ET.
“Justice was done, the evidence was there and that’s where it should stop,” she added.
Duncan was one of the 11 jurors who were in favor of convicting Manafort on all 18 counts against him. In the end he was convicted of eight, with the jury hung 11-1 on the other 10.
Manafort faces up to 80 years in prison. He was found guilty Tuesday of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud.
There has been widespread speculation about whether Trump will pardon Manafort, but The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said it was not something Trump was considering.
Duncan spoke out about her experience on the jury earlier this week in an interview on Fox News. There, she said she “did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty,” but called the evidence “overwhelming.”
“I thought that the public, America, needed to know how close this was, and that the evidence was overwhelming,” Duncan said during the Fox News interview. “I did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty, but he was, and no one’s above the law. So it was our obligation to look through all the evidence.”
