Paul Manafort, who served as Donald Trump's 2016 campaign manager, told Newsmax on Tuesday he doesn't expect the affidavit that was used to justify the search warrant on Mar-a-Lago will ever be released by the Department of Justice because it will expose the department's "corruption."
On "The Chris Salcedo Show," Manafort was asked whether the FBI and DOJ don't follow the law.
"Well, I was punished by an FBI that did that, a DOJ that did that," Manafort, who is promoting his autobiography, "Political Prisoner," told Salcedo.
Manafort was convicted of multiple crimes stemming from the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation. He was pardoned by then-President Donald Trump.
"The affidavit is the key to the whole document, the whole search," he said, "not because it's going to prove that the search was justified, but it's going to expose the corruption."
That, Manafort predicted, is why the affidavit is not going to be released, "unless the judge rules in a way that I'm not expecting."
Trump and Republicans in Congress have pushed for the release of the affidavit, but DOJ has said its release could compromise their investigation and make witnesses less willing to continue cooperating.
Manafort pointed to the case of Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign who found himself under investigation after a fourth FISA court application.
"We now know that there was no basis for the affidavit being changed and that the three FISA applications that had been rejected were the right things to happen," Manafort said. "We're in uncharted territory right now going after a former president and potential future candidates."
He noted that when dealing with the Hillary Clinton email case, then-FBI Director James Comey said that there was no basis for the Department of Justice to go any further with the inquiry.
"But that's part of the two-tiered system that we have in this country," Manafort said. "And that's why we need to bring change because, unfortunately, what originally was focusing on people like me, to go after people like President Trump, is now starting to change even spread even further in the Department of Justice."
Now, he said, average citizens are being targeted, pointing to the cases of parents at school board meetings, and crime victims.
"So Americans who don't buy into their philosophy are the ones who are now at risk,'' he said, adding that "87,000 new IRS agents are going to carry that tune forward," a reference to the $375 billion spending bill signed on Tuesday by President Joe Biden.
"There's no question so it sounds like it's just a legal issue, but it's not," Manafort said. "It's an important issue."
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