President Donald Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani said Friday that special counsel Robert Mueller believes a key witness in the Russia probe is lying about Trump himself.
Giuliani told CNN that Mueller and his team think former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort is being untruthful in regards to the president.
"In the questioning of Manafort, they did tell them at the time that they believed he was lying about certain things related to us that he's not lying about," Giuliani said.
Those "certain things" include Manafort's insistence that Trump did not know about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with members of the campaign and Russians. It was supposedly set up on the promise of providing the Trump team with dirt on Hillary Clinton, but reports said it ended up being about Russian adoptions.
Giuliani, a former mayor of New York City, told CNN that Mueller's team has repeatedly tried to get Manafort to claim that Trump knew about the meeting.
"They repeated that conduct over and over and over again, which gives us a clear indication of what they want him to say in order to get him out of solitary confinement. I find that abominable," Giuliani said.
Mueller is expected to file court documents before Friday's close of business that will spell out the Manafort situation in more detail.
Mueller's probe began in May 2017 over allegations that the Trump campaign may have colluded with the Russians to defeat Clinton in the 2016 election.
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