Paul Manafort, former campaign chairman for President Donald Trump, was reportedly asleep when FBI agents raided his Virginia home in July. | Getty / Getty Images Manafort spokesman says investigations 'entirely politically motivated'

President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman believes the investigations into his actions are “entirely politically motivated,” Paul Manafort's spokesman Jason Maloni said Thursday.

Maloni referred to a CNN report this week, alleging that U.S. investigators conducted surveillance of Manafort under secret court orders before and after the 2016 presidential election.


The CNN report “is all you need to know about this case. When CNN’s story broke about the revelations of not one but two FISA warrants, that made this crystal clear a political story,” Maloni told NPR’s “1A” on Thursday morning. “Paul’s feeling is this is entirely politically motivated.”

Manafort, through a statement released by Maloni on Wednesday, called for the Justice Department’s inspector general to look into the FISA warrant leaks and find the motivations behind surveillance of his communications. He also urged DOJ to release any transcripts it had of his communications with non-Americans.

“Why it’s coming to light now is for someone to investigate,” Maloni said Thursday. “Paul Manafort earlier in the week begged, said, ‘Please, somebody conduct an investigation.’ First of all, who revealed the fact that one of the most classified and valuable tools at our intelligence community’s disposal, the FISA court, why was this violated, and who’s behind it and why? Those are questions that need to be answered.”

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FBI agents raided Manafort’s home in July, in what Maloni on Thursday called a tactic “reserved for violent offenders” that should shock the American people on the same scale as Chelsea Manning’s leaks of classified information to WikiLeaks.

And Maloni signaled that, as a result, Manafort will no longer cooperate with the investigations, which include parallel FBI and congressional probes.

“He has cooperated from the beginning, volunteering to come to Congress, revealing the June 9 meeting with Donald Trump Jr., providing reams of documents for the investigation — until he got a very, very clear signal he shouldn’t cooperate, when federal agents woke him in the morning on the day he was expected to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, knocked on his bedroom door and roused him and his wife up from their sleep,” Maloni said.

“People are not, you know, necessarily wearing suits in the morning. They were frisked, they were manhandled, and this is shocking,” he continued. “The signals that are being clearly sent from various investigators do not bode well for someone who has tried to cooperate and volunteer information in the past. Tell me why he should. Tell me how it benefits him, that he’s provided as much clarity as he can to investigate what did Russia do to undermine our 2016 election. Because we’re still not any closer to that answer. That is the question.”