“Why didn’t government tell me that he was under investigation. These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion - a Hoax!” President Donald Trump tweeted. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Trump claims Manafort case has 'nothing to do with collusion'

President Donald Trump distanced himself on Wednesday from his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, complaining that he was not notified by the government that Manafort had been under federal investigation before the 2016 presidential election.

Manafort is currently on trial, facing charges of tax and bank fraud brought by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose office has been probing allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race as well as allegations that the Trump campaign colluded in those efforts. The charges brought against Manafort are related to his work in Ukraine as a consultant for a Russia-aligned political party.


“Paul Manafort worked for Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other highly prominent and respected political leaders. He worked for me for a very short time,” Trump wrote on Twitter Wednesday morning. “Why didn’t government tell me that he was under investigation. These old charges have nothing to do with Collusion - a Hoax!”

CNN reported last September that Manafort was the subject of a government surveillance both before and after the 2016 election under a secret court order issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

Later Wednesday morning, Trump compared Manafort to infamous mobster Al Capone, who was imprisoned for seven years, including at San Francisco's Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, suggesting that Manafort had received worse treatment than Capone.

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"Looking back on history, who was treated worse, Alfonse Capone, legendary mob boss, killer and 'Public Enemy Number One,' or Paul Manafort, political operative & Reagan/Dole darling, now serving solitary confinement - although convicted of nothing? Where is the Russian Collusion?" Trump wrote online.

Asked Wednesday if the president's concern for Manafort's solitary confinement extended beyond the president's former campaign chairman to other prisoners kept in solitary without having been convicted of a crime, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "I'm not aware of a policy decision on this front. Certainly the president is clear, he thinks Paul Manafort has been treated unfairly."

Manafort’s trial began Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia, and is expected to last roughly three weeks. The former Trump campaign chairman, who essentially served as the president’s campaign manager for a stretch of 2016 that included the contentious Republican National Convention, is also facing a second criminal case in Washington, where he will be tried on federal charges of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent.

Trump has long complained that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Kremlin, labeling Mueller’s investigation a “hoax” and a “witch hunt” that was invented by embarrassed Democrats searching for an excuse for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. Manafort’s alleged crimes, the president and his allies have complained, have nothing to do with the Trump campaign.

While he has insisted that his campaign did not collude with the Russian government, he has accused Clinton and the Democratic Party of doing just that, suggesting that the Clinton campaign’s and Democratic National Committee’s partial financing of a dossier of incendiary but unverified information about him amounted to actual collusion.

Trump has insisted, falsely, that the dossier was the sole factor in the initiation of Mueller’s probe, which the president has said was also fueled by anti-Trump bias inside the Justice Department, including by former FBI Director James Comey and former deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, as well as Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, a bureau agent and attorney, respectively, whose anti-Trump communications to one another were made public.

“Russian Collusion with the Trump Campaign, one of the most successful in history, is a TOTAL HOAX,” Trump wrote online in a follow-up post. “The Democrats paid for the phony and discredited Dossier which was, along with Comey, McCabe, Strzok and his lover, the lovely Lisa Page, used to begin the Witch Hunt. Disgraceful!”