NORTHERN VIRGINIA – Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s
team was one holdout juror away from winning a conviction against Paul
Manafort on all 18 counts of bank and tax fraud, juror Paula Duncan told
Fox News in an exclusive interview Wednesday.
“It was one person who kept the verdict from being
guilty on all 18 counts,” Duncan, 52, said. She added that Mueller’s
team of prosecutors often seemed bored, apparently catnapping during
parts of the trial.
The identities of the jurors have been closely held,
kept under seal by Judge T.S. Ellis III at Tuesday's conclusion of the
high-profile trial.
But Duncan gave a behind-the-scenes account to Fox News
on Wednesday, after the jury returned a guilty verdict against the
former Trump campaign chairman on eight financial crime counts and
deadlocked on 10 others.
Duncan showed her two notebooks with juror number #0302 on the covers.
(Fox News)
Duncan described herself as an avid supporter of
President Trump, but said she was moved by four full boxes of exhibits
provided by Mueller’s team – though she was skeptical about prosecutors'
motives in the financial crimes case.
“Certainly Mr. Manafort got caught breaking the law,
but he wouldn’t have gotten caught if they weren’t after President
Trump,” Duncan said of the special counsel’s case, which she separately
described as a “witch hunt to try to find Russian collusion,” borrowing a
phrase Trump has used in tweets more than 100 times.
“Something that went through my mind is, this should
have been a tax audit,” Duncan said, sympathizing with the foundation of
the Manafort defense team’s argument.
Paula Duncan opened up about her experience as a juror in the Paul Manafort trial.
(Fox News)
She described a tense and emotional four days of
deliberations, which ultimately left one juror holding out. Behind
closed doors, tempers flared at times, even though jurors never
explicitly discussed Manafort’s close ties to Trump.
“It was a very emotionally charged jury room – there
were some tears,” Duncan said about deliberations with a group of
Virginians she didn’t feel included many “fellow Republicans.”
A political allegiance to the president also raised
conflicted feelings in Duncan, but she said it ultimately didn’t change
her decision about the former Trump campaign chairman.
“Finding Mr. Manafort guilty was hard for me. I wanted
him to be innocent, I really wanted him to be innocent, but he wasn’t,”
Duncan said. “That’s the part of a juror, you have to have due diligence
and deliberate and look at the evidence and come up with an informed
and intelligent decision, which I did.”
Duncan, a Missouri native and mother of two, showed Fox News her two notebooks with her juror number #0302 on the covers.
In the interview, Duncan also described how the special
counsel’s prosecutors apparently had a hard time keeping their eyes
open.
“A lot of times they looked bored, and other times they
catnapped – at least two of them did,” Duncan said. “They seemed very
relaxed, feet up on the table bars and they showed a little bit of
almost disinterest to me, at times.”
The jury box was situated in a corner of the courtroom
that gave them an unobstructed head-on view of the prosecutors and
defense, while members of the media and the public viewed both parties
from behind.
Judge Ellis told jurors, including Duncan, that their
names would remain sealed after the trial’s conclusion, because of
dangerous threats he received during the proceedings.
But the verdict gave Duncan a license to share her story without fear.
“Had the verdict gone any other way, I might have been,” Duncan said.
Her account of the deliberations is no longer a
secret. And neither is the pro-Trump apparel she kept for a long drive
to the federal courthouse in Alexandria every day.
“Every day when I drove, I had my Make America Great
Again hat in the backseat,” said Duncan, who said she plans to vote for
Trump again in 2020. “Just as a reminder.”
