Attorney Kevin Downing speaks after Paul Manafort was found guilty of eight financial crimes in Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 21. A mistrial was declared on the remaining 10 charges. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo Manafort jury had lone holdout on deadlocked charges A lone holdout caused a federal court jury to deadlock on 10 felony charges against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a court document released Thursday shows. Although Manafort was found guilty on eight counts of bank and tax fraud, a mistrial was declared on the remaining charges when the jury handed down its verdict on Tuesday. The verdict form filled out by the jury foreman shows a tally of 11 guilty to one not guilty on the 10 counts on which the jurors could not reach agreement on charges brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. “No consensus,” the foreman wrote next to each hung count: three for failing to file foreign bank account reports, five for bank fraud conspiracy and two for bank fraud. For two of the failing-to-report charges, the foreman appeared to have checked the form to find Manafort guilty, but then scratched that out and added the same 11-to-1 tally and the words, “No consensus.” The form appears to confirm the account of one juror that the jury’s deadlocks were the result of a single juror’s concerns that there was a reasonable doubt about Manafort’s guilt on those charges. “It was one person who kept the verdict from being guilty on all 18 counts,” juror Paula Duncan told Fox News on Thursday. Prosecutors must decide by Wednesday whether to retry Manafort on the 10 deadlocked counts. U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III said he would defer setting a sentencing date until he hears whether the prosecution still wants to pursue those charges. Manafort, 69, faces a maximum punishment of 80 years on the charges on he was found guilty, but his actual sentence is likely to be substantially lower, in accordance with federal sentencing guidelines. Manafort is also scheduled to face another trial next month in Washington on charges of failing to register as a foreign agent, money laundering and witness tampering.<doc-sep>“We’re supposed to assume he’s innocent and therefore he does not need to defend himself, and the judge made that very clear, that there is no requirement for him to do so. However, just based on what I saw, what I heard, I think I would have liked to have heard a little more from the defense,” she said. “They gave a very easygoing atmosphere to the whole thing, they objected to very little, and appeared agreeable throughout it all.”<doc-sep>WASHINGTON — Paula Duncan didn't wear her red "Make America Great Again" hat when she arrived in court to serve on Paul Manafort's jury. She kept it in her car, she tells NBC News. But Duncan, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, came to the Manafort trial thinking that Robert Mueller's Russia investigation is a witch hunt that is maligning a good president and dividing America. She still thinks so. But she also had no doubt that Paul Manafort, once Trump's campaign chairman, was guilty. She would have convicted him on all counts, she said, but she and 10 other jurors were stymied by a lone holdout. And no, she doesn't believe that person, a woman, was a Trump supporter. "I wanted Paul Manafort to be innocent, but he wasn't," Duncan told NBC News. Duncan, a homemaker who lives in Leesburg, Virginia, said she believes Manafort was a "pawn," in Mueller's Russia probe, an investigation about which she has serious doubts. She's not even sure Russia interfered in the election. "I as a voter, when I went out to check my boxes I didn't see any Russian holding a gun to my head, so how could Russia have affected the campaign results," said Duncan, who first spoke to Fox News. However, she said, the government presented compelling evidence that Manafort, who was Trump's campaign chairman, evaded taxes and defrauded banks. "In the end I did what we needed to be done," she said. "I did the right thing." During jury selection, she kept her political leanings to herself, she said. "I didn't believe politics had any place in that courtroom, so I was somewhat vague in my answers. I knew I could be fair and impartial." Most of the other jurors in Alexandria, Virginia, "were probably not of my political leanings," she said. That includes the lone holdout, about whom Duncan did not want to say much. Duncan was fairly certain, though, that the two didn't see politics the same way. Most of the jurors agreed by the second day that Manafort was guilty on all counts she said, but there were two skeptics. One came around. But the female holdout refused, despite days of argument by the other jurors. The jury ended up convicting Manafort of eight counts and deadlocking on 10, which were declared to be in mistrial. The government can retry Manafort on those charges, but given that he faces 10 years in prison, there may not be a reason to do so. "It was so frustrating," Duncan said. "She just couldn't explain to us why she had reasonable doubt. We could provide her with the information but she wouldn't change her votes." Judge Ellis addresses the jury of the Paul Manafort trial on Aug. 15, 2018. Art Lien Duncan said the woman could not explain, for example, why she voted to convict on one count of failing to report a foreign bank account, but not on the other three, which were very similar. "I think it was about her right to do that," Duncan said. "In the end it may have been more about her determination" to buck the others. Duncan said none of the jurors put much stock in Rick Gates, who flipped and testified against Manafort. But there was so much other evidence that Manafort's guilt was obvious, she added. Duncan said she did not hold it against Trump that he allowed a man who was committing crimes to help run his campaign. "He was running Donald Trump's campaign in my opinion because he was brilliant as a political strategist," Duncan said, noting that even the government's witnesses said as much. Trump could not have been expected to vet Manafort's finances, she added. The former juror said she had great affection for the judge in the case, T.S. Ellis. He came under criticism for appearing to favor the defense, but she didn't see it that way. "I think a lot of his interruptions were what parents would call 'teachable moments,'" she said. Duncan says she supports Trump's call for Mueller to wrap up his investigation. "America chose," she said. "The other half of America that lost doesn't want to accept those of us who won. I didn't vote for Obama but I had to accept him as my president. We're getting derailed by this whole special counsel thing — let the man do his job. " Trump, she said, "is doing a great job." The jurors' names remain sealed because the judge worried for their safety.<doc-sep>
(CNN) — One of the jurors from Paul Manafort’s trial said on Wednesday that although she “did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty,” the evidence was “overwhelming.” “I thought that the public, America, needed to know how close this was, and that the evidence was overwhelming,” Paula Duncan said in an interview on Fox News. “I did not want Paul Manafort to be guilty, but he was, and no one’s above the law. So it was our obligation to look through all the evidence.” Duncan, who is the first juror to speak publicly, offered a look behind the scenes of the deliberations. She noted that “crazily enough, there were even tears,” and detailed some of the jury’s conversations with the lone juror who she said was the reason Manafort was not found guilty on all counts. “We all tried to convince her to look at the paper trail. We laid it out in front of her again and again and she still said that she had a reasonable doubt. And that’s the way the jury worked. We didn’t want it to be hung, so we tried for an extended period of time to convince her, but in the end she held out and that’s why we have 10 counts that did not get a verdict,” Duncan said on “Fox News at Night.” Manafort, who served as President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, was found guilty on eight of 18 counts on Tuesday, and is facing up to 80 years in prison. He was found guilty of five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud. One of the witnesses who testified against Manafort was his longtime deputy, Rick Gates. Duncan described Gates as “nervous,” and said the jury ultimately threw away his testimony during deliberation. “Some of us had a problem accepting his testimony because he took the plea. So we agreed to throw out his testimony and look at the paperwork, which his name was all over,” Duncan said. “I think he would have done anything to preserve himself – that’s just obvious in the fact that he flipped on Manafort,” she later added. Duncan, who said she is a Trump supporter herself, said the President’s name did come up during deliberations because “in the evidence there were references to Trump and his son-in-law and to the Trump campaign,” but later added that she didn’t think politics played a part in the jury’s decision. “I think we all went in there like we were supposed to and assumed that Mr. Manafort was innocent. We did due diligence, we applied the evidence, our notes, the witnesses and we came up with the guilty verdicts on the eight counts,” she said. Manafort will be on trial again next month on a second set of charges, this time in a Washington federal court. These charges include a failure to register foreign lobbying and a money laundering conspiracy related to Ukrainian political work.