Paula Duncan, one of 12 jurors who sat on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s trial, said the one juror who stymied a ruling on all 18 counts against Manafort couldn’t explain why.
“It was so frustrating,” Duncan told NBC News in a interview published on Thursday in reference to the juror.
“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,” Duncan said of the female holdout.
Duncan said she was puzzled as to how the woman voted to convict Manafort on one count of failing to report a foreign bank account but not on three other similar counts.
{mosads}
“I think it was about her right to do that,” Duncan said. “In the end it may have been more about her determination” to oppose the other 10 jurors.
The jury ended up convicting Manafort on five counts of filing false income tax returns, one count of failing to report foreign bank accounts and two counts of bank fraud.
Duncan, who described herself as a Trump supporter, said she “wanted Manafort to be innocent, but he wasn’t.” She said in an interview with Fox News the night before that she was convinced Manafort was guilty after seeing four full boxes of evidence from special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team.
But she also said she thinks Manafort was just a “pawn” in Mueller’s overall Russia investigation, which she thinks is just a witch hunt out to get Trump and divide the country.
“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.”
Duncan added that she believes the president is currently “doing a great job.”
The names of the other jurors on the case remained sealed out of the judge’s concern for their safety.