On Tuesday night, The Five had a fiery discussion about former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort being reportedly wiretapped during and after the election.
Jesse Watters believes that if the CNN report is true that it vindicates President Trump‘s claim that his predecessor President Obama was “wiretapping” Trump Tower since Manafort previously had a residence in the building and presumably had phone conversations with the then-candidate.
“Can I just bash my head against this table?” Juan Williams reacted. “That’s a whopper what you just said.”
“I was quoting CNN’s report!” Watters shot back. “So CNN is telling whoppers then.”
Dana Perino thought they were “missing the point.”
“It is true that America deserves more information and soon about why a presidential campaign of the party out of power was being surveilled,” Perino began. “But I do think the point is that Manafort never should have taken the job in the first place. This goes back to 2014. The guy’s got lots of business dealings.”
While she didn’t consider Trump as being surveilled because the target was Manafort, she thought it was “irresponsible” of him to take the job as campaign manager.
“If it turns out they were wiretapping Manafort inappropriately, fine.” Perino continued. “But I would say right now he is looking down the barrel of a gun.”
Kennedy pushed back, saying even if you didn’t do anything wrong that you can still be “caught up” in the surveillance, which she says is “problematic.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle agreed with Perino that Manafort put Trump “in a very bad position.”
“I do think that Paul Manafort is staring down the barrel of a gun,” Perino reiterated. “Between the DOJ and the FBI and they’re trying to put ultimate pressure on him either to flip- and it has to make a lot of people very concerned because it wasn’t just that he was calling President Trump after the election even, okay?”
She continued, “Now you actually have — who else did he talk to? So now you have all of these people being called in to talk to the grand jury and the investigators who know that they could possibly be on tape having talked to him. And I don’t necessarily blame President Trump for hiring him. I think Paul Manafort made a terrible decision and put the president and a bad spot.”
Juan Williams closed the conversation by clarifying that Watters was wrong in that this did not vindicate Trump.
Watch the clip above, via Fox News.
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