Rudy Giuliani defends Manafort's 47-month prison sentence: 'He's not a terrorist'

Rudy Giuliani sees nothing wrong with President Trump's former campaign chair Paul Manafort receiving a prison sentence well below the recommended 20 years.

Manafort was convicted last year of bank and tax fraud, and on Thursday evening, Judge T.S. Ellis sentenced him to 47 months in prison. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and a former federal prosecutor, told Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press that this is an acceptable amount of time. "He's not a terrorist," Giuliani said. "He's not an organized criminal. He's a white collar criminal."

Giuliani said he feels "terrible about the way Manafort has been treated," adding that it's "not American to keep a man in solitary confinement to try to crack him." Manafort was targeted because "he wouldn't lie," Giuliani told Lemire. "It was ... not like anything I've ever seen before because they wanted him to say things that were not true."

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Regarding the solitary confinement, Special Counsel Robert Mueller said in a court filing last July that Manafort was in a private unit and "not confined to a cell." He had access to a telephone, laptop, and "his own bathroom and shower facility." Manafort seemed to find his accommodations acceptable, with Vox reporting he was heard on a monitored phone call saying he was treated like a "VIP."