A federal judge in Virginia on Friday accused the office of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III of pursuing a fraud case against President Trump’s former campaign manager to pressure him to “sing” and provide evidence against the president.

The comments from Judge T.S. Ellis III came during a hearing in Alexandria federal court, where attorneys for Paul Manafort argued that bank- and tax-fraud charges against him are outside the scope of the special counsel’s authority.

“You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud,” Ellis told prosecutors at the morning hearing. “You really care about getting information Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”

Ellis said the government wanted Manafort, “the vernacular is, to sing.” The judge put it another way, saying the special counsel set out to “turn the screws and get the information you really want.”

Manafort, 69, is accused in federal court in both Alexandria and the District of Columbia of crimes related to his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine. Manafort served as Trump’s campaign chief for five months before resigning amid news reports that he had received secret cash payments for his Ukraine consulting.

Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign chairman, leaves the federal courthouse in Washington in November. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

But the judge did question why an investigation into Trump attorney Michael Cohen was handed over to federal prosecutors in New York while the Manafort case was kept with the special counsel.

Ellis suggested that if he ruled in Manafort’s favor, the case could simply be returned to the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

It is precisely because the probe into Manafort’s financial dealings began years ago with federal prosecutors in that office, Manafort’s defense attorneys argued, that the special counsel should not be involved.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” defense attorney Kevin Downing said in court. “It’s so unrelated,” he said, “as to be in violation” of the special counsel’s mandate.

Dreeben responded in court that the Manafort investigation has expanded significantly since it was taken over by Mueller. “Our investigation has considerably advanced and deepened our understanding” of Manafort’s actions, he said.

The reason the specific parameters of the special counsel’s investigation have not been publicly revealed, Dreeben said, is that to do so would jeopardize ongoing probes and sensitive national security information.

“It would make no sense for the facts to be conveyed publicly,” he argued. Instead, he said, the scope has been defined in “ongoing discussions” with Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, who oversees the investigation.

Dreeben also referred to an August memorandum from Rosenstein authorizing Mueller to investigate whether Manafort illegally coordinated with Russia in 2016.

Ellis asked for an unredacted version of that memo. Dreeben told the judge that all sections of the memo related to Manafort have been publicly revealed. Significant sections remain classified.

Downing said he would also like a copy of any written records justifying Mueller’s appointment as special counsel. Downing noted he had worked under the deputy attorney general for five years and knows that “Mr. Rosenstein is a stickler for memos being written.”

Manafort has argued that Rosenstein improperly gave Mueller a “blank check” to investigate the Trump campaign.

Ellis appeared somewhat sympathetic to this argument as well, comparing Mueller to independent counsels criticized in the past for overreach.

“The American people feel pretty strongly about no one having unfettered power,” he said.

Dreeben countered that the special counsel is part of the Justice Department and thus subject to oversight that addresses such concerns. The tax division and national security division signed off on the Manafort indictment, he said.

“We are not operating with unfettered power,” he said. “We are not separate from the Justice Department.”

Ellis is known to be tough on attorneys in court, but those who have appeared before him often say that pressure offers little insight into his ultimate ruling.

“Judge Ellis has high expectations from counsel on both sides of any issue,” said Timothy Belevetz, a former prosecutor in the Eastern District now with the firm Holland Knight. “His interactions with counsel in the courtroom do not necessarily reflect where he’ll end up coming out, because he’s a thoughtful judge who takes into account and carefully analyzes what’s presented to him. But in the meantime, he probes counsel and does so thoroughly.”

Manafort has made similar arguments in D.C. federal court, where he faces charges of money laundering, making false statements, failing to follow lobbying disclosure laws and working as an unregistered foreign agent. He is set to go to trial there Sept. 17.

Earlier this week, Manafort’s attorneys accused government officials of falsely telling reporters that conversations between their client and Russian officials were intercepted.

Mueller’s attorneys have no evidence of any such conversations to turn over, the defense said.

Manafort also is arguing that one of the charges against him, failing to register as a foreign agent in 2011, is too old to be prosecuted and that the searches of his home and storage unit were unconstitutional.

Manafort’s attorneys requested that the judge address the motion alleging leaks and other issues at a hearing set for May 25.

Mueller has requested 70 blank subpoenas in preparation for Manafort’s July 10 Virginia trial. He also has added an attorney from the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia to his legal team for the case: Uzo Asonye, who in 2016 prosecuted Norfolk Treasurer Anthony Burfoot for corruption.

Ellis expressed satisfaction with Asonye’s involvement, having pushed Mueller at an earlier hearing to add local counsel to his team.

The judge noted with pleasure that the fraud prosecutor has appeared before him several times.

“He may tell you some interesting things,” Ellis said.

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President Trump’s new lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani sought Friday to clean up a series of comments made during a whirlwind media tour meant to bolster the president’s standing regarding a payment to a porn star but that instead created new problems for his client.

In a statement issued hours after Trump told reporters Giuliani was still getting up to speed on the facts, the former New York mayor said that a $130,000 payment made to adult film actress Stormy Daniels by longtime Trump lawyer Michael Cohen would have happened regardless of whether Trump was on the presidential ballot the following month.

“The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family,” Giuliani said in the statement. “It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.”

On Wednesday, Giuliani revealed that the president had reimbursed Cohen for the settlement Cohen paid in October 2016 to keep Daniels from disclosing details of a sexual encounter she alleged she had with Trump a decade earlier.

Giuliani has said that the details of the reimbursement showed that Trump paid back Cohen because it was a personal, not a campaign expense. But campaign finance law experts said Giuliani’s remarks did not rule out violations of campaign finance laws, and some of his statements may have actually provided new evidence for investigators.

[Analysts: Giuliani’s media blitz gives investigators new leads, new evidence]

Appearing Thursday on the Fox News Channel, for instance, Giuliani asked viewers to imagine if Daniels had aired her allegations “on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton.”

“Cohen didn’t even ask,” Giuliani told viewers. “Cohen made it go away. He did his job.”

In his statement, Giuliani also sought to make clear that he speaking in television interviews about his understanding of events in which Trump had been involved and not about what the president knew at the time. The distinction is important because if Giuliani publicly described a private conversation with the president, he might have inadvertently waived attorney-client privilege on that conversation, potentially opening the door for prosecutors to probe further into what was said.

One close Trump adviser said Giuliani had “waived the privilege big time” with his appearance on “Fox Friends” and description of his conversations with his client, the president.

This adviser, who requested anonymnity to speak more candidly, said Giuliani’s misstatement came because he relied on Trump’s description of what happened, without independently researching the nature of the payments.

“Rudy followed the client’s wishes without knowing all the facts,” the person said.

Giuliani also stated that it was “undisputed” that Trump had the constitutional power to fire former FBI director James B. Comey, which he did last year. Trump’s action is among those under scrutiny by special counsel Robert S. Muller III as part of his investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation,” Giuliani said.

In saying that Trump had the power to Comey, Giuliani appeared to be backing away from an assertion he made earlier this week that the president acted out of frustration that Comey wouldn’t publicly state that the president was not under investigation by the FBI.

That earlier statement raised concerns among some legal experts who said Giuliani seemed to say Comey was fired over the Russia investigation – and such an admission could further an obstruction of justice probe involving the president.

Cohen is under investigation by federal prosecutors in New York for possible bank fraud, wire fraud, and campaign finance violations, according to people familiar with the matter. FBI agents searched Cohen’s house, office, and hotel room.

In early April, after Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he was unaware of the settlement that Cohen had paid to Daniels.

Since Giuliani began discussing these matters publicly two days ago, the White House has been besieged with questions about their past denials of the president’s knowledge, and on Friday morning, Trump suggested Giuliani had misspoken.

“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago, but he really has his heart into it, he’s working hard, he’s learning the subject matter,” Trump told reporters as he prepared to leave the White House.

“He knows it’s a witch hunt,” Trump continued. “He’ll get his facts straight.”

[Kellyanne Conway says she didn’t know about payment to porn star while she ran Trump’s campaign]

Trump talked to reporters again Friday after taking a helicopter from the White House to Joint Base Andrews and before departing to Dallas, where he is addressing a gathering of the National Rifle Association Friday afternoon.

“Rudy’s great,” Trump said there. adding: “He wasn’t totally familiar with everything.”

On Thursday morning, Trump issued a trio of carefully worded tweets, largely echoing the points Giuliani had made in his Wednesday night interview.

In a brief telephone interview later Friday, Giuliani said the episode has not hurt his standing with Trump.

“He says he loves me,” Giuliani said, calling the issue a matter of “interpretation.”

On the campaign trail, Trump saw Giuliani as a loyal surrogate – and the two men even watched sports together riding back from events.

But Giuliani and Trump have never been close friends, associates say, and Giuliani was upset by his treatment during the transition – when he was passed over for secretary of state by Trump’s eventual choice of businessman Rex Tillerson.

Over recent months, Giuliani has occasionally spoken to the president but has not been in his coterie of close advisers.

Trump also said Friday that if he could be treated fairly he would “love to speak” to federal prosecutors investigating ties between his campaign and Russia. He said he would do so even over the objections of his lawyers — if he could be convinced the Russia probe is not a “witch hunt.”

“I would love to speak. I would love to go,” Trump said. “Nothing I want to do more, because we did nothing wrong.”

But, he added, “I have to find that we’re going to be treated fairly. … Right now, it’s a pure witch hunt.”

Those comments come as Trump’s lawyers are continuing to negotiate with special Muller about the conditions of a possible interview.

Trump and his lawyers have said in recent days that they fear Mueller is trying to trap Trump into committing perjury during an extended interview. Mueller has suggested Trump could be subpoenaed if he doesn’t voluntarily talk.

Trump also complained that there are too many “angry Democrats” on Mueller’s team. He did not mention that Mueller himself is a Republican.

“Why aren’t we having Republican people doing what these Democratic people are doing?” Trump asked.

Senior White House staffer were caught off guard Wednesday by Giuliani’s first appearance on Fox News when he disclosed that Trump had repaid Daniels. White House press secretary told reporters on Thursday that she had not learned about the repayment until seeing Giuliani on television that night.

On Friday, a person close to the White House said Giuliani was still not consulting with White House counsel Donald McGahn nor Emmet Flood, the White House attorney recently hired to handle the Russia investigation.

The person, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly, said it is possible that Giuliani had a strategy in mind but that it wasn’t clear.

On Friday, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, who ran President Trump’s campaign in its closing months, said that she was not aware at the time that Cohen made the $130,000 payment.

“I had never heard about that during the campaign,” Conway told reporters at the White House. “I was the campaign manager. A lot crossed my desk.”

Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman contributed to this report.

A Puerto Rico Air National Guard plane crashed shortly after taking off in Georgia on Wednesday, killing all nine airmen on board.

The plane, a C-130-type cargo plane from Puerto Rico’s 156th Airlift Wing, had been in Savannah for maintenance and took off about 11:30 a.m., bound for Arizona. The Associated Press reported that the decades-old plane was due to be retired in Arizona, though a National Guard spokesman would not confirm that at a news conference Thursday morning.

The plane made it only about a mile from Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport before it nose-dived toward a state highway intersection and exploded into a ball of fire and black smoke, which could be seen across the northern suburbs of the city.

All the victims served in Puerto Rico’s National Guard, officials said. Their names have not yet been released, and the military has only begun to investigate the cause of the crash.

Col. Pete Boone, a spokesman for Georgia’s Air National Guard, denied that the plane was more than 60 years old, as one of his counterparts in Puerto Rico had told reporters.

Boone said at a news conference on Thursday that the C-130 was built in the late 1970s and had been in Georgia for routine maintenance.

Regardless, the colonel said, “the Puerto Rico Air National Guard and the whole Puerto Rico community has been through quite a lot over the last few months.”

Hours after the crash, Isabelo Rivera, an adjutant general of Puerto Rico’s National Guard, described the island’s air fleet as old and in disrepair. Of the unit’s six C-130-type planes, he said, two were inoperable and the one destroyed Wednesday had been scheduled for retirement.

“The planes that we have in Puerto Rico — it’s not news today that they are the oldest planes on [National Guard] inventory,” Rivera told the Associated Press after the crash.

“This pains us,” he added.

Whatever its exact age, the destroyed C-130 had been used to rescue Americans stranded in the British Virgin Islands after Hurricane Irma hit the Caribbean late last year, the AP reported.

Days later, Hurricane Maria slammed into the 156th Airlift Wing’s home base in Puerto Rico, and the plane subsequently transported supplies from the U.S. mainland to the ruined island.

All nine crew members killed Wednesday had helped with the hurricane recovery effort, the AP wrote, even as the 156th struggled to rebuild itself.

“Our wing was devastated by two back-to-back Category-4 hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico, and we’re still in that process continuing to work with higher-level command to get us through the recovery phases and rebuild the wing,” Col. Raymond Figueroa, wing commander of the 156th, said in a military news release last month.

Now his unit will mourn again.

Chelsea Sinclair, who works at a store near the crash site, told the Island Packet newspaper that the plane went down nose-first and shook the building. Mark Jones, speaking to the Savannah Morning News, said he was in his car when the plane hit the road in front of him.

“It didn’t look like it nose-dived, but it almost looked like it stalled and just went almost flat right there in the middle of the highway,” Jones said. “I’m still shook up and shaking. My stomach is in knots because I know they’re people just like me. I wasn’t that far from it, and I could have just kept going and it would have been me and we wouldn’t be talking right now,” Jones said.

Scott Cohen tweeted what he said was footage of the crash from his business’s surveillance cameras. In it, the plane appears to lose altitude quickly and twirl into the ground.

President Trump, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló acknowledged the crash on Twitter as well.

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Does it bother anyone that President Trump has been caught lying? Does it bother anyone that this is not new? Does it bother anyone that the president has been shown to be a liar?

These questions are again front and center before the country. People will answer them differently, depending on their views about Trump. Some will condemn the behavior. Some will condone it. Many, no doubt, will try to look away, even if that has become more and more difficult. The questions won’t go away. They are part of the fabric of this presidency.

Thanks to Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor and current member of the president’s legal team, Trump has been exposed flat out about the $130,000 in hush money that his attorney Michael Cohen paid to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) to cover up an affair that the president denies having with her.

In a remarkable exchange with Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel on Wednesday night, Giuliani almost casually dropped the bombshell that, of course, the president reimbursed the money Cohen paid to Daniels, despite a long string of comments from the president and Cohen asserting otherwise.

Even Hannity, long a defender of the president in all manner of controversies, was caught by surprise. “They funneled it through a law firm and the president repaid it,” Giuliani explained. “Oh, I didn’t know that. . . . He did?” Hannity replied. The host apparently hadn’t long ago processed the fact that the president’s and Cohen’s earlier statements about the hush money were false. Now they are inoperative.

The circumstances of the transaction — a retainer to Cohen that could be used for whatever — provide the president the ability to claim lack of knowledge. On Thursday morning, Trump blasted out three tweets in defense of himself, describing how common such arrangements are “among celebrities and people of wealth.” Are they common among presidents of the United States?

Cohen had claimed that the money came from his personal finances. “The funds were taken from my home equity line and transferred internally to my LLC account in the same bank,” he said in a statement in March.

[Giuliani disclosures contradict the president]

Trump had claimed that he knew nothing about any of it. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen,” he told reporters in early April on Air Force One, when asked why Cohen had made the payment. Asked whether he knew where the money had come from, he said, “No, I don’t know.” Asked whether he had ever set up a fund from which Cohen could draw money, Trump didn’t respond.

On Wednesday night, Giuliani said there are many instances in which lawyers do things for clients without letting them know, “like I take care of things like this with my clients” because “these are busy people.” On “Fox and Friends” on Thursday morning, Giuliani, still claiming there was no affair between Daniels and Trump, credited Cohen with good lawyering. “Cohen made it go away,” Giuliani said. “He did his job.”

That, apparently, is how things work with celebrities and people of wealth. Time to move on.

Trump isn’t the first president to tell lies. Bill Clinton lied about his relationship with White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky when he wagged his finger and said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

Other presidents have lied about events and policies. So this president has some company. But from serial exaggerations to disregard for the facts (his claim that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in 2016) to obvious falsehoods, deliberate or unconscious, Trump has a pattern and practice that is often breathtaking in its audacity.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported this week that during Trump’s presidency, the number of “false or misleading claims” has now reached 3,000, an average of 6.5 per day.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders decided not to try to decipher or explain or acknowledge the contradictions between the president’s and Cohen’s earlier statements and what Giuliani said Wednesday night and Thursday morning. Citing “ongoing litigation,” she said, “I don’t have anything else to say.” What else is there to say after the truth finally catches up with the lies?

[Trump adds to his legal team, signaling possibly more combative phase]

The Stormy Daniels episode wasn’t the only instance in which Giuliani provided a new account of events. He also offered a new explanation for the president’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey. It was the third attempt to describe a dismissal that ultimately led to the ongoing Russia investigation being turned over to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Recall the sequence of events a year ago when Comey was suddenly fired while on a trip to California. The initial account from the White House was that Trump fired Comey after receiving a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein criticizing Comey for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

It was, of course, Rosenstein who selected Mueller to oversee the inquiry and it is Rosenstein who is now the target of the president and House conservatives, who want him removed.

That cover story crediting the Rosenstein memo for the firing lasted until the president sat down with NBC’s Lester Holt. He told Holt, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’ ”

Giuliani provided yet another version to Fox News, saying Comey was dismissed because he “would not, among other things, say that he [Trump] wasn’t a target” of the Russia investigation. Trump, by his own admission, was irritated that Comey would not publicly clear him. Perhaps Giuliani’s explanation is partly consistent with Trump’s comment to Holt — it was in one form or another “the Russia thing” that cost Comey his job.

Mueller’s team and Trump’s new legal team appear headed for a major collision over the terms of a possible interview with the president, one that could lead to the Supreme Court for adjudication. Trump allies fear what could happen if the president is required to answer questions verbally, given his tortured relationship with the truth, which is why many have said he should not agree to do so.

There are also potential legal ramifications involving the payment to Daniels, now that the facts of the transaction are becoming clearer. Campaign finance and other lawyers will sort through the possibilities.

All of this will play out in the coming weeks or months. In the meantime, the question of the public’s tolerance for the president’s behavior remains in the forefront. After nearly three years in the political arena, Trump has shown his ability to withstand controversies of many kinds. That may continue to be the case. But that doesn’t make the uncomfortable questions about truth and the president any less important.