President Donald Trump's attorney Rudy Giuliani said Friday that Trump could issue pardons to his associates implicated in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, according to a report in the New York Daily News.
"When the whole thing is over, things might get cleaned up with some presidential pardons," Giuliani said.
A spokesperson for Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment from CNBC, though Giuliani appeared to backpedal in an interview with NBC News later Friday.
"President Trump is not going to pardon anyone as far as I know, and it would be against everybody's advice, including his own. Does he have the power to do it? Of course he does," Giuliani said. "I only said sometimes that happens. It doesn't mean he will do it."
Earlier in the day, Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was sent to jail to await trial on a host of charges related to his overseas consulting business. Manafort was first indicted in October in connection with Mueller's Russia inquiry. It was the most recent indictment, for witness tampering, that got him locked up.
"I don't understand the justification for putting him in jail," Giuliani told the Daily News Friday. "You put a guy in jail if he's trying to kill witnesses, not just talking to witnesses."
Manafort had been under home confinement since his October arrest. U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson revoked Manafort's $10 million bail Friday after Mueller brought new witness-tampering charges against him.
Jackson noted that Manafort didn't present a danger to any person but said in her ruling that the witness-tampering charges represented "harm to the administration of justice."
Manafort's spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Giuliani's Friday comments are the latest in a string of bold proclamations on behalf of his client, the president. On Thursday, Giuliani told Fox's Sean Hannity that Mueller should be suspended, and argued that one of Mueller's former investigators, Peter Strzok, should be in jail "by the end of next week."
Giuliani's comments came on the heels of a report from the Department of Justice that suggested Strzok may have had a political bias against Trump while he worked on Mueller's probe. The report said that there was no evidence Strzok acted on that bias. Strzok was removed from the probe last summer.
Asked about the DOJ report by "Fox and Friends" on Friday, Trump said that he thought the Mueller probe had been "totally discredited."