Trump’s lawyer calls Manafort raid ‘gross abuse’ while Trump was on TV praising it

One of President Donald Trump's lawyers chose a peculiar remark when denouncing an FBI raid on former campaign chair Paul Manafort's house.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump lawyer John Dowd called the July raid on Manafort's house a "gross abuse" of judicial power that is "extremely invasive," countering a statement the president himself made in a press conference published the same time where he appeared to praise the raid.

Dowd went on to say that raids of that nature only happen in Russia.

"These methods are normally found and employed in Russia not America,” Dowd wrote in an email to the Journal.

“This extraordinary invasive tool was employed for its shock value to try to intimidate Mr. Manafort and bring him to his needs [sic],” Dowd, Trump's latest lawyer, wrote in the email. According to him, the FBI "seized privileged and confidential materials prepared for Mr. Manafort by his counsel to aid him in his cooperation with the congressional committees."

He also claimed that special counsel Robert Mueller, not the FBI, should have gone through his grand jury to obtain the materials.

"These failures by Special Counsel to exhaust less intrusive methods is a fatal flaw in the warrant process and would call for a Motion to Suppress the fruits of the search," Dowd wrote.

The statement came on the same day as emerging reports claiming Manafort alerted investigators to Donald Trump, Jr.'s infamous summer 2016 meeting with the former campaign chair, Trump's adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and an envoy of Russians who claimed to have dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Earlier in the afternoon, Mike Warren of the Weekly Standard tweeted a statement from Manafort's counsel claiming he is "in the process of retaining" counsel for Mueller's probe.