counsel's prosecutors, they made it clear, we don't need you to flip on manafort, we don't need your cooperation in this case, but what we need your cooperation for is our broader mission, which is connecting russian collusion with members of the trump campaign. when you look back at the campaign, rick gates wasn't necessarily particularly close to president trump. he wasn't necessarily in all of these top meetings, but he was, of course, close to paul manafort who was the campaign chairman at the time. and sources are telling me that rick gates made it his business to get to know what was going on in trump tower. and he was there at some critical moments. remember the summer of 2016. this is when there was this trump tower meeting between paul manafort and a number of other folks on the campaign as well as a number of russian operatives. we know this is something special counsel robert mueller is interested in and this could be the type of meeting rick gates has information about. in addition to what sources have told us about rick gates and his meeting with the special prosecutors, we also got some new filings from robert mueller in a separate case.