gossip. we ve got to start asking ourselves right now, we know don junior had access to information, true or otherwise, that there was quote/unquote dirt on hillary clinton. we know paul manafort had that in his custody. we know that other senior officials, perhaps an outsider such as roger stone were playing around in that space. this is a man whose defining characteristic is talking with people all the time about all kinds of different things. i guess the question now and it will ultimately have to be answered is did any one of these individuals ever talk to the president about this? and ashley, picking up on that, this is also a man for whom nothing is sacred. so there wouldn t have been that gut instinct that a normal politician would have had when offered help from russia. you can almost yeah, sure, why not? for a campaign that didn t have any red lines, that went after a gold star family, that didn t have any instinct when he was asked about putin and putin,
let s yet get your reaction of the day. this fits into many other meetings we ve seen with george papadopoulos. that s the most important outcome as far as our investigation. an individual, who traveled as a member of the campaign overseas a number of times to meet with russians to get dirt on hillary. boy, that sounds like what don junior was doing, the e-mail exchange, e-mails to michael cohen and sounds a lot like cambridge an lalytico communicating with julian a avaunavaun assan assange. mr. papadopoulos lied three times to the fbi. why does that matter? the documents to be turned over. i m not a lawyer. the rest of you are. that wasn t clear.
it may be incriminating. they want to keep everything quiet. fair enough. i would add to that, in the description of that e-mail and the document, it does have paul manafort saying that but then he also goes on to say in the e-mail, have a low-level person send the signal so the russians don t take it the wrong way. i started watching the americans but isn t that how it goes? you send some low level out to do something so that people knew what paul manafort looked like. that doesn t really suggest that you re not guilty of wanting to get dirt on the russians. i don t think it does at all. you were willing to sacrifice a lower level aide. through all of this, it s been reported multiple times that paul manafort himself was picked up on u.s. intercepts talking to russian intelligence officials or cut-outs for russian intelligence officials during the campaign. these are brand-new contacts we didn t know about today. still contacts reported that we don t know the substance o
those today. he could have released them next week or two weeks from now. he did it today and 90 minutes after when we were all digesting the gates and manafort charges and when people from the white house were already starting to say and trump allies, this isn t about the campaign. this isn t about collusion. and then, boom, the papadopoulos documents landed. and here was collusion. here was collusion and bob mueller saying you don t know what i know. and i know now from folks i ve talked to that everyone is now sort of reracking their own tapes about their knowledge and their conversations about that done junior meeting. that seems to be emerging, ken, as a central incident around which people may have perjured themselves. also now we know that the campaign was already on notice that the russians were peddling dirt. when don junior it s even the same word, dirt. that word comes up now twice in the context of the papadopoulos conversations and the trump
keeping their client out of jail as opposed to making the president s political point. maybe that s some signaling back and forth. to eli s point, it s an important one. you got to imagine that donald trump s lawyers are dreading the thought of trump issuing any more public comments. they may even be wondering whether trump s tweet, his trumpant all-caps tweet claiming there was no collusion was the reason this was unsealed today. and i think that for any lawyer, this has got to be a nightmare scenario, right? let me ask you because you and i talk about russia all the time. what was your personal thought when you saw the papadopoulos he has plead guilty, he s cooperating. we now have someone else who can speak to the campaign s bungled, i guess, but at least an effort to coordinate with the russians. for something where we ve had so few tangible proof points there it was in black and white. what did you think when you read it? that s a good way of expressing it.