down anytime soon, or at least i hope not. i want my panel not to weigh in on the shutdown but to weigh in on eric trump. because in the last hour, despite the fact that eric trump every day is invited to come on the show with me, he says because we don t talk about the economy. a au contraire, eric, we talk about it every day. my father is the least racist person i ve met in my entire life, it s total nonsense. eric trump, while green is the color of money, green is also what you say when someone is naive or simple. green is the color of envy. familiarize with both. what do you think of those comments? it s country first, right? yeah, yeah. this is what a son says about his father. so, okay, let s leave it at that and move on from there. because the fact of the matter is, that may be true for you,
wait government deals with that is they go to somebody and say hey, you didn t register, go back and register. and then like manafort and like flynn both did, you retroactively register and that kind of cleans that up. yes. describing all of the money that came out of ukraine lobbying as essentially, you know, black ledger money as money that would be illegal because of its origins feels like they re pushing it there. yes, well, they wanted to build an air tight case on this specific element without getting into other subjects. and that s what they ve done. if you look at the voluminous documents and lists of wire transfers that were made, it s very, you know, this would be very difficult if the underlying premise and they ve got lawyers, you know, like michael dreben backing this up. the underlying premise is this is prosecutable. the fara violation. and does it make sense to you, the government s case here depends on manafort and gates
on those e-mails in the papadopoulos documents there aren t names of other trump campaign officials. they re described as campaign supervisor and other sort of generic terms like that. we can figure out who some fo those people are because of reporting on other pieces of e-mails. is there a reason the names would be left out of the documents? typically the justice department s policy is if somebody hasn t been implicated in documents in court either through evidentiary filings or through a guilty plea it is the policy not to name those people in those kinds even if you can suss out who they are? even if you can suss it out. sometimes it is more obvious in other cases in different cases. that s the reason for it. if you read the motion to seal the plea of papadopoulos which took place the plea agreement which took place on october 5th, that motion talks about the reason they were the documents were sealed for the last three weeks. that s because the fbi was trying to intervi
quote, my national chairman who at that point would have been paul manafort and maybe one other foreign policy advisor. papadopoulos suggested in this e-mail to his russian contact that the meetings should involve you, his russian contact, also members of the russian ministry of foreign affairs and it should also involve members of president putin s office. this meeting he was trying to set up last summer according to papadopoulos, quote, has been approved from our side. whether or not george papadopoulos was lying to the russians about that proposed meeting being approved from our side, from the trump campaign side. the other documents cited in the unsealed filings in his case today aren t just papadopoulos describing things. the other stuff that turned up in the statement of offense today, in his guilty plea, those documents are other members of the trump campaign okaying and encouraging his work with the russians. are those other people from the trump campaign potentially in trouble
and is that why none of their names appear in the documents about papadopoulos today, even though we can kind of figure out who they all are? then there s the manafort and gates indictment. unlike the george papadopoulos documents, what we ve gotten in terms of this indictment from gates and manafort, this is not a case where both sides, both prosecution and defense, attest to the veracity of these facts. so you have to see the manafort/gates indictment with more skepticism. george papadopoulos agreed in front of a judge with everything the government put in those filings when he pled guilty. he attested it was all true. in contrast, manafort and gates today pled not guilty. so what we read today in their indictment is really just the government s side of the case. you have to keep that in mind, right? but keeping that in mind, what the government alleges in that indictment at least sheds a lot of light on how the government is approaching the trump campaign and specifically the chairm