communication that sparked concerns that manafort had encouraged the russians to help with the campaign. two of three sources on that caution that evidence isn t conclusive. what s your read there? well, look, anytime that you re getting informs from a single intercept it s hard to say that that s conclusive evidence. all you can say is that two people said something. so we heard pam earlier say that some of the communications in question are between manafort himself and other people. obviously that s going to be more indicative. but sm of the post potentially significant things might be what other people said about their communications with manafort. we always want investigators to go slowly, to not sort of get ahead of the evidence, and so i really think that that is an indication of the current investigative team is being careful here. they don t want to jump to conclusions. they re saying that there might be something here. what do you make of this not conclusive, laura? well
right. so it does appear as though obviously there are connections here. there are two separate investigations. one is a previous investigation related to mr. manafort s contacts and work on behalf of the ukrainian government. that warrant was concluded for lack of evidence after a period of time. then there s some gap and then the warrant was restarted in relation to investigation between the trump campaign and contacts with russian officials. so it does sound like there are two investigations, but obviously paul manafort s connections to either russian officials or ukrainian officials sympathetic to russian interests are sort of our connective tie here. laura, there s also new york times reporting that federal investigators picked manafort s locks on an early morning raid. then followed the house search with a warrant. his prosecutors told mr. manafort they planned to indict him said two people close to the investigation. what do you make of that? well, it s likely that the peo
to go through different rabbit holes with the cobb sent of his authority. but the issue here more specifically is whether or not what they re pursuing in terms of manafort is leading concluding whether there s a criminal probe that is justice department about the russia collusion investigation and to that we don t have the answer. what we do have is further evidence that manafort is somebody who is a key piece of the puzzle and he has a lot of different pressures on him right now, including a possible indictment that could lead to him cooperating with the special counsel mueller and his team, which will iner to the benefit of the justice department, but not the president of the united states if he s involved. we have a lot to talk about, every one. so stay with me. when we come back, more bad news for the president. two trump lawyers spilling the beans about the russia investigation at a popular d.c. stake house, overheard by a reporter for the new york times. talk about loose li
and what does it all mean for the mueller investigation? we are digging deep tonight. also, the new york times reporting tonight that prosecutors told manafort they planned to indict him. so it s hard to imagine a worst time for two trump lawyers to be overheard in a popular d.c. stake house talking about the russia investigation and documents in a safe. overheard by a surprised new york times reporter. aren t lawyers supposed to keep you out of trouble? plus hurricane maria getting stronger. the storm a category 5 of winds of 160 miles an hour making landfall in dominica tonight and taking aim at puerto rico. we re going to have the latest on maria s path. as we keep an eye on that huge storm barreling through the kreern i want to get right to cnn s exclusive reports. sources saying u.s.
conversations between the president and paul manafort even earlier this year in the same time frame that the fbi was listening to manafort s phones. so it s certainly possible that those conversations were collected, were swept up. so was the president right that he was wire-tapped? well, that certainly raises the question. the justice department has publicly denied the president s own lines were wire-tapped. as you ll recall he tweeted out months ago that president obama had his wires tamd. the justice department has come out and said that s not true. but what is possible, don, is that he was picked up on the manafort surveillance and we should note that manafort does have a residence in trump tower. but it is not clear if the fbi did surveillance on him there, don. great reporting. thank you very much, pamela brown. i appreciate that. i want to bring in now cnn legal analyst laura coats, former presidential candidate rick santorum and national security and legal analyst susan h