letter it s very likely they will indict him unless he decides to cooperate. go ahead. yeah. i have a very similar answer. what i would say is that this indicates both to me. it certainly indicates, as john said, that mueller is intending to indict manafort, but the fact that he is telegraphing that to manafort in an aggressive way is something that is fairly commonly done in my experience when you are trying to flip someone. and so really one thing that i took from that new york times story is that mueller is trying very aggressively to flip manafort. okay. let s talk i want to ask you more about other new york times reporting, specifically the comment by ty cobb, the president s attorney specifically brought in to a deal with the questions about russia. he said that the white house counsel done mcgahn has a couple documents locked in a safe. what kind of information would
investigators wire-tapped paul manafort under a secret court order before and after the election. cnn s evan perez, shim own and pamela brown broke the story of why the government was listening to someone so close to the president. pamela joins me now. good evening to you. what are you learning? well, don, sources tell our team that the fbi got permgts from the secret surveillance court to monitor paul manafort both before and after the election as you mentioned and this is an extraordinary step for the fbi to do surveillance of a high-ranking campaign official. fb, manafort is now at the center of the russia meddling probe. and we re told that there are intercepted communications that did raise concerns among investigators about whether manafort was encouraging russians to help the campaign, some sources told us though others cautioned that intelligence was not conclusive.
robert mueller has been provided all these communications so gts part of the ongoing investigation into paul manafort. so what do you mean by encouraging? well, to be clear and transparent, there s a lot we don t know about exactly what was said, but we are told that the fbi has communications between suspected operatives relaying what they claimed were discussions with manafort as well as communications vofg manafort himself. now, none of this has amounted to what people would consider a smoking gun in this investigation. there is still more being done to determine whether there is a criminal violation here. we did not get a comment from paul manafort s spokesman, but manafort has previously denied that he ever knowingly communicated with russian intelligence operatives during the election. and he s also denied helping russia undermine u.s. interests, don. so pamela, they ve monitored him two separate times s corrects? right. so we have learned that the secret order began actu
they said federal agents bearing a search warrant picked the lock on his front door and raided his virginia home. they took binders stuffed with documents and copied his computer files looking for evidence that mr. manafort, president trump s former campaign chairman set up secret offshore bank accounts. they even photographed the expensive suits in his closet. special counsel mueller then followed the house search with a warning. his prosecutors told mr. manafort they planned to indict him said two people close to the investigation. is he likely going to indict manafort or is he trying to flip him to get him to divulge information about others? are you asking me? sure. this is for john. oh, sorry. federal prosecutors do not use that term lightly. it sounds like this was we don t know if this was the investigators who were saying they were likely to indict or the prosecutors themselves who were saying that. if so he probably received a target letter. that might be what they r
orders, surveillance that continued until this year when manafort was still talking to the president. they also raided a storage facility of his. what are the implications of all of this? well, it certainly is a very aggressive investigation, much more so than is the norm for special prosecutors, certainly historically. they must see something because to get a warrant, which they ve done on three occasions with manafort, they have to show probable cause that there is not only is he a foreign agent, but there s likely an he is pga auj or similar crime. so this was a pretty high standard. so that s why i say, you know, they have some evidence and they re being very aggressive in going after it and they re not hiding that fact at all. just a short while ago the new york times reported some of the aggressive tactics special counsel robert mueller is using in his investigation. here is a part of what they said about the raid on manafort s home in july.