to be, a short-term assignment. caveat here is that only robert mueller knows how long this investigation will go. hallie. yeah, i think that is totally safe so say. thank you very much. i want to bring in joyce vance, msnbc contributor and a former u.s. attorney. thanks for being here today. let me start with the news that s developing that ken dilanian teed up for us. t the wall street journal, the associated press reporting that it was vladimir putin who called who mike flynn didn t tell the president about right away, the president got very frustrated about that. potentially interesting, certainly. what do you make of that? what s the significance there to you? we re just learning about this inclusion in comey s memo now, but presumably mueller s team has had comey s memos really for months now and this would be part of the focus of their investigation. mueller s core charge is to understand the relationship, if any, between the campaign and
this case, not the antics but the heart of it, what do you see? you know, we all see the tip of the iceberg. we know that mueller knows a lot that we don t know. i hesitate to put any faith in things that nunberg has said about his interaction with special counsel but it doesn t seem unlikely nunberg notwithstanding that mueller would be looking at roger stone and his alleged contact with wikileaks, with julian assange, because that really is part of his core charge between whether there was collusion between the campaign on one hand and russia on the other. so with nunberg s indication that mueller is focused there, we re seeing this piece of the investigation that s dropped off a bit perhaps come back in focus
as much as from, you know, sons, sons-in-law another associates. no meetings with russia and turns out there were meetings with russia. that has cast a shadow. the fact they were changing stories early on really fueled the idea that there was some sort of collusion but as you take a step back and look at it, there has really been nothing established there. what they ve gotten is that you had paul manafort accused of not paying all his taxes, of not filing registrations for the lobbying he was doing on parts of others. you have other charges indirectly related for michael flynn. the core charge of collusion with russia, we haven t seen the there there yet and that has been trump s consistent defense there. the sort of peacemaking things that mueller will be fair, i think that s smart and i agree with him and i think that s an accurate statement about mueller. rick: do you think his critics were expecting more by now? oh yeah. there was just a blog on this
paul cal lesson, laura coats, done steen and jeff tu been. michael, let s put this into perspective for us. what does this mean for the mueller investigation? well, what it means is that he s indicted somebody. we don t know whether it s to the core charge of collusion or whether it s to the collateral charge of money laundering or tax evasion. we can surmise from pamela s reporting if it was andrew wise man who was at the courthouse who was returning the indictment, wise man has been on the manafort case and that it therefore might beological to conclude that it is manafort. manafort has been under scrutiny for both collusion and also for his real estate dealings and for tax and money laundering investigatio investigations. so you could have an investigation of manafort separate from the collusion but which implicates his dealings with the monies that he earned in ukraine and elsewhere over seas. jeff, is what s your take on this from a legal standpoint?