work in, washington, have the political clout to say, back off, get out of the way? i think with the indictment you hit the nail on the head. an indictment is bearing fruit. it tells a story. it s saying to the world that, i m moving along and i m doing stuff, i m not just twiddling my thumbs. on one level, i don t think bob mueller cares what anybody thinks. i think if the evidence led to his mother, she would be indicted. but i think it does buy him some time. i think that s very important. i understand the argument against the jurisdiction of the special counsel, the jurisdictional argument. i think it s going to be a tough sell. and the other interesting thing, though, that s related to that is take a look at the original manafort/gates indictment. that obviously is not specifically covered in the charter. that means that mueller had to go to rod rosenstein and get rod
if they make a threat, they re going to follow through on that threat. i think that all of us should be looking out for when the gates plea agreement comes out. each one of these agreements that mueller has done had three aspects. they ve had the criminal information or the indictment, they ve had the plea agreement itself, and then they have the statement of the offense. you can t plead guilty unless you stand in front of a judge and say, this is what i did. and the statement of the offense is really the key document. because take mike flynn, for example, michael flynn. his statement of the offense didn t indicate that he had any information about criminal collusion. that s very important. that says, at least with respect to flynn, there is no collusion case. same thing with the papadopoulos statement of the offense. so i would look at that. that will be a clue. statement of the offense, there is also a provision in the plea agreement, all these plea agreements, that is you re
most folks feel the end game here for this special counsel investigation is to get paul manafort to flip and get him to provide information. because there are indications to two investigators that he has a lot of information and that his cooperation would be key and central in this investigation. shimon, stay with us if you can. let s bring solomon wisenberg into the conversation. he interviewed bill clinton in the grand jury indictment case. take us inside mueller s calculations. you were in plea negotiations, they weren t working well. you slap a number of new charges against rick gates and then you get a plea deal. take us inside the prosecutor s mindset and what that tells you about what comes next. well, one thing we know about bob mueller s team, they re very aggressive, and when they set a deadline, they re going to go by that deadline.
i think he s grown frustrated at that idea. it s not helpful to him politically. he talked to my colleague, maggie haberman to try to dispel that point of view. what do do we think of this effort, what looks like an effort to discredit papadopoulos? it does seem this may be the more troubling development for the president that papadopoulos is cooperating and what we ve learn sod far does not look good in that he s saying in that meeting with trump he said do you want to have a meeting with the russians and the president didn t shoot it down. that kind of flies right in the face of the president s long-time convention that he knew of no contacts between his campaign and the russians. yeah. it s obviously a concern, and it was obviously a surprise. in fact, i think there was some relief in some ways in the white house when they first saw manafort and gates indictment. everybody knew this was coming. even my 12-year-old said it was
these phones, multiple aliases, three passports. it s very unusual, very suspicious and why him confined. so yesterday you ve got the announcement on manafort which i think was not surprising to people. then gates as well, which is probably a little more surprising. then the papadopoulos plea. what do you make of this sort of strategy, jennifer, here for how mueller is proceeding? it was very interesting, of course as you said you get the manafort/gates indictment, which while not surprising that manafort was being charged, i thought the substance of it, the heft of it was surprising. what do you mean by the heft? it s a very strong indictment, it carries a ton of jail time. it s just more in terms of charges than i think people were expecting, obviously because they actually picked up an investigation that had been going on for some time, and there was a lot of evidence collected, otherwise there s no way that mueller starting in may