someone let s go to the third trump defense. okay, this is candidly my favorite one. which is all these people, many of them who had very senior rolls in the campaign, they didn t matter. michael flynn. the guy who introduced donald trump in afrn rally at the the end of his campaign. and the guy who was the national security adviser, he was only there for 25 days. he called george papadopoulos. rick gates, manafort s deputy. and then, of course, michael cohen. a tiny fraction of cohen s business was donald trump. let s go to explanation 4.0. donald trump attorney, this is what is collusion actually mean.
his disclosure forms time and again and leave information out? michael flynn was not honest to the fbi. that manafort was not honest in his dealings. that george pop papadopoulos. does that make you think there s something here? all i ll say about the financial disclosure forms having gone through many clearances and background investigations that if you have a lot of financial activity and a lot of transactions, it s a very complex thing to do. the idea of amending them is certainly not unusual. as for the issues of registering as a foreign agent, i think there s only been five or six prosecutions of that in the last 40-some years. that s a pretty rare occurrence. again, i m not certainly not any prosecutorial expert, but having been through investigations these things dig deep and they try to spin a lot of stuff out of thin air.
page or george papadopoulos, anyone saying they raised a few red flags? martha, i don t know carter page or george papadopoulos. carter page was recommended to the campaign by a well-known new york individual involved in national party politics for 40 years. so, you know, it was at the recommendation of a trusted source. do we have time with five people on the campaign to go back and do a deep vetting, a background check? of course not, right? did those two individuals have any role in the campaign that was decision-making. absolutely not. what about paul manafort? that also appears to be a trigger in early spring. we re hearing about how this all started. i have a lot of question whether it was chicken or egg that started this, and i think that s what we have to look closely at. what about paul manafort, did anyone say, related to the government or otherwise, hmm, you might want to take a closer
confidential source were trying to protect donald trump at the time. right. because you re not looking at criminal activity, your goal is to find out what this other country is doing, you know, you may do this under the radar, and i think they would want to do this under the radar, when it comes to a political campaign, because if they did it overtly, if fbi agents stormed over to carter page or george pop papadopoulos. that would create questions, why is he talking to these people. i don t think that was the case at that time. this was in an early stage of the investigation. i think they were trying to keep it on the down low to kind of avoid creating a cloud of suspicion around the campaign. to be fair, let s look at the other side. you ve seen the president s accusations, is it possible that
so now we re talking early spring. what it links up with is the formation, david, of the foreign policy team. we all remember asking questions of your campaign, who s on the foreign policy team? who are the big foreign policy advisors for this team? i asked the president that in new hampshire, who s going to be your advisors. march 21, five people on the list, that include carter page, george pop papadopoulos. i didn t come in until later in the campaign. corey, you were there, right? corey, you answer the question. were you concerned about carter