my sources told me today the cooperation has been ongoing for at least a month. so my sense is that probably mid, late summer, could have been early summer. but about two or three months or so. josh, one last question for you. the way this fits into my understanding of what s going on with the mueller inquiry is paul manafort isn t just sort of at the center of the bull s-eye, it feels like he s his own gigantic target at this point. they really seem to be treating him differently from other people who are associated with this case. the fbi raid, subpoenaing one of his lawyers, now this news about potentially bringing in state level law enforcement as well. do you have any insight into that, any sense about whether or not that perception is accurate? well, we certainly have not seen those sorts of ratcheting up like michael flynn or others in the case. the trump tower meeting, with supposedly on hillary clinton,
trump campaign, that pressure was presumably alleviated by his hope or expectation that president trump would pardon him and render him not touchable by the mueller investigation in terms of federal crimes. that alleviation of pressure doesn t apply to the states. a federal pardon doesn t get you out of state prosecution. if there is a potential state level prosecution, then the flip strategy got all its leverage back, no matter what the president does. joining us is the reporter who broke the story tonight for politico, josh dowsey. thank you for joining us. thanks for having me, rachel. let me ask if i understand the gist of what you ve written. if they are working together, obviously it raises the question of whether or not manafort may not be able to rely on a presidential pardon to get out of prosecution here. but it also means that there s
they often work together on cases, particularly in new york. schneiderman has worked with the former fdny prosecutor on a number of cases. we re not aware of previous precedent for special counsel bob mueller consulting with local and state authorities. now, that s not to say there isn t one, but we just don t know about it. this is the purported place that we ve seen, and others have seen, where the special counsel is doing that. josh, do you know, were you able to uncover how long this teamwork has been happening? how long these two teams have been working on this together? and do we know which side initiated this? we don t know which side initiated it. in our reporting today, it happened over the summer. we know there were subpoenas issued by attorney general schneiderman in this case, this summer. and we also know the special counsel was impaneled this summer.