from manafort s business to make it look like he had more money than he had. they were inventing fake invoices to make it look like they had more money come income and doctoring documents. the bookkeeper from manafort s company was turning them down for some stuff they were trying to get the bookkeeper to do and started faking these documents themselves. the details of that mad scramble for cash, that was the basis for all the new bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracy felony charges that manafort and gates got hit with yesterday and that apparently pushed gates to plead guilty and manafort is facing the charges alone because gates decided to save himself and flip for most of the charges against him being dropped. still, though, in terms of the overall plot here, not just thinking about the legal liability but how does this fit into what happened to our country, we don t know why paul manafort was in such a mad scramble for cash in late 2015
the worst thing for rick gates right now would be to agree to cooperate and then be found to be less than fully forthcoming. so that means that gates is going to have to tell bob mueller everything and hold nothing back and he could have a lot to offer as you were pointing out at the very time that the russians are making over tours to the trump campaign and don junior in the meeting in trump tower, you have manafort reaching out in the opposite direction to deripaska to hope to facilitate more money and you have a guilty plea in connection with essentially gates and manafort obtaining money from pro russian interest in ukraine, millions of dollars worth of it, laundering that money and lying about it. so there is enormous liability facing them both and gates in a position to talk about it a great deal. congressman, in the past week we ve just seen a remarkable amount of activity from the special counsel s office.
it was basically a love letter saying give me a pardon. i m not doing what rick gates did, i m standing by you, but he s obviously facing enormous liability and now an insider cooperating and i think the detail of those indictments show him as well as the country just what these guys were involved with. congressman adam schiff, the top democrat joining us from california tonight. thank you very much. much appreciate you being here. thank you. we got much more ahead on this friday night. i feel like we haven t even started. stay with us.
phase one manafort and gates were raking in tens of millions of dollars working for pro-putin interests overseas, special counsel s office says they illegally hid the money offshore and disguised origins and evaded taxes on the money. those are the charges associated with what mueller s office calls phase one. what was new in yesterday s indictment about manafort and gates was phase two of their scheme. which you can think of as the donald trump for president time. the second part of their scheme according to mueller s indictment started in 2015 and ran until, quote, at least january 2017, which was of course the inauguration. in yesterday s indictment, that second part of the scheme, 2015 to 2017, that s a time when manafort and gates have stopped raking in millions of dollars from their work for pro-putin interests overseas and instead,
what s hanging over rick gates right now is multiple years starting right away and he s already signed for it. so this cooperation deal that he signed today, these two charges he plead guilty to, this is put together as a very serious package for trump s deputy campaign manager. and therefore put as huge spotlight on what gates could possibly give mueller for his on going investigation and here is the part of it that i think is really important and i will just say so much of this is happening so fast that i m not sure this really important part of it has sunk in yet. but after marinating in these legal filings and reporting today, in my opinion, i think this is the most important piece. in yesterday s indictment of manafort and gates, special counsel s office spelled out in intense detail a two-part scheme but manafort and gates. part one we already knew about from the first time they got indicted back in october. part one was the older stuff