felony criminal charges against 17 people but even just that activity of his that we can see in public, i would say that makes this a pretty good contender for busy week when it comes to the special counsel s investigation. just today alone has been head snapping in terms of how much happened all at once, just since yesterday. just rick gates has been charged with 23 new felonies on top of the eight he was already facing. he then had his entire legal team replaced. then he got a new lawyer. then he had all 31 felony charges pending against him dropped. then he pled guilty to two new, brand-new felony charges and then he signed on to a sweeping and sort of intimidating cooperation agreement with the government in which among other things he pledges to go undercover for them if they ask him to. can rick gates go undercover for anybody anymore? now that he s this famous for what he and paul fan fomanafort
rick gates referred alex van der zwaan to the same guy meeting with manafort to bring him the messages from deripaska. one of the things he lied about is communication with rick gates. rick gates in september 2016 sent van der zwann documents with an encrypted app and he put him in touch with konstantin kilimnik. rick gates was connected to the mad and illegal scramble for cash right before manafort and gates joined the trump campaign. he was part of the initial deals that incurred that debt from deripaska. he was in communication with kilimnik who was managing communications between manafort and deripaska during the trump campaign while they were the top two officials running it.
that looks like a loan or at least it looks like he expected to get that money back from paul manafort and rick gates and we can tell that because he tried really hard to get it back. in 2014, this terrifying russian oligarch sued. they were supposed to be investing in something together but they run off with millions of dollars of his money and in august 2015, he moved the lawsuit from the cayman islands to the u.s., to virginia. he was really going after manafort and gates for millions of dollars that he says they stole from him and they needed to pay back. again, august 2015, they depose paul manafort and rick gates and that case as deripaska is after them. he s not allowed to come to the
amount of activity from the special counsel s office. i probably got the math wrong and it was a little hard to add it all up but by my best count i think we ve seen 89 new felony charges brought against 17 people in the course of a week and now of course, we got the deputy campaign chair pleading guilty. through all of these legal proceedings, the filings and indictments and charges we ve seen over the past week or so, aside from the question of the legal jeopardy any of those folks may be facing, big picture, do you feel like the special counsel s investigation has now told us more than we knew before about the central question, about the russian attack, about whether they had help? do we now understand more from the filings than we did before about the main plot line? oh, absolutely and i think that was really part of bob mueller s intention. if you look in particular the indictment, vis-a-vis the russians, he told in more dethal
the transition he was a senior official and then he was the number two official in the trump inaugural committee. he was frequently seen at the white house protrump outside group and long standings and committee. the national republican committee. people talk about him as manafort s deputy and a long-standing business relationship and proceeds the trump campaign. in terms on his role for the investigators you might have seen what and who he might have been exposed to in the time of a trump as a presidential candidate. rick gates is potentially witness to a lot more than manafort ever saw. he was just there for a lot longer for a lot of extra parts of this, the trump presidential