russians, you re going to pay for what you did, you better cut it out, we re not going to let you get away with this? we have no indication, even up to the last meeting that trump had that this message was ever sent to the russians by anyone connected to trump or trump himself. yeah, and meanwhile, david, we do know that at least from reporting, jared kushner did say to his father-in-law, the president, that, yeah, he ought to fire jim comey, which doesn t put him in a very good light. well, that s also strange because kushner had this reputation based onion what a t, a voice of restraint. other people in the administration have other kinds of legal problems. the secretary of health and human services has got some questions about his stock trading, for example. there are a lot of this is the administration that generally includes a lot of people that have been close to the law and they might be mad at comey for a host of other
that was. we have some push back from folks close to trump saying no, it was much less frequent. but clearly there is an open channel of communication here. as david suggested, it s not just between manafort or folks involved in this who are being looked at and trump, in fact we know trump texted mike flynn saying, stay strong. but it s also trump s team and the fbi with the report from cnn that right after trump asked comey to stand down on some of this stuff that priebus called the fbi, called both comey and his deputy director and asked them if they could come out and say something to refute reports about communication between trump s team and the russians during the campaign. so, all this is going to feed into the sort of handling of the investigation as opposed to the actual meat of the interactions between trump s team and russia. and, david, do we have any reporting, ken, you would know
official role, you could see why the justice department would be interested. but, look, there s a lot here we don t know. the reporting is all over the map. this began with him being a significant person of interest, which is not really a legal term, and now being somebody who is under scrutiny, or just may have information that might be of interest to investigators. i think we ought to be a little cautious at this point. the only thing we can say for certainty is the mere fact that he is within the orbit of this investigation is something that is likely to drive his father-in-law crazy. here s the thing, david. we know donald trump is incredibly reliant on jared kushner. he wants him in all the meetings. he wants him to go on all the trips, meet with foreign leaders. he was meeting with officials from mexico. he s supposed to be negotiating middle east peace. the fact he s in all the meetings as a proxy a lot of the times for his father, means you would be the person you d talk to b
point. i mean, there really is no way to isolate that dossier in the hillary clinton camp. what do you make of this idea that paul manafort was, a, advising the trump campaign or at least trying to, and still talking to them after he himself was under scrutiny? well, i think you see from everyone in trump s circles over the last circumstances months, effort to deflect and obstruct. this falls probably more in the category of deflect as ken reporting, kudos for the story, coming up with this alternative narrative. it s all about alternative narratives. i think as you get into the obstruction side, conversations that manafort has with reince priebus or anything else, i mean ken and politico reported what they know about these conversations, but the question i have just as a reader of the story, as another reporter, what other conversations were there? what else happened in these conversations? these are all things now that the special counsel is going to have to look at.
politico who broke the story and david corn washington bureau chief political analyst. ken, this is a pretty block buster story. among the many interesting details is this one. that manafort, according to your story, discussed with other trump allies the possibility of launching a counter veiling investigation bayy ukrainian officials to damage hillary clinton s campaign. a way to distract attention from the parallel fbi congressional russia probe. the idea that manafort was advising this incoming administration to launch essentially a phony investigation, i mean, what? yeah, i mean, we actually did some reporting on this and there was some evidence to suggest that certain officials in the ukrainian government in the embassy here as well as kiev were trying to push out this damaging information about manafort, and manafort and his