white house official about his future contacts can constantine. and then at the same time, why did the white house down play their communications with paul manafort. there was some reporting earlier that there was a line of communication. the white house denied it and repeatedly the president has distanced himself from paul manafort as if he were a man who came out on a blip on his radar during the campaign and he never saw him again. everything we saw last night makes clear that s not the case. there were relationships that continued and the question is who knew about them and who lied about them. representative. you were reacting to a lot of what julia had to say. i think that s right. i was trying to deal with the big picture here. the small picture, too, is very important. why is manafort lying. it may also be because he wants a pardon here desperately because it may well be that whatever leniency he s going to get from the prosecutors is never going to match the leniency he wo
how it impeded their plea agreement or their investigation at this point. we will see all of that laid out the same way we did with george papadopoulos. what s kear y is that mueller ks manafort lied. let s not forget manafort was the subject of two fisa orders before he entered the campaign. i m guessing that mueller has quite a lot of information on manafort s activities leading up to the campaign and thereafter. hurts him as a witness if there were to be any prosecution. he is someone who you know has a credibility problem. right? well sure. he is not somebody that s going to be believed. mueller presumably has quite a lot of information from many other cooperating witnesses and possibly things like electronic surveillance like i mentioned. then comes the second possibility. that is that mueller has caught manafort lying, concealing
effort by the administration, rudy giuliani and trump to discredit it before it comes out and when it comes out. we know, for instance, they are putting together their own report. it will be largely historical and probably a bit bias, i would argue. we also know rudy hinted they would fight the release of the report citing executive privilege hoping to basically bottle it up. and mat whitaker s role as acting attorney general probably plays a role on this here. i do have a question for dan ny if he s still around. he is. so if they fight this on report, the release, mueller and manafort will have to go before a judge to outline where they thought on or where they are accusing manafort of having breached his plea agreement. will that report, the secondary report about manafort lying, be made public? in other words, will they be
but telling us manafort s testimony is no good because he s a serial liar. meanwhile, nbc news has obtained a draft court document sent to one of roger stone s associates, which includes an e-mail asserting stone sought documents from wikileaks in 2016 and then he was told by an sort that wikileaks would be releasing information damaging to the clinton campaign, which as you all know, it did. i m joined by barbara mcquade, who is an msnbc contributor and former u.s. attorney. she is here with tonight s panel, jonathan, nbc news political analyst and ap white house reporter. a former clinton campaign adviser and susan del percio, msnbc political analyst and republican strategist. barbara, i do want to get this straight from you, there are a lot of different prongs to the news out today. there s the manafort lying,