mueller s investigation expanding and these new questions about flynn, you couple that with the fact that this tax bill looks like it actually raises taxes on a fair amount of middle class families. that s a lot of issues for the white house to be coming back to. and this is not an environment that s friendly to something as complex and politically difficult as tax reform. our thanks to the members of our lead-off panel for leading off our coverage on a friday night. julia ainsley, great work again, thank you very much. matthew newsbomb, thank you. and announcing they no longer supporting the candidacy of roy moore in alabama. we have the latest fallout for the gop. and later we go live to vietnam where perhaps the most controversial item on the president s agenda prior to wheels up and heading home, the 11th hour just getting started on a friday night. check this out, bro. what s that, broheim? i switched to geico and got more. more savings on car insurance?
world? in some ways it is convenient that they are overseas while this news drops, but sarah sanders will have to confront this when they get back. it is hard to overstate how serious this is. obviously, the manafort indictment was serious for this white house, but that was someone who left the campaign in august. mike flynn is someone who was with the campaign through the end, prominent on the transition and served in this white house over the warnings of people like president obama who told president trump not to hire him. and you have to remember, it was michael flynn who donald trump was defending to james comey and said, hey, can t we find a way to let this go? he went on later to fire james comey, which led to bob mueller getting here in the first place. this flynn case is very, very serious for the white house. even more serious than the manafort case. matthew, let s go a little deeper on that, because this is more than just a news media distinction. flynn does put it closer
administration has a hard time driving one message. we have seen that this week when tax reform and the asia trip were supposed to be the big thing. obviously, roy moore made short work of that. between this controversy down in alabama and the white house having to answer for that and mueller s investigation expanding and these new questions about flynn, you couple that with the fact that this tax bill looks like it actually raises taxes on a fair amount of middle class families. that s a lot of issues for the white house to be coming back to. and this is not an environment that s friendly to something as complex and politically difficult as tax reform. our thanks to the members of our lead-off panel for leading off our coverage on a friday night. julia ainsley, great work again, thank you very much. matthew newsbomb, thank you. and announcing they no longer supporting the candidacy of roy moore in alabama. we have the latest fallout for the gop. and later we go live to vietnam w
that was not so. let s bring in our starting panel on a friday night show, national political reporter julia ainsley, one of the authors of the flynn report we quoted. more on that in a moment. politico white house reporter matthew newsbomb, and here in new york, jennifer rogers, former attorney for the southern district of new york. julia, you get to go first, because of the panelists you made the news today. tell us this story as best you can for a lay audience, including how in the name it includes the pocanos and pennsylvania? that s a good question and i ll break that down for you as simply as i can. basically, we know robert mueller is looking into whether or not michael flynn and his associates met in a december 2016 meeting at the 21 club in new york. that is an upscale restaurant just blocks away from the trump tower where flynn was serving on the presidential transition
media today that if there could be anything funny taken out of this, this could be the plot from a cohen brothers movie with general flynn driving around the pocanos looking for the old guy to send out of the country. as a former prosecutor, what alarm bells go off in your head? well, it s not good for flynn to matter how you slice it. if he s talking about taking money to try to orchestrate a return of gulen to turkey through official channels, then you re talking serious bribery offenses. you re not allowed to do that except your salary. if you re trying for him to conduct a legal operation, you re orchestrating a kidnapping that crosses international lines. so either way you look at it, he s talking about committing a very serious crime if these allegations are proven to be true. matthew, how does this continue to haunt the administration that after all continues, even though the traveling white house right now is on the other side of the