jennifer rubin and also go to a broader point. jennifer is a washington post columnist and a conservative and a critic of donald trump. i don t want to wax too poetic here, but i wonder if we could begin by noting, jennifer, this is a president who has taken extraordinary measures identified by his own lawyers, some of them as potentially impeachable to try to shut down and undermine the doj and prosecutors and rule of law. i wonder if having gone through a lot of the details tonight, it s fitting to turn to you and look at what is working. career prosecutors doing their job, career prosecutors identifying individual one for directing this, because that s what the facts show. apparently they re not afraid of what that means or that donald trump will get in there. they don t have the same buffers that the mueller prosecution team does. and that i should note is the southern district of new york where donald trump famously invited then u.s. attorney preet
and rudy giuliani is pressing this further with an interview with nbc news citing that mueller treating manafort like a terrorist. and they report that they briefed giuliani and other member of the trump legal team about mueller s focus. giuliani says this joint defense agreement is normal but democrats say you couple that with the president holding open possibility of a pardon for manafort and they say it could be obstruction of justice. manafort is clearly putting all of his eggs in the trump pardon basket. he s gambling. it s a big gamble that trump will pardon him. he is playing both sides and he is completely untrustworthy. the president telling the new york post in an oval office interview about a manafort pardon, it was never discussed but i wouldn t take it off the table. why would i take it off the table? he added the flipping stuff is terrible. you anyone and you lie. and you get, the prosecutors tell you 99% of time they can get people to flip.
arabia. yes. harris: in the last few hours senator lindsey graham has come out strong on the issue. he won t even vote from the spending bill until he hears from the c.i.a. director gina haspel. why wasn t she there? first, i respect lindsey graham s position. he is right. the c.i.a. director was not there. i wish she had been there. but i think i know why she wasn t there. i think that she is worried about something that she would tell us leaking. harris: was she invited? i don t know that. i think she was but i don t know that for a fact. harris: i haven t read that she was. but okay. initially i was perturbed. i said, where is the c.i.a. director? i was then told, and i wish this wasn t the case but it s true. in a classified briefing her team was worried that some senator was going to go out and leak classified information. harris: i tell you that leaking problem, if that is the case, somebody has to deal with that.
know whether he lied or not. how is she going to figure that out? the government will put f.b.i. agents on the stand and they will say here is what we asked him and here is what he told us and what why we believe it s a lie. when you look at what they say you will see the road map of where the mueller prosecution team is finally headed. harris: what is the end game now for the prosecution? it appears that the end game is to find whatever evidence this is not necessarily the end game. we have been doing this for almost two years. whatever evidence they can find about the president s involvement in illegal activity. the easiest case for them to prove is conspiracy. because it s just an agreement. it doesn t actually have to have been consummated. we believe that from the documents that jerome corsi released just yesterday which show what the guilty plea was that they wanted him to enter which he eventually declined. harris: all right. real quickly, back to manafort for a second.
more seriously go on susan. well, i was just going to say they ve actually said that these are going to be evidence that the mueller prosecution team is looking at, and, you know, that we think of it as insight into his mind but it s also, you know, potentially evidence in a criminal obstruction proceeding. susan, i want to ask you about this again the president told reuters tonight he would consider lifting sanctions on moskow if russia cooperates with the u.s. on ukraine, on syria. is there any scenario where you would consider lifting sanctions on russia is a good idea? well, don, thank you so much for bringing that up because i did think that was a very interesting argument. once again you have this head snapping confusion in what exactly is the trump administration s policy. on the one hand they re bragging about the tough series of sanctions and the fact that the administration has enacted a