to do with russian collusion. he s all but promised. look at his words and the verbiage used. pretty much dangled this in front of him. look what he said about cohen. looking for a good lawyer, don t call michael cohen, but when we get to paul manafort, this poor guy. such a victim. look how horribly they re treating him. i disagree a little. that he s a stand-up guy. exactly. this chapter of the trump presidency is clearly directed by martin scorsese, obviously. i disagree a little, because this is not a president who necessarily follows the advice of his counsel. right? he s demonstrated that a number of times. when you look at the defense, the trials they put on, didn t make much of a case there. kind of sat back. you saw manafort during the trial give rick gates, former partner, the stink eye the entire time. i m waiting on a pardon. i would put money on it. i ll buy you a drink back in d.c. if it doesn t happen. and what did we learn from the first trial, gentlemen, lookin
what did prosecutors learn? you ve written about, talked about how rick gates wasn t that effective of a witness for prosecutors to put forward. bearing that in mind, how does their strategy change looking ahead to the september 17th trial? re-evaluate rick gates a little built. he proved to be a worse witness than they expected. essential? told from the get-go, a documents case. how essential was it? how did they make the case themselves he was a couple things they really did sort of need rick gates to explain, but remember, they charged manafort for all of these crimes without rick gates cooperating. at some point they had a case without rick gates. and you know, it s easy to monday morning quarterback it at this point and i haven t been in that position, yes, a great documents case, but if i can get the right-hand man to narrate through the documents, much better. it wasn t clear to me he was narrating through the documents. he proved to be worse than they