post he has not ruled out a pardon for paul manafort, quote, it was never discussed but i wouldn t take it off the table. why would i take it off the table? the president says. he also alleged manafort was political advisor roger stone, and his associate jerome corsi were pressured to lie, quote, you flip and you lie and the prosecutors will tell you 99% of the time they can get people to flip. it is rare that they can t. on the senate floor bill to protect robert mueller s investigation was blocked after democrats and one republican made their case. we ve seen the forced resignation of the attorney general the day after the election. it is clear something has to be done to protect robert mueller s investigation. the president s legal team singled out andrew reisman for pressuring manafort and other witnesses. the former prosecutor said the mueller probe may have overreached but others disagree.
reaction to president trump saying that a manafort pardon is not off the table. well, that s par for the course, i guess, to hold that and dangle it out there. is what the president is kind of doing on this investigation. i just can t for the life of me understand why more of us here in the senate aren t concerned about this investigation. the attorney general is fired, somebody is brought in that is hostile to the mueller probe. i think that we ought to be much more concerned than we are right now. the president i mean, mueller right now is pressuring manafort. he s trying to get him to cooperate, trying to get him to tell the truth in his view. in the midst of that, the president dangles this pardon, which could be interpreted as him signaling to manafort, just hang in there, buddy. you don t have to worry about it, you don t have to cooperate. does this rise to obstruction of justice, in your view? i ll leave that to others,
i m not sure why he said that, he talks on the record about the investigation a lot. and he basically said that this was something that was helpful to them, that allowed them to learn it. and he said it was fine and legal so he was defending it. and i think he thought maybe if he talked about it on the record he could defend it better. i m not sure. but what this did do is it gave them real insights into what was going on and it helped feed the president s anger about the mueller investigation. the president was learning that investigators were pressuring manafort. this is what manafort s lawyers were saying, to tell them what the president knew about the 2016 trump tower meeting, a meeting where the president s son met with russians offering dirt on hillary clinton. and giuliani said that they wanted manafort to incriminate the president. and that is a significant sort of detail to know that the investigators were so hard pressing on manafort to give
what kind of information was shared, as far as you know, by manafort to trump through the intermediaries of their specific lawyers and how did the president s lawyers according to your reporting take that information and weaponize it, my word, not yours? the most significant thing we learned about this was that mueller s investigators, led by andrew weissman, were pressuring manafort, this is according to manafort s lawyers, to tell them what he knew about the 2016 up from tower meeting and what specifically the president knew. did the president know that his son was going to be meeting with russians who are offering dirt on hillary clinton and what did the president know about it afterwards? and giuliani says that they hammered on manafort about this. manafort, who was in solitary confinement, was being brought out for these interviews every few days with weissman.
i have no intention of doing anything. well, let s bring in our lead-off panel on this tuesday night, michael schmidt, pulitzer prize-winning reporters and one of the by-lines on this latest story from the new york times. philip rucker, bureaucrat from the washington post who interviewed the president the other day, and frank faluzzi, investigator for counter-intelligence who am the past has worked for and with robert mueller. robert, i d like to begin with you. what information, if any, was shared by mueller to trump within the mediaries of specific lawyers, and how did he take it and weaponize it, my word not yours? the most specific thing we learned about this is mueller s investigators led by andrew weissman were pressuring manafort this is according to manafort s lawyers to tell