Coverage of national and international news, including breaking stories. Trump tower meeting between allegedly his son and some russians and some other folks. And it is true that parts of that investigation have blossomed into whole new areas, such as the manafort trial, which has nothing at all to do with the original russia investigation. In fact its one of the bases that manafort asked the judge to throw that case out, that it exceeded the power of the Special Counsel. So its hard to say what exactly Kristin Davis has information about, because the scope of this investigation is so broad. Just to give a little better sense pulling back the curtain from my conversations in my day job working over at the white house, in a series of conversations i had late this week with sources close to the president , they all tell me that the president s frustration specifically as it relates to paul manafort, remember that specific case he attacked as a hoax on twitter earlier this week, is in the
part of this russian misinformation campaign, sowing disinformation, and amplifying these crazy things. even though trump has gone off and used that phrase for his own purposes, meanwhile social media manipulation continues. so just this week we had facebook announce that it was taking down a dozen or more accounts and pages that were part of a covert manipulation campaign and information operation. they re not saying russian, but they re saying they re linked to the russian accounts and the pattern is the same so read between the lines. it s probably still them. and facebook has been under all this tremendous pressure to act in a way that it didn t do in 2016. but what we saw this week was they reacted by taking down everything that was linked to any of these suspect accounts, which included a lot of real content by real people. it shows what a dilemma this is. stuff gets intermingled. so in this case apparently a bad account started an event page