expected on cross-examinatiocro. seem from the jury verdict and from what one juror said they discountered what rick said. re-evaluate whether you need to use him for the d.c. case also charged without him. that s the big thing for the prosecutors. if i could touch on the pardon thing first thing. sure. game it out a little. right? right now paul manafort has been charged with crimes unrelated to the campaign. okay? so it is not clear at all that he has information relevant to donald trump, that he is a, that he did anything wrong within the campaign. okay? back to the point before. i don t think president trump will pardon him before the election. sdamp rouse. imagine the scenario after the election before robert mueller releases evidence he has on collusion, which may or may not
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
rick gates might have kept have emails, documentation, other evidence that leads to other people who may know more. sarah was reporting that rick gates wasn t in the inner circle. but as mueller is able to get more information about what might have been happening in the inner circle, some of that may begin to talk as well. this is how a conspiracy unfolds. we are watching it in 24/7 cable news time which is some random case of a random lawyer, a court filing at 10:00 p.m. at night with a little reference to a potential discussion between manafort and a russian intelligence agency or that they were that they were friendly, then leading to, you know, sort of disclosures about what gates may be saying. this is just going to keep happening. it s at the oval office. we no he that now. and we are heading towards as i ve been saying the unknown. is it a pardon or is it a firing? but the idea that if my mind
counsel s prosecutors, they made it clear, we don t need you to flip on manafort, we don t need your cooperation in this case, but what we need your cooperation for is our broader mission, which is connecting russian collusion with members of the trump campaign. when you look back at the campaign, rick gates wasn t necessarily particularly close to president trump. he wasn t necessarily in all of these top meetings, but he was, of course, close to paul manafort who was the campaign chairman at the time. and sources are telling me that rick gates made it his business to get to know what was going on in trump tower. and he was there at some critical moments. remember the summer of 2016. this is when there was this trump tower meeting between paul manafort and a number of other folks on the campaign as well as a number of russian operatives. we know this is something special counsel robert mueller is interested in and this could be the type of meeting rick gates has information about. in
him, he had great latitude to handle these matters. michael was the fixer. it could be anything. there were a ton of matters that took place that michael fixed, and donald trump wasn t involved in every single matter. reporter: former federal prosecutor who watched and tweeted about the interview with cnn s erin burnett said schwartz s admission supports the idea that the deal was void. you cannot bind another person to a contract without their informed consent. it is unethical for a lawyer to enter into a contract on their client s behalf without their informed consent. reporter: he said schwartz s statements are hurting cohen. i question what this attorney was doing because he essentially admitted that his client committed major ethical violations and hurt his client s position in litigation. reporter: for his part, schwartz says he s not surprised that california judge ruled against the motion to question the president and his lawyer under oath.