star witness. he spent today detailing, sometimes tediously, how he and manafort committed these financial crimes. gates testified how manafort directed him to lie about his income and fake company records. now, manafort s defense team is in the middle of cross exam eng gates, trying to convince jurors that gates who is cooperating with prosecutors to reduce prison time can t be trusted. we heard president trump s name come up, the campaign came up because the jury saw evidence that manafort tried to leverage his connections on the trump transition, aka, his friendship with rick gates to curry favor with one of his lepders. joining us nbc news tis correspondent pete williams and mimi rocca from the southern district of new york and msnbc legal analyst. i think she gets to stay dry by contract. anyway, people, let me start
coup leaders, these guys are with me and not with you. it is a coup by criminals. said yeltsin. because of the liberalization that gorbachev had brought about, the communist party and the military could no longer move against the russian people. and that was earth shaking. tonight moscow s skyline was ablaze with celebration. relief as the symbols of conflict were removed. gorbachev comes back to moscow, but the soviet institutions, the totalitarian system of government that had led this country for 70 years, collapsed virtually overnight. and that was an amazing thing to see. when gorbachev saw evidence that his vision of a free lennonist state wasn t going to come to pass, rather than cracking down so he could stay in the kremlin, he let it happen. that takes a political courage that is so unusual in world history.
in the southern district, there was a magistrate, a judge to look into is this. so it wasn t just mueller on his own deciding to do this tbut i m talking about the political public which is ultimately what all these things come down to, right? you re sort of i think up to this point mueller s been very tight on this stuff. this is a dramatic move. that s not speculation. we all believe this is dramatic. this is serious. if you don t find something, if you go to these lengths or find something that s not that big of a deal, and, you know, it s been raised to this level, i believe the public s credibility starts to turn against mueller because they re saying what are you doing? this has been going on for over a year, this has nothing to do with russian collusion, this has nothing to do with russians getting on facebook, you re going after the president s personal lawyer and not finding anything. i want to ask, though, he didn t refer and say you are to do x, y, and z with this.
we all believe this is dramatic. this is serious. if you don t find something, if you go to these lengths or find something that s not that big of a deal, and, you know, it s been raised to this level, i believe the public s credibility starts to turn against mueller because they re saying what are you doing? this has been going on for over a year, this has nothing to do with russian collusion, this has nothing to do with russians getting on facebook, you re going after the president s personal lawyer and not finding anything. i want to ask, though, he didn t refer and say you are to do x, y, and z with this. he just found something. and is referring it. this is why i think we have to hit pause. if it is the case that mueller saw evidence of criminal of potential criminal activity and referred it to someone else, i had hundreds of things referred to me when i was attorney general, some cases we filed, some we didn t. so it really does, you really are passing the baton to th
trump-russia inquiry when the only ones who excluded with the russians was your girlfriend hillary and the cfius committee with the safe our uranium to russia and a payback to hillary. there were investigations and you were removed when the new fbi director saw evidence of your activities. while you threaten jim comey and threatened if you go down, everyone else will, jim comey writes a conciliatory tweet and says you served with distinction. he s clearly hoping you won t testify against him. this is a classic crime family takedown. who is going to rat on whom. if this were the movie the