pete williams, take it away, first, the significance and the facts embedded in this these allegations against pal manafort and rick gates as well as rick papadopoulos. yeah. manafort and gates are getting most of the attention because they are familiar names. but the papadopoulos case is potentially more important for bob mueller s investigation as to whether anyone in the u.s. was in cahoots with the russians to try to inflew enthe campaign. the reason is one thing that you mentioned, we know that he is cooperating. he was actually arrested in late july. and court documents say he has repeatedly been questioned by the government since then and has been providing answers. that s the first hint he is cooperating. the second one is that the court dock pts say that the government in return for his plea is recommending a sentence of zero to six months for the single charge of lying to the fbi.
how is it going to play? how is it playing out there? well, what i would suggest to republicans, because it s not just how the white house is going to respond, it s also how republicans throughout the country, congressional republicans, speaker paul ryan, will react to all of this, just step back and ask, how would they be reacting if, in fact, it was president hillary clinton and these stories were coming out? are they really going to hold their guy to a completely different standard? i mean, i know we live in an era where there are shifting standards and finger pointing and the what-about-ism but i m trying to imagine how congressional republicans would be reacting, what they would be saying if we had this kind of evidence about the clinton administration, the lying to the fbi. i hope there s a role here for the congressional republicans to hold this administration accountable. i m not optimistic but it should be something they should consider because there s a lot more to come.
under chiermairman nunez. i think the biggest news is around george papadopoulos. that stip laying of facts shows he was as a senior foreign adviser someone the president called an excellent guy. travelin traveling abroad during the campaign and taking meetings with russians about dirt on hillary clinton. sounds a lot like the june 9 e-mail, sounds like the felix sader e-mail saying that we can engineer this. shows one he was willing to ply to the fbi when first confronted and came around once they confronted him with additional efd. that makes me wonder, these witnesses, bringing into congress, how truthful are are they he with us if they are willing to lie under oath to fbi agent. what about recent steps taken by chairman nunez, by trey gowdy, to go after hillary clinton on the very day that we felt they were getting closer and muler is getting closer to
clients. do you have any conflicts you think because of the people you represented in past? no, i don t represent them any more. and of those classified briefings wouldn t be shared with you? i have no expectation of that being shared with me. let s go to donald trump today and his tweets. kristin? right. well president trump distancing himself, not surprisingly, andrea, from paul manafort saying sorry this was years ago. had nothing to do with my campaign. and then reiterating what we have heard from him, andrea, that there was no collusion. this from his son, donald trump jr. on papadopoulos and charges you are talking about there, saying papadopoulos was an unpaid policy campaign adviser who stupidly lied to the fbi. he wanted trum top meet putin. trump team said no. that i think will be the strategy here. merging out of the white house, andrea. we have seen this in past. sean spicer trying to make the
understood who he was dealing with but this has the fingerprints of russian intelligence all over it. if you read through the complaint and read new york times reporting this morning, we ve got papadopoulos talking to an unnamed campaign supervisor in the trump campaign saying the russians have dirt on hillary clinton and the unnamed campaign supervisor says back great work. the other russian fingerprint we see on this on the manafort and gates side is that as just said, they worked in the campaign in ukrainian former ukrainian presidentiana voef itch. why is that important? i believe he that is their first primer on how russian intelligence can manipulate an election and i believe it is possible that russian intel told them how to set up the bank accounts. cypre cyprus is well documented as an area for russian intelligence. the fbi has known that for years and they have their first observation of hey the russian