flynn can tell them about the other players in this ongoing legal drama about russia. brian, just generally, if you do flip, does it work if you tell on people who work for you, your assistant or who do you have to tell on? generally the rule of thumb from anyone that has seen the godfather trilogy, you have to trade up, frankie five angels didn t give them anybody below him. he gave them michael. so in this situation it s critical for mike flynn to be able to advance the story beyond that which bob mueller already knows and that ought to be the scary part for everybody who works in the white house. they don t know what bob mueller knows. and to that point, joyce, the theory of the case is either that pike flynn outside of, you know, outsmarted bob mueller and got a sweet deal and isn t giving much up or bob mueller outsmarted nooik mike flynn and is getting a lot in the deal. what s your bet. you know, plea agreements are a lot like business deals.
some of these seem more serious than others. like conspiracy against the united states. but we you have seen people go to jail for avoiding taxes for much lower smaller amounts. absolutely. paul manafort s big decision is what he s going to please guilty to. here s the thing. mueller knows his charge is collusion and obstruction of justice. and if this is all there is, even though it s a big deal because we re talking about the president s campaign adviser, i think we ll look at the investigation as not living up to its promise. so again, i think he s only going to bring charges against higher ups if there s evidence, if he thinks he can win a case before a jury. but i don t think this is where it s going to end up. you heard stan say a few moments ago this puts manafort in a tough position. if manafort really doesn t know anything about collusion if he was just making money off selling his access, which it s quite likely. he likes to make money. if he has nothing to trade up,
and of course, we know that the fisa court wouldn t just rely on the dossier or the trip, so there must be more out there. and these investigations will get at that. all right, sam stein. sure. when jeremy talks about these investigations, let s start with the house. we heard from schiff talking in a very hopeful tone about what might half. devin nunes has been placed aside mike conaway from texas in. is that enough of a trade-up to make the ranking members sound optimistic? apparently. apparently what happened a couple weeks ago was this whole weird saga of devin nunes going to the white house to get documents which he then showed to the white house which was not just a distraction, it really undercut the ability of the house committee to investigate this matter to the point that nunes basically had to step aside. now we re in a position where the committee seems to be
we ve been trying to figure out exactly what s happened over the past seven days and what it means. what does it mean to you? as we near the end of the first 100 days, which in its totality cannot be judged as successful by any measure, but they are ending better than they began. and they re ending better than they began because inside the white house serious adults are beginning to assert their can we talk about the trade-ups here? national security council, can you think of a more dramatic trade-up from michael flynn to swr general mcmaster in all of your years covering politics? no. it s extraordinary. someone who is accomplished, econoclastic dereliction of duties a must read about the misjudgments in the vietnam war. general mattis, mike pompeo, cia directorraduate of wt point
wall and mass deportations. are we to take these things seriously, something donald trump put out during the campaign and sort of stepped back a little bit. are we actually going forward with those? those are questions for general kelly. you look what s so fascinating, we re going to talk about secretary of state for a second. you look where donald trump started with john bolton and rudy giuliani. you look at homeland security where he started with a guy out of kansas who would have been a radical selection. it s remarkable where he started and ended up with general kelly. talk about a series of trade ups. we ll see whether john mccain and lindsey graham and others believe rex tillerson is a trade up. confirmation hearings for secretary of state, rex tillerson goes before the senate foreign relations committee tomorrow. usa today reports while tillerson was a top executive, subsidiary of exxonmobil did business with sudan, syria,