part, when you talk about people who are used to spending nearly $1 million in three years on business suits out of a place in cyprus, these guys are not going to do 25 years in jail. that s why bob mueller s going about this the way that he is. he knows these guys are not seasoned criminals. and he knows they re going to roll over on each other. mark my words, it will start becoming a race to the special counsel s office. i also heard someone today refer to mueller as an acupuncturist for the precision with which they have gone about the case so far. your reaction. well, that s the idea, clearly. that was the point, i think, behind the substance in the manafort indictment was to get them to cooperate. and similarly here, they have charges to bring on flynn already, but the registration, the foreign agent s registration is may not be enough to get him to flip. so you bring, potential will i
of course, it is not normal, not appropriate route for an extradition request to come from the white house. it s supposed to come through diplomatic channels in the justice department. so counselor, this comes down to you, someone said on social media today that if there could be anything funny taken out of this, this could be the plot from a cohen brothers movie with general flynn driving around the pocanos looking for the old guy to send out of the country. as a former prosecutor, what alarm bells go off in your head? well, it s not good for flynn no matter how you slice it. if he s talking about taking money to try to orchestrate a return of gulen to turkey through official channels, then you re talking serious bribery offenses. you re not allowed to do that except your salary. if you re trying for him to conduct a legal operation, you re orchestrating a kidnapping that crosses international lines. so either way you look at it, he s talking about committing a very serious crime
and obviously bob mueller is digging into that. julia, assisting the prosecution as often is the case, there is a grand jury sitting in washington, d.c., you ve learned further about their schedule of late, what can you report about that? yes, that s right, brian. so we know that the grand jury that s been impanelled by robert mueller is interviewing witnesses about flynn s lobbying activities through the end of next week. that s important because a lot of people have been waiting for a flynn indictment for some time. since the manafort indictment, we have thought flynn would be the next shoe to drop. we know that mueller is continuing these interviews, which shows us two things. one, that he really wants to drill deep and get as much information on flynn as he possibly can. and it also shows that flynn perhaps could be cooperating. and that s why this timeline has been extended. counselor, i want to hear you out on a piece in time magazine written by the former assistant direc
serious for the white house. even more serious than the manafort case. matthew, let s go a little deeper on that, because this is more than just a news media distinction. flynn does put it closer to the oval office of a sitting president than anyone else. people may have seen splashy headlines about paul manafort and others, but this would put it in a different category. that s right. at the end of the day, as important as paul manafort was in this campaign, he was the campaign chairman. he was helping to lead a political campaign. what we re seeing with flynn with these allegations is possibly using his government office, his position as the national security adviser to basically do deeds on behalf of a foreign government. it s a question of who in the white house knew about this. we know that flynn allegedly misled the vice president. but having this so close to the oval office, and then again, having the president himself ask the fbi director to back away from this investigation
or not michael flynn and his associates met in a december 2016 meeting at the 21 club in new york. that is an upscale restaurant just blocks away from the trump tower where flynn was serving on the presidential transition team. we understand from sources who are familiar with this meeting that they allegedly talked about a $15 million bribe that they would try to give flynn once he was national security adviser if he could see that gulen was removed from the united states. gulen is a turkish president to erdogan living in the pocanos. in order to remove him, that could have been through a kidnapping operation or through extradition. we also know that the fbi had re-upped their investigation, they were asked to re-up the investigation into gulen at the beginning of the trump administration when flynn was national security adviser. this was after they dismissed this investigation under obama.