but later is better than never. clearly that s the calculation here. from both point of views. he was up against it. put yourself in paul manafort s situation, 69-year-old guy, looking down the barrel of eight, ten, 12 years. the d.c. trial is coming up. hugely expensive and going to expose how he earned that money, the inner workings, the things the judge tried to keep out of the virginia trial. he doesn t want that. and he s got a third trial on the hung counts he s now admitted to from virginia. so all that s super expensive. paul, there s some talk about you mentioned this, that the forfeiture, which by the way is more than the total of the budget of the mueller probe spent so far if not mistaken, sort of plundering his way through and feeding the army off what they capture. there s also the fact that some people think this is pardon proof that it was designed to be pardon proof, not just the forfeiture. what do you think of that? i think the president will probably sti
significant. but we honestly don t know and we won t know until we see the fruits of this, whatever they may be. one of the things about the mueller investigation is that they give away very little. and what we know is that manafort is obliged to cooperate. what we don t know is what the what his capacity for cooperation is. and there s you know, you can make a case that this could be the keys to the kingdom. you can also make a case that this is a guy who, you know, is didn t may not know that much and who chiefly what he s giving mueller is saving him the time and expense of going through another trial. and so i you know, my gut is that there s something very significant happened today but i don t think we know that for sure. it s got to be significant. and the reason social security significant is you don t just to be clear, you think
nonsense. it s like alice in wonderland. it s a fig leaf on a fig leaf. awful this was orchestrated by paul manafort. they were cooperating in this. this is a part of what we ask him as well. he need the services of rick gates. of course someone was a cooperator against him in the virginia trial. we have this section about how they conspired to talk about what they called the obama jews and tried to use them to try to infiltrate and lobo behalf of the cause. the first time, they belie the entire defense and he had nothing do with it was a min yon to rick gates. he was getting tens of millions of pro russian ukrainians. that is potentially significant as well. they never told anybody they
but, glenn, what if it suspect? the difference between paul manafort and michael cohen, michael cohen s whole professional existence, his universe, the reason we know who he is and the reason federal prosecutors know who he is is because he was donald trump s fixer. what if all that surrounds manafort right now is about the dirty dealings of manafort for decades, the decades prior to him joining the campaign? yeah, now make no mistake about it. paul manafort will not be an appealing witness. it s going to take a whole lot of detergent to clean him up before they put him on the stand at a criminal trial. but we have taken some of the worst of the worst people over the years as prosecutors and put them on the stand, the henry hil hills of the world. it s because they re so dirty for such a long period of time that they have inside information about others with whom they were doing their dirt. we heard a clip from paul manafort recently bragging about how, you know, i ve known mr.
trump. other people in the trump campaign that paul manafort worked with and calling it a cooperation agreement suggests that it s the latter, that manafort is actually going to work with the mueller team and tell what he knows about what happened during the trump campaign, stephanie. what do we know specifically about andrew weissman, the prosecutor who said this, the cooperation? weissman is one of the pit bulls on the mueller team. he s one of the senior prosecutors. he s famous for handling the case against enron, a corporation that was engaged in criminality. he took down their ceo. he was not, actually, part of the manafort trial team, but he is one of the leading figures on robert mueller s special counsel team. but it is noteworthy. if you go back to the time of enron, everyone who followed the news and knew the story assumed that enron and the enron executives would absolutely have it handed to them, but then when they actually went to trial, it didn t turn out that way.