trial, but talks broke down. the journal says tonight that paul manafort s defense team held talks with prosecutors from the special counsel s office to try and resolve a second set of charges, the ones he faces next month, in washington, d.c. manafort s lawyers reportedly tried to talk this out before he was convicted last week on eight felony counts in virginia while the jury was deliberating. talks stalled, according to the wall street journal. the plea talks on the second set of charges stalled over issues raised by special counsel robert mueller, one of the people said. it isn t clear what those issues were, and the proposed term of the plea deal couldn t immediately be determined. the effort to make a deal apparently didn t work out, but what does it mean for the mueller investigation that trump campaign chairman, newly
they are similar, too, in some ways but also they depart from the kinds of charges that he faced in virginia. why would they have thought that they had leverage with the special counsel s office at that point to get prosecutors to drop those charges? what could they have been offering? they don t really have leverage unless they re willing to offer full and complete and truthful cooperation. and that doesn t seem likely to me. so there really isn t a lot of leverage. and i m not surprised that defense counsel would try this. i m also not surprised that prosecutors would balk. look, would prosecutors like to have the finality of the conviction? absolutely. but they go into the second trial in d.c. with a very strong hand, rachel. obviously the prosecutors in this case want conviction of paul manafort. presumably they would also like any information they could get from paul manafort about the ongoing investigations. the judge himself at the virginia trial said in open court to some c
will it take for there to be a crack in that support to signal to these members of congress that it is time to take action. the speculation at this point is that maybe it would take ultimately just a change in control of the u.s. house. heidi, quickly when it comes to manafort and the deal that the washington post is reporting on, if you look at the timeline of that happening during the time when the jurors were, you know, going back and forth, debating on the verdict, also the same time that we re hearing from guilliani and the president about possible pardon here. so how interesting you have, you know, just the juxtaposition of these two topics when it comes to a plea deal and a pardon. reporter: there s been so much speculation, frances, about why manafort didn t crack earlier, why are we only seeing the softening now when he faced so many potential charges in the virginia trial. but what we saw was that there were ten cases that he was not found guilty of, ten points that cou
it does look like there is a little bit of chunk in the armor so to speak. i don t want to read too much into this. it is relatively common you went down to the wire and went through a very grueling trial and have another grueling trial in the next couple of weeks, you want to ex-explore for possible options to get this off the table and is there some kind of deal we can reach to handle this together and get him in front of the judge in virginia to get sentenced and get it all over with together. you mentioned and we said in the story they didn t seem to reach a deal. they are moving forward to go ahead with this washington trial and a possibility of a third trial. we will find out if the prosecutors will retry those deadlocked counts. it does suggest there is some softening of his position and
pled to everything on the table. we don t know at this point what was specifically on the table. stay with me. i want to bring in our panel and maia wiley, first, your reaction and anything else you want to know with aruna on the line with us about what she found. first, for all the reasons you already said, ari, amazing how you lose friends when those friends are facing prison time. not surprising manafort was softening. we don t yet know whether there will be continuing discussions. we shouldn t assume just because they broke down at this point they won t continue. one thing i want to know, do we have any sense there are continuing conversations. just because prosecutors are getting ready to continue with a trial that s been booked doesn t mean there aren t continuing negotiations going on. the other thing we don t know, maybe manafort didn t offer