is in the game but he s removed from the game. in other words, he s in the process but he s removed from it. he creates that distance that when stuff goes south, he can go, well, that wasn t my decision. weisselberg made that decision. he was running these operations. he was the one who made the financial determination to do x, y, z, to open something up or shut it down. it is that part of this process that to the first point whether weisselberg goes, yeah, but we know how the communication goes in trump world, right? so i act understanding what it is you want done. and if he comes forward and says, time-out, let me clarify how this communication process worked. yeah, i made the decision but here are the series of conversations i had with trump in which it was either relayed to me directly or indirectly what strategy i could take. if he does that, then all hell
so far which is why paul manafort and his defense team elected to go on trial twice. once in virginia and once in washington, d.c. prosecutors from the special counsel s office had offered to consolidate the two cases so he would go on trial once. his legal team said no. this judge in the d.c. case has previously proclaimed herself in court to be basically bewildered by that decision and here today she once again goes back to it. the judge, quote, now i the judge, quote, now i understand, wasn t my decision to move another trial in front of this. wasn t my decision on push that trial up to accommodate that judge s schedule. and you know, it was your decision to push it further. so you re under extraordinary time pressures that don t happen on a daily basis. but we have a pretrial conference scheduled on september 5th and i need to know what objections have you to the prosecutors exhibits. so what are we going to do? manafort s defense lawyer kevin downing says, i don t know, your hono
so there s another round of fairly vociferous fighting at the end of the hearing over this issue of whether or not the trial will be delayed. manafort s defense lawyers again complain about the pace. about all the work they have to do. quote, as the court is well aware we finished a trial literally a week ago today. we ve been doing our best in the time we ve had since then to obviously pick up the ball. and the prosecutors came back arguing against with basically, no, you shouldn t get a delay. the date has been set for a long time. the prosecutor andrew wise mane tells the court quote, i can say there home run witness who have been told exactly when the trial is. we have witnesses who have medical issues, that have worked around this. we have witnesses from overseas. i mean, the idea that it is now going to move again, it does create a substantial problem for the government. meaning for the prosecution. the judge weighed both sides of that argument.
quite recently. he ll be joining us for his first tv interview since leaving government service tonight so we ll talk about that with him and more. the other important thing going on here is that the president, of course, isn t alone in his crusade to try dismantle or roadblock the russia investigation and all of its component parts by going after key personnel and officials who have connections to different parts of the investigation. this is from an almost lyrical portrait more than 20 years ago. it was written in 1996. it was published in the new york times about the head of a drug gang in the bronx. in the criminal organization that he ran in the bronx. quote, when the history is written of the drug gangs of new york in the 1980s and the mid 1990s, the kind that wrecked a city s nerves, helped create record high murder rates and made gunfire a common sound in
reporting earlier this year when the atlantic magazine and washington post turned up e-mails that indicated add while manafort s was running trump s presidential campaign he was simultaneously offering private briefings on the election and the campaign to this russian oligarch. last spring, the associated press reported that manafort enters into a $10 million contract a year contract with deripaska to promote the interests of vladimir putin s government around the world. well, in 2006, that same justice department official, the one that started as the gang prosecutor, taking apart those drug gangs in the bronx, the guy who had worked his way to become an expert on transnational organized crime, who led the team that brought the prosecution of the head of the russian mafia, that same official, quote, was part of a group of government officials who revoked the visa of oleg deripaska, a russian billionaire and aluminum