intelligence agencies collected among suspected russian operatives discussing their efforts to work with manafort, to coordinate information that could hurt hillary clinton s bid for the white house according to u.s. officials. in flynn s case, the focus is now on his lobbying work for the turkish government which he failed to initially disclose by law. while both men deny any wrongdoing, the approach to the manafort and flynn probes may offer a template for how focus of investigations on financial crimes could help gain leverage and cooperation in the investigation. the president s attorney, jay sekulow, told cnn in a statement that the president s outside legal team has not received any requests for documentation or information about this. any inquiries from the special counsel that goes beyond the mandate specified in the appointment, we would object to. alisyn? thank you very much.
though the president himself said that would cross a red line, do you think that red line he didn t specify what happens if the red line is crossed. do you think he gets a feeling to fire robert mueller? i certainly would recommend that he not discharge mr. mueller. one wonders who would actually do that. i don t think the acting attorney general it would have to be mr. rosenstein because the attorney general has recused himself in these matters would have to do it. and i don t imagine he would do it. i don t think that s good policy. i m sure that the president s advisers are recommending that he not do that. are you sure? because kellyanne conway was on cnn last night saying she likened this to a fishing expedition. i think the facts should go where they go. i m not sure we should go back to the 1980s, but certainly we should cover the 2016 election. also today, there are leaked documents, transcripts from
that have nothing to do with russia, but involve trump associates are being referred to the special counsel to encourage subjects of the investigation to cooperate. trump s team seeking to limit mueller s investigation. the president s point is he doesn t want the special counsel to move beyond the scope and outside of its mix, and the president has been very clear, as have his accountants and team that he has no financial dealings with russia. so i think we ve been extremely clear on that. reporter: cnn has learned new details about how mueller is running his special counsel team. more than three dozen attorneys, fbi agents and support staff, experts in investigating fraud and financial crimes broken into groups separated on collusion and obstruction of justice. there s focus on key targets like paul manafort, trump s former campaign manager and general michael flynn, his fired national security adviser. cnn has learned that investigators became more suspicious of manafort when th
democratic system of government. there were major developments we learned about in the last 4 hours. one is that a grand jury is issuing subpoenas in this case for data, documents and witness testimony in the russia investigation. cnn also learning that the investigation is delving into the president s finances, looking into the trump organization. kellyanne conway suggesting overnight this could be considered a fishing expedition. jay sekulow, his private attorney, saying this could be outside the purview, outside of the scope of this investigation. what s your take on that? mr. mueller needs to follow all leads. he has an obligation to follow the information. you can t led it sit on the table. that s his responsibility, to make sure all the questions are answer answered. we don t want to prejudge it. we know there are troubling
obviously need the help this morning. we begin with several developments in the russia investigation. cnn learned special counsel robert mueller is issuing grand jury subpoenas, his target? everyone at that june 2016 meeting at trump tower between donald trump s son, don junior, top campaign aides and a russian lawyer. and cnn covering what the president referred to as its red line. they believe the money trail could be a fertile ground for evidence. the president, though, slugging the whole thing off as a total fabrication, concocting by democrats who are still bitter about the election loss. let s begin our coverage with cnn justice correspondent evan perez live in washington who broke so many details of this story. what are you learning? special counsel robert mueller is following the money.