i tell you the person who s been at the forefront of doing reporting on this case is jason leopold at buzzfeed. he s been following the money. the case involved was this republican operative who claimed to have ties to michael flynn trying to pay hackers to gather hillary clinton s e-mails to authenticate them. leopold at the front, trying to figure out was he paying people, was he serving as a front for the campaign to try to go after hillary clinton s e-mails they were gathering from people linked to russia. that s a larger piece that we really aren t digging in. when i first saw that, that s what i first suspected. we don t know at this point because of the redactions. anyone in michael flynn s orbit to make engaged in any type of criminal activity with him regardless of what that was should can very worried right now. this goes far beyond the special counsel. we re told flynn provided documents and communications as
president trump not only maybe directed michael flynn to violate the logan act but possibly, i don t want to get over my skis too much but what about the written answers to robert mueller and the possibility that not only are the written statements being contradicted by what will michael flynn and michael cohen have said but bill evidence that they might have presented. corroborating evidence. right. yeah. so no jail time. what do you read into that? if you were the president or anyone in his orbit and his allies, what would you take. a couple things here, right? first of all, as ryan said, i think that this is a thank you. but i also think it is a message. you know, just the other day donald trump tweeted to roger stone basically, sending a message look, if you don t talk, if you stick with me. i m going to pardon. you i m going to pardon you. i think this is robert mueller saying there s another game in town. there s someone else who can be
and upstanding thing as he has throughout his life. the second sort of inference there is there are many in the government that mueller has been dealing with who have not been similarly admirable. and you know, it s possible to me by the way, that that whole other section that we don t know about may concern the obstruction conduct that flynn at least knew about and in fact it was his investigation that will trump tried to make to ask comey to back off of. so that would be a kind of classic bad government action in contrast to flynn s you know, acting upright and owning up to his mistake and criminal conduct. so we mentioned the acting attorney general sally yates remember going over and saying flynn is compromised telling the white house that. after trump asked comey to let flynn go. trump is a man who has shown
about a big area that will mueller senior pursuing that we don t that has not yet really come home in a way to make us aware of it. so what s not in there of course, is in some ways the most significant but generally, you see flynn a guy who broke it early and really gave a lot as sara just detailed. listen if i was at the white house right now, don t you think you d be going oh, my gosh, am i part of that redacted part. what do you think the criminal investigation could be about, josh? don, when i first saw that piece and i ll preface this by saying i m not about to talk about anything i learned when i was in the fbi, this is post my journalism days. the larger issue we haven t been focusing on in this case and this goes back to this issue of peter smith, who was this republican operative who was closely linked to michael flynn.
huge parts of this that are redacted because it will includes, quote, sensitive information about ongoing investigations. it tells you that there s still very active probes not only when it comes to the special council s investigation but it refers to a criminal investigation and everything afterwards is redacted. it said that flynn cooperated with other justice department offices. that tells you that he wasn t just involved necessarily in the special counsel s probe that he was probably helping out on other investigations that are no longer under the special counsel s purview. these are redacted because they don t want to give the targets a heads-up something is coming on don t want the public to know what they re still working on and there are more shoes to drop. sara, mueller is also saying flynn s early conversation helped him get others to cooperate. it s very significant.