look, i frankly think, going back to your earlier point, that, number one, the special counsel the only thing that would be surprising is if mueller and his team didn t expect paul manafort to do what he did, namely lie. i think they fully expected him to lie. i wouldn t be surprised if he said things in the course of his dealings with the president s attorneys that have put them potentially in a very awkward position. so i think they expected him to do what he did because, as you said, he s done it repeatedly. mm-hmm. and i think that, you know, this could be a serious problem on the russian front. i also think that paul manafort is driven here in part by his fear of the russians he crossed up. interesting. okay. i want you guys to stick with me because we have some new reporting we need to talk about,
witness tampering to try to get out of his own prosecution for foreign lobbying crimes. so that was for him. your point is the new thing going on is not necessarily to duck his own crimes, because he was going to get leniency for mueller. so what s it for? yeah. now he puts himself at great risk for exactly what happened which is he s likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. right. natasha? i think what you said is really important. it s hard to distinguish between manafort s general recklessness and whether there was a strategy here. i think it might be a combination of both. manafort had proven himself to be a reckless figure. he went to trial against all odds. he wrote an op-ed in violation of a court gag order and, of course, he was engaged in witness tampering which is what put him in jail. so for his whole life, i think it s shown from the way he s built his career, he s thought he is above the law. he basically thought he could
the rnc platform. roger stone did not ever give him advance intel about wikileaks, and trump also telling mueller he was not told about his son s secret meeting at trump tower with russians offering dirt on hillary clinton. trump reportedly saying he was answering to the best of of his recollection. i m joined by gene rossy. let me start with the basics. why would people on the trump side leak this? well, here s my view. the attorney for paul manafort is basically an insider trader. and the trump people are using this information to possibly coordinate trump s answers to the questions with what they know paul manafort is saying. if there s a consistency in what they say, even though they may not be truthful, that only helps
cooperate with bob mueller. the new reporting here is that manafort was trying to basically be an apparent double agent and that explains the news you may have heard earlier this week when bob mueller suddenly canceled the plea agreement with manafort. and it gives context to this other story tonight. donald trump telling the new york post that pardoning paul manafort is not off the table. those words are farther than donald trump has gone off that topic so far and it would further tie donald trump back to a convicted felon at the center of the collusion probe who stands accused of obstructing that probe and meeting with julian assange if he actually gave him the pardon. then there s this, donald trump s lawyer rudy giuliani making waves by bragging about this newly exposed ongoing secret alliance with manafort, saying it delivered valuable insight as to where it was headed. so that is a lot.
paul? as a prosecutor, will you look at that as linked to what s going on with manafort? or paul manafort is so reckless and allegedly criminal it s hard to draw any conclusion yet? so paul manafort is a stone-cold thug who in september confessed in open court to at least 10 crimes involving lying and cheating. so in a way it s not a surprise that even after that guilty plea he s still lying and cheating. the surprising thing, ari, is that in the past, paul manafort s crimes have been about helping paul manafort. right. his lies to mueller help donald trump and they put manafort at great risk. let s pause on that. i want to let you build on that, because it s very important what you just said. we are dealing with you call him a thug, i would call him a guilty convicted felon, but those are words of art, they mean the same thing. so here is this felon who previously was busted for