money. the issues of money laundering have been mentioned. there are lots of things he s gone back with these people many years that have nothing to do with donald trump. so we don t know what that tells us and it may be just as we were saying about reince priebus what they won t paul manafort not for himself but to find out what, if anything, he knows about the campaign last year. and, mika, because we re all in the dark using flashlights without knowing what s going on behind the scenes, do you think there s been any surprise among members of the mueller team at just how much financial crimes have become a percentage of this investigation? i think they knew that this was going to be a big percentage of this. mueller was pulling some of the best financial prosecutors from across the government. they reached out to the irs criminal investigation team, financial crimes, financial
cannot publicly castrate your own secretary of state without giving yourself that binary choice. this is the washington post headline bob corker on trump s biggest problem, the castration of rex tillerson. jonathan, i read this quote earlier from mike murphy wondering if other gop senators are going to think better of running for re-election and if they don t will they join corker in the kind of loud that wing of the republican party? is he just going to be this guy? i think that, number one, in terms of mike murphy, that s wishful thinking right now i think in most senators are going to make a decision of whether or not they want to be in the united states senate and it s really not that bad of a job no matter how frustrated they. they get paid a reasonable a. money, healthcare, et cetera, so i think most of them will probably hang on. what s interesting with tillerson and corker here is, number one, i think that corker is he expressing a frustration
islands. we re going to be there. we have really it s not even a question of a choice. we don t even want a choice. we re going to be there as americans. for the record, donald trump is the president of the u.s. virgin islands. he met with the governor of that u.s. territory. this morning on twitter the president seemed to soften his position on puerto rico writing, the wonderful people of puerto rico with their unmatched spirit, know how bad things were before the hurricanes, i will always be with them. later, he appeared to pivot back to something closer to his original stance. well, you have to watch it. you can t say there was a hurricane and now we re going spend x dollars. and we also have to do something with all the money that s been invested mostly private, the government s gonna have to come before that money because the government s gonna want security, they re going to have to come before that money. i m sure we ll be able to work that out. but the puerto rican people
intelligence folks, they know that they have to follow the money and they brought in the best experts do that. matthew, same question. i think mieke is exactly right. look, in all of these cases you always end up following the money or in this case maybe it s follow the black caviar. if you remember that s what one of paul manafort s former employees said to him is that oleg was the person that be gave him a big jar of black caviar. we now know that means $60 million. you asked about that statement earlier. i think the reason they withdrew it, one of two things happened. either he repaid the loan or he didn t. if he didn t repay the loan, that means it s either still on the books or it was another potential crime because it was money that he received that wasn t a loan that he probably hasn t reported and paid taxes on and i think that s why you see, as mika said, bob mueller pulling in experts from the irs and a number of people in a history of money laundering. showing up with
with that kind of a windup, peter, what do you make of it? that s obviously significant. they don t take that out of statement without cause and it s interesting that they would initially is that in there and have to be corrected at some point. somebody told them that their understanding of the circumstance was knots what they originally thought. even within his own team they don t have their stories straight. we have known and this story reenforces that paul manafort was very big into the russian/pro russian orbit here. this man is one of the richest in russia, he s not an independent actor, and the fact that paul manafort has been close business associate, tied in with lots and lots of money between them over these years is of course raises lots of red flags. that doesn t mean he s done anything wrong and there s been collusion. that s a whole separate leap to make and one the lawyers are looking at. there are a lot of issues for paul manafort that go beyond the campaign. it coul