A spokesman for manafort says its 100 false to suggest this meeting including any discussion of contributions to the Trump Campaign or the Republican Party. When donald trump jr. Talked about the meeting he called it nothing and manafort said he was on his phone most of the time. The whole contact took how long . 20 minutes or so. 20 minutes. And jared left after five or ten. Yes. Like she said and paul manafort. On his phone. The whole time. Like i said it was pretty apparent this is not what we were in there talking about. It does appear manafort was on his phone to take notes. Nbcs reporting says manafortses notes typed on a smartphone described by one source as cryptic were turned over to the house and senate
think you know. Im not answering about any particular eggs vexes. I cant talk about that in a classified setting. I want to be careful in open setting. I carefully chose the words. Like look ive seen the tweet about tapes lordy, i hope there are tapes. Jeremy theyre making the
thoughts. first of all, do you agree with zerlena, the fact that this whole project began in 2014 and the president says look, it s not me. it s before i was even a candidate. but the reality is that it sounds to me by this indictment they were doing research. they were being told to go to purple states, they pointed out specifically colorado, virginia and florida. do research for a while before they actually began their activity. we can look back, certainly and find out what happened in the previous administration. the fact is that the current president has called this whole russia incident a hoax and it s not a hoax. and robert mueller is completely justified, this whole entire investigation. which he was, he was appointed to research russian interference in american elections. now he has 13 indictments of people, operatives acting in the united states, probably at a level of sophistication greater than the majority of the actual
presidential campaigns in targeting. so it s unbelievable to suggest that it wouldn t have an impact on the election. i know the indictment doesn t say that specifically. but of course it had an impact on the election. so robert mueller has legitimized his investigation and he has delegitimized the election of this president. it s hard to quantify precisely how it had an effect. it s unknowable. but it did have an impact. no question about that. joe, where do you draw the line between truth and spin here? well robert mueller has organized a rock star team of investigators and they re not playing. they re coming at it with the hard-cold facts. and so there is really not much room for spin. i mean you can try to spin it to say that well, whatever side you want. but at the end of the day, robert mueller s investigators have come up with the truth. and the truth is that russians began this in 2014 and there were three companies involved.
a look at retired general michael flynn as he walks into the courthouse. evan perez is standing by outside there. evan, dana brought up a good point about the link between james comey and michael flynn and the investigation there. you point out one of the ironies here is that james comey didn t think there was enough to get michael flynn on the issue of lying to the fbi. explain? right. exactly. that s one of the ironies here of the situation, john. this is something we ve said repeatedly which is a decision that the president made to fire jim comey has backfired in so many ways and this is exactly what we re talking about. the team that was doing the investigation of michael flynn had made a decision earlier this year that there wasn t enough evidence to bring charges against him for lying. they had decided that there wasn t enough evidence to show that there was willful intent in the way he answered these questions falsely. you see four lies that the special counsel is charging mic
analyst jeffrey toobin and analyst michael zeldin who once worked for special counsel robert mueller in a different capacity. jeffrey be tooin , we talk about the developments, the fact that at this moment may be pleading guilty and may be cooperating, this could be the most significant development to dade date? i don t think there s any doubt it s the most significant because the only guilty plea so far has been george papadopolous, who i think everybody agrees is a fairly minor figure. michael flynn is anything but a minor figure. paul manafort is a major figure but he s only been indicted. they haven t proved he has committed anything, any crime, the fact that such a senior figure is pleading guilty is, obviously, of immense significance. historically as well as legally. let me just raise one point that i think is really important.