What’s Happening With Mueller and Manafort?

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It seems as if the Mueller investigation may actually, finally, be coming to a close.

Explosive reporting this week revealed that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort breached his plea deal with special counsel Robert Mueller for, according according to Team Mueller, crimes and lies about a variety of subject matters, and his cooperation has now ended, as well as his deal to avoid significant jail time.

Manafort is widely seen as the key witness, someone who has a lot on the line in this investigation.

So, why risk life behind bars?

What does Robert Mueller know, and what is Paul Manafort lying about?

Has President Trump assured Manafort a pardon?

Will he issue one?

Are we headed toward a constitutional crisis?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hello, listeners.

It's Alex Wagner.

Today we are going to get into the micro and macro of this week's news in and around the Mueller investigation.

Later in the episode, we will get to the big picture with someone who knows well the inside of the White House Counsel's office.

But first, our staff writer, Natasha Bertrand, covers national security and in particular, the Mueller investigation.

It is a great pleasure to have the tenacious and brilliant Natasha Bertrand on this podcast.

Thanks so much for having me, Alex.

So this has been, I mean, every week where there is news pertaining to the Mueller investigation feels seismic, but this feels monumental in terms of the developments of the week.

Let's just start first with the fact that on Monday, a court filing, a status report, revealed that prosecutors believe that Paul Manafort has lied and committed crimes unspecified in breach of the plea agreement he signed with investigators two months ago.

Do we know when we're going to get a full accounting of these alleged lies on the part of Manafort and the crimes?

That seems significant as well.

Unfortunately, right now, we don't know when to expect that hopefully detailed report and hopefully public report that Manafort is going to submit to the judge, but I think that we should expect that it will be really revealing.

And part of the news this week, you know, that Manafort had this joint defense agreement with the president, and he was essentially collaborating with him throughout his negotiations with Mueller and throughout his cooperation with Mueller.

It makes you wonder, well, was he also coordinating his lies with the president?

So So, this is definitely

a huge, huge piece of the puzzle.

And I think it could also explain why Trump delayed perhaps submitting his answers to the special counsel.

Fascinating.

We're going to get a little bit more into the timing in a second.

But

when we talk about the joint defense agreement with the White House, you've written about what that means.

Why is that particularly relevant in this moment?

So, the White House has a joint defense agreement with

upwards of 30 people involved in this investigation.

And it basically means that

the lawyers for people involved in the probe are talking to each other about what prosecutors are asking them, for example, about what happened in 2016 or about what happened after Trump took office, for example, when he fired Jim Comey, when he helped his son draft that statement about his meeting with the Russians at Trump Tower, things like that.

So they're basically sharing information, and then there's nothing unusual about that in and of itself.

Lawyers have joint defense agreements all the time.

What's not normal is for a person to begin cooperating with prosecutors and actually enter into that formal deal and then continue to have this defense agreement with another subject of the investigation.

That is typically seen as a huge no-no because it means that now the prosecutor is sharing potentially sensitive information with the person that is cooperating in order to get them to be more forthcoming in a way that they've already agreed to be, right?

So there's the worry that the person now cooperating with the special counsel and who is kind of privy and has this inside information will then be sharing it with another subject of the investigation.

And that, I think, is what people are very concerned about here.

It was a very dangerous game for Manafort and his lawyers to be playing.

And one of the only reasons that they would have been playing this game and hoping to keep it secret would be be if Manafort was angling for a pardon.

That, of course, is what legal experts are interpreting this weird arrangement as.

It is quite literally having your cake and eating it too.

Say, okay, I'm going to sign a plea deal with Robert Mueller, but I'm going to continue to sort of back channel to the Trump White House because maybe I can get a pardon out of them.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Exactly.

And Manafort has always been a very duplicitous figure, right?

So it's not necessarily surprising that he would want to try to do this, but his lawyers should have advised him that it is not a good idea.

And it could actually put Manafort's lawyer in a position where he faces criminal exposure, perhaps for attempting to obstruct justice or witness tampering, for example.

It actually happened in the Watergate era.

One of the subjects of that investigation, Howard Hunt, his lawyer, actually became an unindicted co-conspirator because of his back-channel communications with the White House while negotiations with the special prosecutor were ongoing.

So this is very dangerous for everyone involved.

And the only reason that lawyers lawyers I speak to could think of for them to take this kind of risk again is because Manafort was hoping for a pardon.

Aaron Ross Powell, Natasha, there's so much going on, but related to all of this is some really

big developments as far as the central kind of issue of the investigation, which is collusion.

How much did the Trump campaign know?

How much were they working with or in communication with Russians who were seeking to elect Donald Trump and ensure that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election?

The Guardian reports this week that Paul Manafort participated in secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London several times, 2013, 2015, and in the spring of 2016.

That's the meeting that's getting the most attention because, of course, Paul Manafort was named the campaign chair of Trump's bid at the presidency around that time.

What can you tell us about that Guardian reporting?

There's a lot of back and forth about how legitimate it actually is and how meaningful it is in the context of the Mueller investigation.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, so this broke yesterday morning and it was like a bomb had gone off.

It was pretty earth-shattering because that would seem like the smoking gun, right?

If the Trump campaign's chairman was meeting with the man who had all of this hacked material that had been stolen by the Russians that had not yet been released, but then was actually released at very strategic moments during the campaign, just before the Democrats' National Convention, and of course just before, just after the Access Hollywood tape, which was very damaging to the president, was released.

So, it would seem like this would be potentially the answer to who was coordinating with WikiLeaks on the campaign, who was coordinating perhaps with Russians on the campaign in a way that would have given them guidance as to when to release these documents.

The only problem is that the Guardian has very thinly sourced this story.

It's not entirely clear where they

got this information.

They don't really know when it happened.

They said that it happened in the spring of 2016, but they were murky on whether it was before or after Manafort formally joined the campaign.

And of course, Manafort later came out and strongly denied that these meetings ever actually happened.

Now, of course, he did not immediately deny that.

He said that he was just unaware of the hacks themselves, but it took him a little bit longer to actually come out and deny that the meetings actually happened.

But the Guardian's report has not been corroborated, and that remains the biggest issue with it.

Aaron Powell, well, you have your own reporting in The Atlantic about another sort of satellite figure to the Trump campaign.

Well, not to the Trump campaign directly.

A sort of conservative rabble-rouser, a far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

What did he tell you about the Mueller investigation as it concerns WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign?

Yeah, so he's a really interesting figure.

It's hard to believe a lot of what he says because he, of course, made his name as one of the biggest conspiracy theorists in the country.

He helped mainstream the theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, for example.

So he and the president actually kind of bonded over their shared belief in this crazy birtherism theory.

So he is not necessarily a wholly reliable narrator, but he has produced some interesting documentation around what Mueller is interested in with regard to Wikileaks and the Trump campaign in 2016.

He told me that Mueller essentially had presented to him and confronted him with emails that Jerome Corsi had not shown him when he began cooperating with the special counsel and negotiating with him.

in September of this year, which basically said that Roger Stone had reached out to him in late July of 2016, asking him to get to Julian Assange to get more documents that Wikileaks may have had that incriminate Hillary Clinton because of course WikiLeaks had just dumped the DNC emails, which you know they really disrupted the Democratic National Convention.

They made Bernie Sanders supporters very upset.

It was very, very damaging to the Democratic Party.

So Roger Stone was eager for more.

And so he reached out to Jerome Corsi at that point and said, can you get to Assange?

and you know, see what else he has up his sleeve.

Jerome Corsi told prosecutors that he had actually said, hey, I can't do that because if we're found out, you know, that we were trying to coordinate with Julian Assange, then, you know, we might be investigated by the FBI.

That, of course, was a lie.

Jerome Corsi actually did go back and he went to an intermediary in London who was able to get that information from Julian Assange.

And he and Roger Stone then continued to coordinate through the end of 2016, through the election,

the release of these stolen documents from WikiLeaks.

So he seems to be a very central figure.

Let me interrupt you for one second, Natasha.

Sure.

It is fairly brazen to say, oh, I had nothing to do with that.

And then NBC News, for example, on Tuesday obtained incriminating emails between Jerome Corsi and Roger Stone that say precisely the opposite of when Mueller had them.

Right.

It's with all of these guys, it's as if they just fundamentally don't believe they will get caught.

And so they lie brazenly in what is the highest stakes game of poker you can play.

Exactly.

And Jerome Coursey did not think that he would get caught because he scrubbed his computer of any and all emails predating October 11th of 2016.

So all of his emails and communications with Roger Stone, with his intermediary to Julian Assange, he deleted those purposefully.

That is what Mueller says anyway.

So he thought that that was enough, that Mueller would not be able to get those emails.

Of course, that turned out to be not true.

Mueller has a lot more information on everyone than we think.

And the fact that witnesses keep lying to the special counsel, whether it's Manafort, whether it's Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Jerome Corsi, and potentially down the road, who knows, Roger Stone, once he is interviewed by the special counsel,

you know, they should really have learned their lesson by now that Mueller knows way more than they think.

I want to just close this out with a question that you've teed up brilliantly about lying and the sort of feeling that lies will go unchecked.

Last Tuesday, President Trump submitted his written answers to Mueller's investigative team.

And a lot of folks said this is the last large remaining order of business on the agenda for Robert Mueller.

I wonder if you think it's a coincidence that a week after the president turns in his answers, we have this revelation that Mueller knew Paul Manafort was lying for some unspecified amount of time.

Will that make the White House nervous, given the fact that the president was, as we know, coordinating with Manafort or at least back channeling with Manafort, has already submitted his answers and potentially submitted answers that are not entirely truthful?

Well, I think we see the proof this morning that the White House is nervous with the President tweeting memes that show Robert Mueller and members of the Democratic Party behind bars and saying that the Mueller investigation will go down in history as a treasonous witch hunt.

He clearly is panicking.

And

Mueller delayed the status report regarding his cooperation, his coordination with Manafort about 10 days.

And in that 10-day period, Donald Trump finished responding to Mueller's questions about a potential conspiracy between the campaign and Russia.

So yes, you have to wonder whether in that 10-day period, before Mueller actually told a judge that Manafort had been lying the whole time, and while Donald Trump was crafting his answers to Mueller, you have to wonder whether Mueller was just letting Donald Trump kind of dig his own grave there.

Because now that we know that Manafort and Donald Trump were coordinating the whole time, that also raises the question again: were they coordinating their lies?

Did Donald Trump and his lawyers draft these answers based on information that Manafort had given them, saying, I've been telling Mueller this, you know, it's not necessarily true, but this is the story that you should also tell him.

Come Monday, we learn that everything that Manafort has been telling to Mueller has not been true and that Mueller knows it, which means that he has evidence that Manafort and perhaps Donald Trump are not telling the truth.

So I think that as the weeks go forward, we're going to see Trump panicking even more because

I think he knows what the implications of that are.

I'm trying to determine whether it's more Agatha Christie or Scooby-Doo.

Stakes are more Agatha Christie.

The behavior is more Scooby-Doo.

Absolutely.

Natasha, thank you so much for your great reporting and for joining us on the podcast.

Thanks so much, Alex.

Okay, there are cliffhangers galore, and here's another one.

We're going to take a quick break, but stick with us because when we come back, we will get to the big picture and what the latest twists and turns in the Mueller investigation mean for for our democracy.

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Okay, so the question now is, are we headed toward a crisis?

Joining me now is Ron Klain, a man who has worn a number of different hats in a number of different White Houses.

He's been the senior aide to President Obama.

He's been the chief of staff to Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden.

He is the former chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

And he was also associate counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Ron, it's a pleasure to have someone with such a wealth of knowledge and experience in this time of uncertainty.

Thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Alex.

Pleasure to be here.

Let me just first start with,

give us an anecdote here.

For those of us who do not understand what it is like to be in a White House, in the counsel's office, in a time of stress and or crisis.

Can you give us a window, a peek behind the curtain from your experience?

Well, you know, yes and no.

So, I mean, I lived through the Clinton White House during the impeachment battle, and what I will say was it was a time of just enormous stress and tension and,

you know, all kinds of challenges to try to manage through it.

But I think what was very different then was that President Clinton made an explicit decision to kind of cabin the people who were working on impeachment and working on the crisis issues away from those who were working on the rest of the business of the White House.

President Clinton didn't daily tweet or whatever the equivalent would have been in the mid-90s about the investigation.

In fact, he made a real point of kind of saying, look, the investigation is the investigation.

I'm going to go do the business of the American people every day and made it clear that the rest of us in the White House were supposed to be working on that.

And what we're seeing now is just the exact opposite of that.

The President gets up and his first thought in the morning is about Mueller and the investigation.

His last thought at night is about it.

And most of the thoughts in between when he's not golfing are about it as well.

And so it's not a White House that is trying to cordon off the crisis from everything else, but it's a White House that's completely consumed by the President's effort to thwart and otherwise

resist the consequences and the accountability of Robert Mueller's investigation.

Aaron Ross Powell,

describe, if you could, a little bit the relationship between the counsel's office and the president's office.

Counsel, as far as I could tell from the outside, is the group of people trying to keep everything in line, and sometimes to the chagrin of the president and his aides, right?

Aaron Powell, that's right.

Look, I mean, I think when you're the lawyers and you're doing your job well, we'll come back to that in a second.

You know, your job is to try to keep the president and his team from doing things that are wrong and trying to give advice and where the lines are, what can, what can't be done, trying to police certain kinds of activities in the White House.

And

that sometimes means you rub people the wrong way.

It sometimes means you have to tell people no.

It means that the President, no, he can't talk about politics during an official event.

No, the White House staff can't promote the President's private businesses from their official Twitter accounts and all these kinds of things.

And so, you know, a well-functioning White House Counsel's office is there to make sure that the President and the White House staff obey the law, that they comply with all the rules that govern the White House and the staff and its conduct.

That's not what we've seen under President Trump.

What we've seen is essentially a White House Counsel's office that has either empowered or looked the other way as rule after rule, norm after norm, line after line is crossed by the President and his team.

Now, one of those things that isn't a law, admittedly, but has been a norm that goes all the way back to Watergate is a rigorous policing of contacts between the White House and the senior people at the Justice Department.

And that's to try to keep politics out of law enforcement.

And this White House has shredded that in every conceivable way.

And that shredding has started at the top with President Trump from the early days of the administration leaning on senior law enforcement officials to adhere to his will in their investigations of all these scandals involving the president and his people.

Famously, the president telling the director of the FBI, asking Jim Comey to go light on Michael Flynn, and just down the line.

And now we've seen kind of the ultimate culmination of that with the installation of an operative, Matt Whitaker, in the position as acting attorney general overseeing the Mueller investigation, contrary to the law, contrary to the Constitution, and contrary to any norms that any president since Richard Nixon has adhered to.

Aaron Powell,

when you talk about norms being shattered and lines being crossed, the widespread belief in this particular moment and in this week, given the fact that Paul Manafort has breached his plea deal with Robert Mueller and his investigative team, is that a pardon may be in the cards.

We know that Trump, Trump's White House, and Manafort's legal team have had a joint defense agreement.

There's been some sort of back-channel communication.

Do you think a pardon is inevitable here?

Well, I think

I don't know if it's inevitable, Alex, but I do worry that it's been offered and that the president is bargaining the powers of the presidency with someone who is an admitted criminal to try to get him to help cover up.

I do think that it's hard to explain

Paul Manafort's change of course here

with anything other than the idea that he's been promised a presidential pardon.

He pled guilty, essentially, and agreed to cooperate and

then began to lie about what he told Mueller.

And

the special prosecutor has said that he has conclusive proof that Manafort's been lying, and surely that proof has been offered to Manafort, and he continues to lie.

And so he took a bad situation and he's made it much worse.

He is going to spend the rest of his life in jail.

That's almost a certainty.

And the only way around that is if he has been offered or promised a presidential pardon.

And for President Trump to offer someone a pardon as an effort to cover up some kind of offense that he himself may have been involved in is a debasement of the presidency and a

contradiction of the whole purpose of the pardon power that really is unprecedented in our history.

Aaron Powell, yeah, you said earlier this week that it would mark the president essentially pardoning himself.

What are the implications for his presidency if he offers Manafort a pardon?

Aaron Powell,

if he offers Manafort a pardon in exchange for Manafort

withholding information or lying about potential crimes that the president or his family or whomever we're involved in, it is like the president pardoning himself.

It's the president using the pardon power to

avoid being exposed legally or his family being exposed legally for the consequences of their actions.

That is like a self-pardon.

Look, I think that's about as close to a constitutional crisis as you can have in a democratic republic.

We are supposed to be a government of laws, not men.

And that means that everyone in our country is subject to the law and subject to being accountable under the law.

Now, we have special ways in which the president is accountable under the law.

We have obviously the impeachment process and other processes.

But the fundamental principle here is that no person, no one in America, not even the president, can break the law with impunity.

And using the pardon power to try to induce silence or worse still, mistruths, lies to a federal prosecutor about potential crimes, that really undermines the fundamental principle of the rule of law in our country.

Aaron Trevor Brandeis, that's one scenario that has us potentially barreling to a constitutional crisis.

There's another one that I sort of want to explore that is less developed, but we were discussing it with Natasha Bertrand earlier in the show.

And there's a concern, or there's a theory, perhaps, that the president may have compromised himself in his written testimony to Robert Mueller.

That was submitted last week at the beginning of the week.

Robert Mueller requested a delay on his status report, which we received this week after the president submitted his answers, in which Mueller revealed that Paul Manafort has been lying, presumably for quite some time.

There's some speculation that that means, because Manafort and Trump have been sharing note cards, if you will, that the president may have perjured himself in his written answers.

This is all speculation.

But if, for example, the president did lie in his answers to Mueller, where does that leave us as a country?

Is that another constitutional crisis?

Well, it could be.

Look, I mean, this is like the old joke about

someone who's playing chess and the other people who are playing checkers.

And I think think in this case, what we really have is we have Bob Mueller playing three-dimensional chess and

Paul Manafort playing

chutes and ladders and the president playing crazy eights.

I mean, and so

we don't really know how all these pieces fit together, as you say, Alex.

We don't really know if the delay Mueller provided Manafort was just one last chance to get clean on the known lies or if in fact Mueller knew what was going on and was waiting to see see what Trump's answers would do and who Trump was lining his answers up with, also how Trump was lining up his answers with Mr.

Corsi as well.

And so, you know, I do think that the one thing that has been true throughout the year plus of the Mueller investigation is that Bob Mueller's always known things that we don't, and he's always kind of one step ahead of where we speculate that we are.

And so he may well have known that President Trump was lying in these answers or was potentially going to lie in these answers.

He may well have proof of that.

We'll just have to wait and see here.

It does feel to me like we are getting near the crescendo of this investigation.

You know,

it feels like that whether it's days or weeks in the not too distant future, Mueller is going to lay some significant cards on the table and we're going to see exactly what he knows that we really haven't known all this time.

Aaron Powell,

because you have, as I said earlier, worn just a number of different hats, I'd love to get your thoughts about what levers exist.

If we do head towards a crisis, either constitutional or not,

we're fair.

I think everyone understands what Trump's position and, therefore, what the executive branch position will be on all of this.

What about the Supreme Court?

You have worked on Supreme Court confirmations.

You got Ruth Vader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor onto the bench.

Is there anything for them to do

in the context of a conservative-leaning court?

Well, I think even, frankly, in the context of any kind of court, I think the Supreme Court would view this as something that's really up to the political branches to resolve.

I mean, it's possible it would come before the court.

It's possible there would be some kind of judicial process.

But overwhelmingly, what's going to happen here, I think, is that Mr.

Mueller will

bring whatever indictments he's going to bring against people other than the president, and those people would be judged and adjudicated in the criminal justice system.

But for the president, probably the ultimate accountability is going to come in either the impeachment process, if that's what Mueller's case presents itself for.

And then look, ultimately, in the political process,

President Trump will either choose to or not choose to stand for re-election, and this will be a factor in how voters view him.

And in some sense, I'd say the first judgment in the Mueller investigation really came

for the first judgment for President Trump in the Mueller investigation really came in the midterm elections.

For a president to lose the kind of political losses that Donald Trump suffered in the 2018 midterms is a verdict by the American people about his presidency, about

his conduct in office.

And that is really in the democracy, the fundamental check we have on a president's behavior is

our actions as voters to hold that president and his party accountable

when he misbehaves or does even worse.

Aaron Powell, so you think the true power lies in the voting booth, perhaps, not with the institutions set up to be checks and balances?

Aaron Ross Powell, well, it would be great if the institutions do their job.

And I think maybe, hopefully some Republicans got a message from the midterm elections that the public is tired with the Congress just kind of rolling over and letting Donald Trump and his allies do what they will, not just on these issues that Bob Mueller's investigating, but all the other kinds of corruption and wrongdoing we've been seeing in this country over the past two years.

The use of public office for private gain, the fact that the Veterans Administration is being run out of Mar-Lago, basically, by a bunch of Trump donors for the benefits of their private personal gain.

I mean, just up and down the line through these agencies, all this kind of corruption, I think that really stuck with voters and is the reason why the Republicans were thrown out.

The Democrats have the most members of Congress they've had since Watergate.

Aaron Powell, Ron, I want to ask you a semi-impossible question.

Oh, good.

I like that.

What would you, as counsel, advise in this moment if you were working in the White House?

I mean, is there even a good option that protects the president, upholds the rule of law, avoids a controversy?

Aaron Powell, yeah.

Well, first of all, you know,

stop doing bad things.

I mean, look,

there's one question about how you clean up everything that's happened thus far, but I think the really

kind of impossible thing is that Trump continues to do it.

He continues to make more messes.

He continues to, as you suggested a few minutes ago, Alex, perhaps as recently as within the past 10 days, file untruthful answers to a federal prosecutor.

So, I mean,

the old line, the first law of holes is when you're in a hole, stop digging.

You know, that's the first piece of advice someone should give Donald Trump, which is

he is president of the United States and he should start to act like it.

He should start to follow the law.

He should tell his family members to stop with the corruption.

He needs to hold his administration accountable with all the things that are going on in the cabinet.

But with all due respect, Ron,

these are potential crimes that have happened in the past that he can't undo.

Well, that is true.

Is there something counsel can advise at this point that would keep him out of harm's way?

Well, it depends what he's done.

I mean, that's just the honest truth about Alex.

I mean,

there's a lot of suspicion about what he's done

and a lot of speculation about what he's done.

But,

you know, as I said, the first thing he's got to do is stop doing it and stop making it worse and stop aggravating these things.

I think with regard to what he's done thus far, look, it's cliché, but I think it's true.

The very best thing he could do would be to come clean about it.

I mean, I think that

he is continuing to make matters worse.

I don't really know what Donald Trump himself personally knew about

the collaboration between his campaign and the Russians, which clearly existed at some level in 2016.

Whether or not it got all the way up to Trump or not, we don't know, but don't know what he knew.

He should come clean about that.

He should be honest with the American people about the fact that the Russians did play a role in getting him elected in 2016, that they did help his campaign with the WikiLeaks gambit that the president embraced enthusiastically as a key element of his campaign.

They did help his campaign with efforts on social media, and he should be honest about what he does or doesn't know about that.

And I think he should

stop trying to obstruct the investigation and let the truth come out.

It's, again, I keep using these clichés, but the clichés apply.

The cover-up is worse than the crime.

Now, in this case, the crime may well have been very, very bad, but since day one of his presidency,

the biggest reason to believe that Donald Trump did something wrong in 2016 is all the ways in which he's been trying to cover it up ever since.

If he didn't do something wrong in 2016, it has been the most misguided effort to obstruct justice in American history.

Firing the FBI director because he wouldn't stop the investigation, constantly ranting and raving about the Justice Department, now ultimately pushing out the Attorney General and putting in an operative as Attorney General.

If this isn't about covering up crimes, it's hard to explain what it is about.

And it needs to stop.

He needs to come clean on it and

do his best to come to account for what happened and what's happened since then.

Aaron Powell, based on what you've seen and also your legal expertise, does this sort of inflection point register as more complicated and potentially catastrophic than others?

Aaron Powell, yeah, look, I think we are, I mean, I think there's a little little bit of a risk like the old

frog in the pot slowly being boiled here, that we're seeing a real corrosion of the rule of law and of our core accountability for high-level officials in our country.

And it happens week by week with each development.

And each week we get up and we say, oh, my gosh, I can't believe this week's news, and it's even worse than last week's news.

And we don't really realize that we are passing some pretty significant waste stations here.

And I think the recent developments in the Mueller investigation is one of those really significant points that it's easy to kind of blink past as just, oh, it's just another week of a bunch of news and what did it all mean and whatnot.

But I think it is a significant turning point because what you have here is, let's not forget, you have here a man, Paul Manafort, who has really been one of the central figures in the Republican Party in the past quarter century, who was not just some operative, but the chair of Donald Trump's campaign, his senior most advisor in the heart of the general election campaign, who is now an admitted criminal.

And on top of it, we found out this week,

was lying to prosecutors even after he promised to cooperate.

And, oh, by the way, cooperating with the president and his legal team as he was lying to federal prosecutors.

And that's really something we've never seen before.

I mean, not even in Watergate did something like this happen.

And if that happened, because the President of the United States promised Paul Manafort a pardon in exchange for his willingness to cover up with federal prosecutors, again, that is a level of intentional criminality coming out of the Oval Office that is, again, unmatched by Watergate.

And so I think this really has been.

We're going to have to wait and see how it all racks up, when all the truth finally comes out, when Mueller finally lays his cards on the table.

But I think it's possible possible we will look back on this week as a big turning point, as a big curve in the road, where a situation we knew was very bad got even worse, and where abuse of power that's been mounting and building really hit a major turning point.

Ron Clain, it's always great to talk to you.

Thanks for your time.

Thanks for having me, Alex.

That'll do it for this week of of Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with help from Patricia Jacob.

Catherine Wells is the executive producer of Atlantic Podcasts.

Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic by John Batiste.

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See you next week.