tv The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC February 20, 2018 9:00pm-10:00pm PST
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semiautomatic firearms to effectively turn them, in his words, into machine guns, that make them fire automatic. that would seem to include accessories like the bump stock, used in the las vegas massacre a few months ago and trigger cranks, to artificially increase the speed on which you can pull the trigger on a semiautomatic rifle. the president didn't specify. there's a lot of ambiguity as to proceed earlierly wh-- procedur they're going to do. they reportedly decided after the las vegas massacre that only congress could make laws to restrict these accessories, the justice department couldn't do it by regulation alone. but now the president has told the justice department to produce these recommended regulations. nobody quite know what is that will mean. we're watching that develop
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tonight. we're looking for more clarity or specificity about what the white house thinks it's doing here and what it is actually doing here and sometimes those are two different things. so we'll have more on that ahead over the course of this hour. there's also a new cloud of confusion that has just blown in off the horizon concerning the president's family and the high-profile white house role the president has given to his son-in-law, jared kushner. as we reported in detail last night, white house chief of staff john kelly a few days ago released new white house policies for dealing with security clearances in the white house in the wake of the domestic violence violence concerning white house secretary rob porter, who served in the incredibly sensitive job of staff secretary for more than a year, even though he only had an interim security clearance because he couldn't clear the fbi background check for a permanent clearance due to the domestic violence allegations against him. the new white house policy announced on friday night says
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that as of this friday, three days from now, the white house will no longer allow access to classified material by people who can't get full clearances. well, jared kushner is the highest profiled person in the white house who reportedly cannot get through the background process to get cleared for a full clearance despite the fact he's been working in the white house for over a year. this new policy from white house chief of staff john kelly seemed aimed at jared kushner's forehead and it looked like jared kushner would be out of a job out of the white house or at least bumped down to a job where he wouldn't be able to see anything sensitive and very soon, this week, that's what's in the black-and-white policy document that john kelly just released. but then tonight because you can't spell chaos without "o,"
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something new from john kelly, and puts out a statement inexplicably praising jared kushner, quote, i have full confidence in jared's ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio. what does that mean? nobody really know what is that means. either that means that john kelly thinks you don't really need a security clearance to run foreign policy in the white house, that seems unlikely, or it means that john kelly's new crackdown in the white house maybe isn't going to happen, they're not going to change the rules, they're going to keep letting people like rob porter and jared kushner continue to access classified information without a clearance. or i guess one third possibility is that the president is just going to give jared kushner a
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security clearance himself. even though kushner can't pass his fbi background check. why would he -- when you're family, don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again, ever. why would you do that? so those are two big developing stories right now and both of them have a lot of ambiguity in terms of how they are going to work out. this issue of potential movement on a small part of the gun debate and whether or not the president gets to keep his children as white house officials. there's also news tonight that the democrats may have flipped yet another legislative seat, a seat that went to donald trump by 50 points in november 2016, it looks like the democrats may have won that seat tonight in one of the biggest swings in the democrats' direction since we have been watching all these special elections in the past year and a half. so more on that coming up as well. in the midst of those developing
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news stories today, raise your hand if you picked -- what's his name? alex van der zwaan as the next person picked in the bingo game. are you that much closer to bingo because he got picked? is there a single person on earth who had alex van der zwaan as the next best guest for the next guilty plea in the special counsel's case. after the 13 russians get indicted on friday and today alex van der zwaan? huh? the man who pled guilty today in federal court in washington is named alex van der zwaan, speaks
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dutch, russian, english and french and today is facing american imprisonment in a u.s. federal prison. prosecutors are holding his passport and refusing to leave the d.c. area except to meet with his own expensive new york lawyers. you should me victor yushenko. at that time he was a candidate for president and he was considered to be a dashing and fairly charismatic opposition figure in his country. that's him in july 2004. here he is six months later. same guy. that is him in december that same year. july on the left, december on the right. almost not recognizable as the same man, right?
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what happened between those two pictures, between that -- in that six-month period, what happened while he was running for president of his country is that he got poisoned. he got poisoned with dioxin and it disfigured him, it paralyzed half his face, left him with severe debilitating pain. >> with just two weeks to go before a rerun of the disputed presidential election in ukraine, doctors confirmed that opposition candidate victor yu shen co was poisoned during the campaign. >> the effects were startling, transformed in a matter of a few weeks into a gravely ill man. his face almost overnight changed into a scarred, bloated mass. today doctors at a priority clinic announced that he had been poisoned.
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>> translator: there is no doubt this was caused by a case of dioxin poisoning. we know today at least 1,000 times normal concentration was found in his blood and tissue. it would be very easy to administer in soup. >> that's the kind of thing that used to happen to opposition figure who is made a nuisance of themselves in ukraine, especially someone promising and charismatic, who was running very well against victor yanocovic. manafort was hired in 2004 to work on that presidential campaign, the one where this was what happened to the guy running against manafort's client. but poison is not the only risk that opposition candidates have faced in ukraine. at the republican national convention in 2016, manafort was
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running the trump campaign then, they pulled out the "lock her up" signs and mike flynn led the lock her up chants from the podium. remember that? before the donald trump for president campaign, the lock her up idea for a campaign, that was something foreign to mainstream american politics. but even though that sentiment was new to our politics here in the united states before the trump campaign, there are places around the world, plenty of them, where that really is the way campaigns work, that really is the way politics operates. so again, manafort's guy in ukraine was janocovic. another presidential rival as few years later, they went ahead and locked her up. she was a major figure in the opposition in ukraine. she was a very successful politician, a prime minister. one of the things she made a big deal about as prime minister was a massively corrupt natural gas deal set up between putin's
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government in russia and his chosen oligarchs in ukraine. she ran against manafort's guy in 2010. she came very, very close to beating him. she came too close to beating him, and so janocovic decided to lock her up. they brought a million different criminal charges against her in 2010, the year of the election. they convicted her in 2011 and centered her to 11 years in prison. the people in ukraine decided they had enough against manafort's guy, they overthrew the government, there were bloody protests, fatal confrontations and janocovic said he would never resign, never state police down but ultimately, he took off, he fled in the dead of night, he went to moscow for safe keeping. and when manafort's guy got overthrown and had to flee to moscow where putin could take
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care of him, that was finally when she could get out of prison, that was the occasion of her being released. it was really dramatic at the time. the winter olympics are in pyeongchang. when all this happened with him fleeing to moscow, that was also during the winter olympics. this all happened exactly four years ago when the sochi olympics were under way. >> good evening, it's been a day of fast-moving vaechldevelopmen ukraine's capital, a day after agreeing to a broad series of reforms and concessions, the country's president up and fled the presidential palace and protesters now seem to be in control. >> reporter: what's going on here? >> it's our victory. >> reporter: people are now gathering here in front of parliament and starting to celebrate. they realize that something
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profound is happening here, that their revolution for more democracy in ukraine may have won. hungry for information, they pressed their faces to parliament's gates for updates. broadcast on loud speakers. parliament was taking over. and joy was spreading. lawmakers came out to tell the crowds president janocovic's days in power were over. parliament voted to impeach him. >> we're witnessing the collapse of dictatorship but the idea is to start a new ukraine built on human dignity. >> reporter: but where was the president? he wasn't at his chalet. they took it over, seeing how he lived by a private pond with a private zoo but he wasn't finished yet.
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he appeared on television from where he'd fled in western ukraine and vowed not to resign. by the evening it was clear he'd lost the capital and more. the police joined the opposition. the army refused to back the president and parliament ordered the release of yulia, his main rival. he'd thrown her in jail when she arrived at independence square. the protesters believed they'd won. >> paul manafort's job when he ran janocovic's political operation was to make sure he looked just like him, to make sure he would win elections and to seem vaguely legitimate in the eyes of the world. it was a hard thing to do. a little nuts to even try. if you want to run a guy who is a cross between al capone and
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whitey bulger and pablo escobar, that would be a hard thing to do. but if you wanted to do that and make that guy seem legit, paul manafort is probably the guy you'd hire to do that. this has been his kind of gig for decades. manafort would arrange some p.r. evident to say, yes, he's whitey bulger but he's very nice to stray cats and he's very clean and tidy and also we've given him a hair cut. paul manafort's job has been all over the world to put a shine on dictators while he was looting his country and running it as a l low-rent, violent syndicate. one of the things that paul manafort did to shine up victor janocovic was to hire u.s. law firms and p.r. companies to sell this guy in the u.s., to sell him like a product in
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washington, to make him seem kind of legit. and paul manafort's a life long republican and his connections are all in republican politics, but at the time his client in ukraine was walking to tim shen co and manafort was trying to make that seem okay. he in the u.s. it was the obama administration that was in power. and for manafort that put a premium on him trying to sell janocovic and put a premium on him that had democratic credentials or bipartisan credentials so they could try to get a better hearing from the democratic administration in power in washington. to try to whitewash the fact that his client had locked up his political rival, manafort arranged to hire washington p.r. firms that had bipartisan credentials and arranged to fire this very well known law firm, skadden arps. they could brag they had greg
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craig as one of their principles. they hired skadden to do a review of the whole lock her up a adventure with timo shell cone. we'll have this blue chip law firm look into it, check it all out, issue a report, explaining what happened here. the report prepared by that law firm gave manafort what he was paying for. yes, there was a face saving mild rebuke of tymoshenko's jailing maybe not being up to western standards but it excused the whole thing, it was "utterly baffling and pernicious." and by others it was called a
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nasty piece of work. i should mention, though, paul manafort's daughter got an associates gig at the skadden arps firm. they threw that in as a swe sweetener? i don't know. here's the second thing to know about paul manafort's lock her up adventure in ukraine. that report, that payment therein has just produced the latest criminal charges and latest guilty plea for your robert mueller special counsel's investigation. we know until last year he
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worked in the london off of skadden. the statement of offense spells out what the special counsel said he did "at all relevant times herein, the special counsel's office had an open investigation into paul manafort and rick gates in connection with among other things their work in the u.s. on behalf of foreign principle paals. it encompassed lobbying and public relations work including the trial of yulia ymoshenko. on november 3, 2017 just three days after the felony charges were unsealed in washington, november 3rd, 2017 in d.c., alex
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van der zwaan did an interview with d.o.j. prosecutors and fbi special agents. he was represented by counsel, he was warned that intentionally false statements could subject him to criminal charges. he indicated he understood. van der zwaan thereafter made materially false statements. the special counsel's office lists three things they say van der zwaan knowingly lied about. they said he falsely stated his last communication with rick gates had been in mid august 2016 and it had been an innocuous text message. he falsely stated his last communication with a long-time business associate of manafort and gates in ukraine had been way back in 2014 when he talked with that person about that person's family. according to the special counsel's office, he also falsely stated that he had no
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idea why skadden hadn't given the special counsel's office an e-mail that dated from september 2016 between him and person a, him and this person he said he hadn't talk to since 2014. statement of the offense lays all that out and lays out in detail why all of those things were false, saying that despite those denials, in fact this lawyer who is charged today, he was still in communication with rick gates about this whitewash report on yulia tymoschenko. gates that was was still working for the campaign. according to the special counsel's office, this lawyer charged today communicated with gates using an encrypted app, which appears to have made them think nobody could listen in to what they were saving. and he sent them electric
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documents and then called person a and discussed in russian that criminal charges might be brown against a former ukrainian justice minister against law firm a and against paul manafort. and the special counsel's office also say that van der zwaan may recordings of these phone calls about this whitewash report on the jailing, about criminal charges being brought about manafort and again his own law firm. he was recording these calls. we don't know why the special counsel's office knows that but apparently they know that. they know about his notes on his calls, they know about his recordings of his calls, about the discussions that led to the calls, using e-mails and encrypted apps to avoid records, charged with making materially false, fictitious and fraudul t
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fraudulently false statements and he signed it last week, last wednesday on valentine's day. but this was all revealed when he was arraigned in court today. this implications on what's going on in mueller's investigation. we saw that on friday night and we now see it todwith this lawy from skadden. this plea adds to the pressure on paul manafort himself, that he, too, should start cooperating with prosecutors given all the stuff they've got on him and all the people who worked around him in various ways.
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i also have some very specific questions about this guy just charged and pled guilty. part of what is interesting is that nobody knew who he was before today. it's also interesting to know that last year he got married to the daughter of one of the richest men in russia, who is very close to vladimir putin. there's some really specific stuff here. if you're not a lawyer like me, number one, this guy is not a u.s. citizen. he's a russian-speaking dutch guy born in belgium and working in london. how did they get him in court today? we had those 13 indictments against russian nationals unsealed on friday. nobody thought any of those people would ever end up here but this guy is in court today in d.c. does charging a non-u.s. citizen complicate these cases at all? secondly, is it where they're bringing charges against a lawyer? is a laura differewye laura difa
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different kind of defendant? is it weird to charge a lawyer? third, there are references in the statement of the offense today that the law firm itself, skadd skadden, was going to face criminal charges in this matter. does that make sense? would him getting arrested and charged have anything to do with that possibility? that seems like a big deal. and lastly, the stuff that we learned in this guilty plea today, this all comes out of some very dramatic, terrible and really recent stuff that happened in ukraine. we know from previous reporting that after janocovic got run out of that country in 2014, ukrainians started screaming bloody murder about the stuff that paul manafort and his client had done to ukraine, which u.s. law firms and p.r.
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firms may have been involved in greasing the skids for. they had been asking for access to manafort, access to skadden and to this specific young lawyer who was charged today. did those requests get met? how do requests, demands look that from an ally country, how do those affect u.s. prosecutors, if they do at all, when they're making decisions about bringing charges in a case like this that is this high profile with stakes this high. these questions can be answered. stay with us. "what pulled musc" "what headache?" nothing works faster to make pain a distant memory. advil liqui-gels and advil liqui-gels minis. what pain? advil liqui-gels when i was too busy with the kids to get a repair estimate. i just snapped a photo and got an estimate in 24 hours. my insurance company definitely doesn't have that... you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™ liberty mutual insurance.
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he faces a sentence of a maximum of five years, if you lie to the fbi but the likely sentencing range here is zero to six months. if he cooperates with the government, i doubt he'll do much time at all, if any. his lawyer said his wife is in london, she's pregnant and they want to get the sentencing over with so they can send whatever time he may have to so he can
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get back there and help her with the birth. >> and that's the road ahead for alex van der zwaan. he is not a u.s. citizen. does that complicate the process? >> no. the department of justice prosecutors people who are not citizens of the united states all the time. last week robert mueller indicted 13 russians. if someone commits a crime, such as lying to the fbi or hacking in the united states or stealing money in the united states, robbing a bank in the united states, those people are subject to u.s. law. >> what about the fact that he is a lawyer. they don't have any special protection or exposure to u.s. laws, but i wonder in this case or in big complicated cases like
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this, if there's a sort of message that comes along with charging a lawyer. obviously there a lot of lawyers involved in representing a lot of different people's interest in this big, strauling cas-- sprawling case. is it at all unusual? does it strike you as interesting that this is a lawyer and one from a very well-regarded big firm? >> i think in this particular instance the fact that he's a lawyer is not as important that he's fact witness to something that went on in the investigation. i think prosecutors feel like lawyers should know better. so when a lawyer does something that is contrary to his or her training, is contrary to the ethical norms he or she should know about and when a lawyer lies to the fbi, i think it has a special resonance. in this particular circumstance, i don't think he was being interviewed for his role as a lawyer. if you look at the manafort
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indictment, halfway through during the allegations that describe the fact that paul manafort and gates were pulling the strings on this lobbying on behalf of the ukraines and the russians with whom they were associated, there's a lot of talk about lobbying firm a and b but in the middle of that description is a sentence that says paul manafort funneled $4 million in order to get the report you were describing at the top of the show. so what happened here is as you described a few minutes ago, the indictment of manafort and gates was unsealed on the last monday in october and a few days later, this fella, van der zwaan was called in for an interview, showed up with his lawyer, was asked questions about his dealings with gates and lied about it. but in this particular instance he was a witness to whether gates and manafort were actually
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pulling strings behind the skadden report. >> when you look at the evidence they have laid out in the statement of offense today, does that lead to you, as it does to me tha me, that this is information that rick gates -- >> if gates started to cooperate, maybe he didn't start quite that early. what is clear from the indictment is that they have access to e-mails and chats and other electron ek immediaic med gates had and this fella, van der zwaan showed up in some of that. and what's interesting here and it's something that we've talked about a lot on your show is that the investigation doesn't stop with the indictment. four days later after the indictment and robert mueller and agents are nt viinterviewin fact case in the same case and they are just as offended as if
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it happened before when someone lies to them. and he's not the first guy on your bingo card, papadopoulos and last week pinedo, the identity theft, you're going to continue to see both surprises and people you've never heard of. >> i have learned to have no expectations whatsoever. paul fishman, former u.s. attorney for the great state of new jersey, thank you. be right back, stay with us. ♪
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surprises news tonight out of kentucky. tonight it is a legislative seat just outside louisville in bullet county, kentucky. a democrat named linda belcher had run for this seat in 2016. she lost in 2016 on a night when donald trump won that district by like 50 points. well, tonight linda belcher went for that seat again and this time she won by a ton, by almost 37 points. did i mention this was a district trump won by nearly 50 points? depending on how you like your rounding, that's a democratic swing in that district tonight of kentucky of 86 or 87 points in the democrats' direction. this flip from red to blue in kentucky tonight is, we believe,
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the 37th legislative seat that the democrats have flipped from red to blue since the presidential election. that's what's making democrats really excited about the mid terms. we'll be right back. i try to take care of my teeth, but there's acid in what i eat and drink everyday that can do damage over a lifetime. so my dentist told me to go-pro with crest pro-health. crest pro-health protects against acids in everyday food and drinks better than regular toothpaste. that's how you nail a checkup. crest.
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so you might want to think about pulling the ol' switcheroo. that's auto and home insurance for the modern world. esurance. an allstate company. click or call. money. in 2003 bp announced a partnership in russia with a group called alpha group, controlled by four russian billionaire oligarchs. it was the largest deal in russian corporate history but within a few years, things went south. they started being harassed. russian police repeatedly raided their offices. more than 100 employees had their visa status ranked. the current ceo of b.p. managed.
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the current ceo of b.p. managya. the current ceo of b.p. managed things on the b.p. side of the venture was among the b.p. employees who got kicked out of russia. he fled the country. he was forced to go into hiding and it was determined he was poisoned as part of the harassment in russia. he started feeling ill and had the blood tested and doctors found poisoned. once he stopped eating the food provided by his company, he started to feel better. b.p. had to cash out of the 50% stake and ended up forced to sell it to the russian state oil company. it was a deal that was brokered by vladimir putin. b.p.'s russian oligarch partners did very, very well with this deal forced by putin. the alpha group partners got $27 billion for their stake in the venture.
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one of the partners was a man named german kahn. he has an estimated fortune of $10 billion and gets a mention in the dossier specifically his company's closeness to vladimir putin. an alpha group deny any wrongdoing and are suing buzz feed. but today, german kahn found himself in the news for a different reason because he's the father in law of this guy. alex van der zwann who today pled guilty to lying to robert mueller's investigators. these new charges are interesting for a lot of reasons but what happens when you're a multibillionaire oligarch putin ally and the young man who just married your daughter gets arraigned and possibly jailed in the united states by robert mueller? if you're german kahn in this circumstance, what do you say to your friend vladimir putin about this? if you're robert mueller, did you just indict someone knowing full well that that's really
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whitewashed an incident in which the president of ukraine paul manafort's client jailed one. who was involved in the preparation of the report pled guilty in washington d.c. as the latest court proceedings of the special counsel's investigation. joining us is ken vogel who has been on this story from the beginning. mr. vogel, thank you for being here. >> thank you, rachel. >> the through line for me for understanding relationship between this young man charged today and the special counsel's investigation is that paul manafort was representing the ukrainian who did the bad thing -- it's sort of a winding road you have to follow to see how this corrects to the charge of the special counsel's investigation. >> that is the most direct through-line. it's a little bit of a torturous one. however, there are also bread
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crumbs that lead to something that is in sort of a different bucket of the mueller investigation. that is connections to -- current connections to russian oligarchs and that is through this young man's father-in-law, who as you pointed out, mr. kahn is one of the founding oligarchs at alpha banking groups, he's closest to the russian security services and alpha group, in addition to being the subject of ongoing fbi investigations into a connection between alpha bank servers and the trump organization, there is also this tie, which is that alpha group has retained skadden arps in the past to represent it. >> so i feel like the cast of characters here is getting large and also a little scary when you start looking at all the other things that we know about the people who are involved here. do we know anything about the
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strategy of the mueller investigation or how they ended up where on friday or today they've charged non-u.s. citizens, the 13 russian nationals, the man today was working at the british offices of an american law firm, reportedly a dutch citizen who speaks russian and is married to a russian woman, the daughter of this oligarch, the increasingly international turn of the investigation. is this happenstance or does this mark the way this is going to go from here on out? >> i think it's following the money and following the money overseas. from friday's indictment, you have laying the groundwork for potential charge of foreign money influencing u.s. elections. that wasn't charged in that indictment but that is the underlying crime that could ensnare u.s. citizens because if any u.s. citizens is seen as conspiring to influence a u.s. election, that would be a crime under the federal election
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campaign act. here you have more of the manafort following the manafort money trail but in a way that sort of brings in more of this d.c.-based lobbying that we see mueller continuing to sniff around, including subpoenaing folks that work with the podesta group and mercury public airfares through manafort, through a front group for yanacovic. >> and with mercury and the podesta group and now askskadde all being central to this current line of inquiry, is there any sense that those groups as entities are in trouble here? >> i've heard from folks from podesta and mercury that they are concerned. many of them have lawyered up and they were offered in some cases pool attorneys through those companies but many of the folks i talked to have opted to
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get their own lawyer because they're worried their interests may not be aligned with those of the company's. >> ken, congratulations for being on this story before anybody else was and thanks for being here tonight. much appreciated. >> it was a pleasure. oh, that's lovely... so graceful. the corkscrew spin, flawless... ...his signature move, the flying dutchman. poetry in motion.
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while 20,000 troops massed across the borders, ukraine's forces heavily outnumbered for the worse. barack obama responded today with tougher sanctions this time against vladimir putin's banker, his childhood friend and partner and the oligarch known as cronies. >> that round of sanctions targeted government officials and individuals connected to vladimir putin. including this fellow. at the time he was head of the lower house of parliament in russia, but soon there after he was appointed to be the head of russia's foreign intelligence service, the sbr. he's still under sanctions by our treasury department which means any assets under u.s. jurisdiction are frozen but this is important. transactions by u.s. persons or within the united states involving sanctioned individuals
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are generally prohibited. transactions within the u.s. are generally prohibited for anybody on the sanctions list. that means if you're on the sanctions list you can't come to the united states. except in this guy's case, he's still on the sanctions list and he was just here. he came to the u.s. last month. we learned he was here because the russian government started bragging on twitter about how the head of the sbr just had a great trip to the usa. he what now? then we learned that he didn't come alone. the head of the sbr, russia's foreign intelligence service who is under sanctions turns out he came to the u.s. with the head of the fsb which used to be the kgr, russia's equivalent of the fbi. while they were here they reportedly met with our director of national intelligence dan
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cotes and mike pompeo. then "the washington post" reported there was actually a third guy here. the head of russia's military service, the lead russian government agency responding for attacking our election in 2016. he reportedly also came to washington at the same time as those other russian intelligence chiefs. that's what's been reported. i should mention that the gru guy is also under sanctions. so he's not really allowed to travel to the united states either. which makes it interesting to have it reported that he did travel here. well, today we got confirmation that the dni dan coats did meet with the guy with the sbr and the fsb in the united states in washington, d.c. senator chuck schumer had sent a letter asking about the meeting with these russian intelligence chiefs, how the guy sanctioned got into the united states. today director coats responded by confirming that meeting. he said the head of the sbr was admitted into the country in
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full accordance with applicable u.s. law and policy governing visa and visa waivers which made the case to the state department knits in our interest to allow him into the united states, please give him a waiver even though he's sanctioned. but then there's this continuing mystery about the head of russia's military intelligence, the guy from the gru, this agency very much behind the meddling in our election. he was reportedly here in the united states at the same time as the other russian intelligence chiefs. in his case we don't know anybody that he met with. we do know that he was named in the most recent rounds of sanctions that president obama announced before he left office for russia meddling in our election because his agency was partially responsible for the attack. so he's sanctioned, right? but this is a total mystery as to how he got in the u.s. and if he did get here, who did he meet with? his buddies were meeting with the director of national intelligence and the cia but no u.s. officials have admitted to meeting with him. we reached out to the state department to see if they could tell us since that's the agency that would issue the visa a
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spokesman answered by referring us to the russian government. what? the state department here would have to grant a waiver for a sanctioned individual then to the united states. the russian government wouldn't necessarily be able to comment on that since they wouldn't be the ones issuing the waiver? mystery continues. the state department here would have to grant a waiver for a sanctioned individual then to the united states. the russian government wouldn't necessarily be able to comment on that since they wouldn't be the ones issuing the waiver? mystery continues. did the head of the gru in fact come to the u.s.? how did he get in? who did he meet with? we'll let you know if the russian government gets back to us on that because that's who the state department referred us to today. seriously. that does it for us tonight. we'll see you tomorrow. >> good evening, rachel. so there seems to be or is there really a struggle over the jared kushner security clearance business with john kelly or is john kelly just going along with this whole thing? >> you know, friday is going to arrive which is going to be the date by which john kelly said the new security clearance thing was going to be in effect and either the new security clearance thing isn't going to
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