A Washington Post columnist has written a new piece which explains why today is a "blockbuster" day in the Trump-Russia investigation.
Paul Waldman compared today's revelations that Paul Manafort reneged on the conditions of his plea bargain with special prosecutor Robert Mueller by lying to investigators after vowing to come clean to get a lighter sentence.
"We have not one but two new and potentially vital developments. Both of them involve former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and while it’s always possible they’ll turn out to be inconsequential, the fact that the president himself is highly distressed suggests otherwise," he wrote.
Waldman says that "things get speculative" when you try to parse the developments, but that it's "unlikely that Mueller would be withdrawing Manafort’s plea agreement unless he had specific evidence demonstrating that Manafort lied."
Waldman also pointed to the Guardian's reporting about Manafort meeting with Wikileaks during the heat of the 2016 campaign.
"We have to be careful about this story, because the sourcing — anonymous Ecuadorians connected to the government — is less than ironclad, even if The Guardian did its best to verify the claims," he writes. "But if it is true that Manafort met with Assange in the spring of 2016, it would be almost ludicrous to think they didn’t discuss the Democratic emails stolen by Russia that Wikileaks was soon to release in order to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy."
Read the full column here.
