MSNBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos explained how the inadvertent revelations from Paul Manafort's lawyers revealed another damning dimension to help prove his collusion with Russia.
Manafort's lawyers failed to properly redact a new court filing, which shows he met in Madrid with Ukrainian associate Konstantin Kilimnik, who has ties to Russian intelligence, to offer polling data he obtained as Donald Trump's campaign chairman.
"In a number of different theories of connection between the campaign and Russia, this fulfills the theory that Manafort may have been offering for sale access to the campaign in exchange for debt forgiveness or whatever else he needed on his end," Cevallos said. "It certainly suggests a quid pro quo of some kind, any kind of communication that suggested it might give the Russians some advantage or valuable information."
Cevallos said polling data was incredibly valuable in the political world.
"Information is currency in this world of election and campaign success and everything else," he said, "so you have a connection like this between the Russians, strongly suggests one of the theories of liability in the Manafort case."
"Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough said Trump was almost certainly aware of everything that went on in his minuscule campaign, but he said only Manafort was sleazy enough to provide him with plausible deniability.
"The only person that might keep information from him would be somebody $19 million in debt to an oligarch, and probably more of a sleazy trader than Donald Trump," Scarborough said. "I could totally see Manafort trying to sell information on the side to get him out of hot water with the Russians."
But the host agreed these revelations were incredibly serious, and Cevallos said they offered strong evidence of a possible conspiracy to violate the law -- and how that could potentially relate to the president.
"Conspiracy is just an agreement between two or more people to achieve some unlawful objective and some overt act in furtherance of that," Cevallos said. "It can be a small act, and not every conspirator has to do anything or know what the others were doing -- that's the power of conspiracy law."
