Manafort revelations prove Trump campaign was ‘open for business with the Russians’: CNN panel

A CNN panel on Wednesday dissected damning new revelations about former Trump campaign Paul Manafort giving internal Trump campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national who allegedly has ties to Russian intelligence services.

Journalist Garrett Graff started the discussion by marveling at how Manafort's attorneys managed to accidentally reveal the new information about their client because they failed to properly redact their court filing.

"Paul Manafort remains unable to actually figure out how technology works," he said. "He's been tripped up by Microsoft Word track changes, he's been tripped up by backing his encrypted texts up to the cloud, and now he can't copy and paste correctly."

On a more serious note, Graff said that the sharing of polling data with Kilimnik was suspicious because Manafort could have just sent him data from websites like FiveThirtyEight if he wanted to help Kilimnik keep track of the campaign.

"The fact that he's flying to Madrid to have a private conversation with someone involved with Russian intelligence, it doesn't get much more of a blinking red light than that," he said.

Panelist David Gregory, meanwhile, said that Manafort's actions show that the Trump campaign was more than willing to collude with Russian intelligence agencies to help them win the 2016 election.

"This team was open for business to deal with the Russians," he said. "Whether it was opposition research, whether it was sharing information about the campaign, whether it was coordinating on policy toward Crimea and Ukraine."

Watch the video below.