Flynn's Lawyers Stop Sharing Info With Trump's Lawyers
WHITFIELD: All right. Welcome back. The White House still dealing with developments in the Russia investigation. Sources tell CNN former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's lawyers are cutting off communications with President Trump's legal team. It comes just weeks after CNN reported that Flynn was increasingly concerned about the potential legal exposure of his son in the investigation. I want to bring in Michael Zeldin. He is a former special assistant to Robert Mueller and a former federal prosecutor. Good to see you. How do you read into this? Is this Mueller's team getting out a little bit of information to perhaps really jolt the White House or is this indeed the case an indicator that Flynn's team may be working on something, trying to cut some sort of deal with Mueller's team?</s>MICHAEL ZELDIN, CNN LEGAL ANALYST: Well, so the way coordination works among parties in an investigation like this is if they have mutual interests that is an alignment of their legal interests, they cooperate with one another. They operate under attorney/client privilege among the group of people. When one person's interests become unaligned order dis-aligned with that group, they notify the group to say no longer can I cooperate with you, no longer can privilege protect our communications. I'm going on my own. And they tell the group for the protection of the group and for their own protection. So, what we have here I think is that Flynn has told the group no longer can I cooperate with you. I'm striking out on my own to try to pick myself, most probably his son, and Mueller's going to ask Flynn for either cooperation or both. And Flynn has a lot of information that he has that's relevant to Mueller, particularly potential collusion, communications with Wikileaks and Russians, and also notably whether or not the president told him, Flynn whether he, the president told Comey about the Flynn investigation and his desire to have Comey back off the investigation. So, obstruction and collusion are areas that Flynn may know something about that's relevant.</s>WHITFIELD: So President Trump's lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said, quoting now, "No one should draw the conclusion this means anything about General Flynn cooperating against the president." But as you read into this, cooperating, might it be, because the Mueller team would see that potentially this could lead to a bigger fish, or information leading to a bigger name?</s>ZELDIN: Right. So Sekulow may be right in respect of it may not be cooperation against the president, but he's wrong in respect of cooperation generally because it has to be some form of cooperation. Even if the only objective here is enter a plea agreement, that is cooperation, because otherwise you go to jury trial and contest the charges. As to the bigger fish, it seems to me at least with respect to obstruction, Mueller has in Flynn a witness who can potentially tell him what are the nature of the communications between the president and Comey as it relates to Flynn. With respect to Wikileaks and Russia communications, we just don't know yet what Flynn knows about that. Remember, Flynn said at the very outset of this thing, I have a story to tell. If you immunize me, I'll tell it. So we'll find out perhaps soon whether or not he actually has a story to tell and if he does about whom and with respect to what.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, perhaps we'll all soon find out, Michael Zeldin, thank you so much. All right, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a new law forcing foreign media outlets there to be listed as foreign agents and disclose their funding sources. This follows allegations that Russia meddled in last year's presidential election by using Russian internet trolls to influence American voters. It also comes after the U.S. Justice Department demanded that Russian broadcaster RT America register its U.S. affiliate as a foreign agent. All right, straight ahead, an update on that U.S. Navy plane crash that killed three sailors this week. What we're learning about those men next.