Source: Mueller Pushed for Gates' Help on Collusion.
TRUMP: There is no collusion between me and my campaign and the Russians. There's been absolutely no collusion. There's been no collusion between us and the Russians. There has been no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians or Trump and Russians. No collusion. Bottom line they all say there's no collusion and there is no collusion.</s>HENDERSON: That was President Trump talking about collusion. He says it's pretty straightforward, his campaign had nothing to do with Russia's interference in the 2016 election. But special counsel Robert Mueller might not be convinced. CNN reports that Mueller is honing in on the Trump campaign's contacts with Russians as part of a plea deal Paul Manafort's deputy Rick Gates is sharing more about who team Trump talked to and when. A court filing released on Tuesday shows how Mueller's team plans to use Gates to tie Manafort directly to a Russian intelligence agency. The document says, Gates and person A were directly communicating in September and October 2016, person A has ties to Russian intelligence, service and has had such ties since 2016. Gates told him Mueller that person A was a former Russian intelligence officer with GRU. One former CIA director says the investigation is speeding up, not slowing down.</s>GEN. MICHAEL HAYDEN (RET.), FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: You can see the pace picking up. We're seeing a great body of evidence that the president, his family, his business, his campaign had a lot of contacts with a lot of Russians which may be entirely innocent, but now we're seeing Bob Mueller explore each of those linkages.</s>HENDERSON: Karoun, where does this take us at this point, Mueller focusing on Gates and using him to explore collusion?</s>DEMIRJIAN: Right. I mean, it takes us backwards and forwards, really. So, this is like a perfect example of how this -- the pebble in the water that just keeps growing and Mueller's kind of expanding his probe. The court filing is for this Alexander Van Der Zwaan guy that he was talking about in conversation he had with Gates in which Gates told him that they had -- he had been in touch with a person -- the description people believe is Konstantin Kilimnik, who's the person -- who basically ran Manafort's office for the 10 years he was working in Russia sympathetic Ukraine and that he had ties to the GRU, which is Russian military intelligence, and that Manafort and Gates knew this as late of September, October 2016, which is the heat of the campaign, really. And so, it just kind of shows you how Mueller is kind of using the conversations he's having with the smaller fish to really kind of get the bigger fish --</s>HENDERSON: Right.</s>DEMIRJIAN: -- really stuck and then it's -- it's been easy for Manafort to say that was a past life. Yes, sure I worked on those issues when I was in Ukraine, but this is not -- has nothing to do with the campaign. If you're still in contact, if you still know about those intelligence ties a month before the election, it becomes much, much harder to make that argument. And then the question is, what about everything that came before? What about all the comments that the president -- the candidate at that point was making about Russia? What about the change to the party platform that was made? What about all of these different things and was that actually because you had not just idle, you know, contacts with Russians you knew, but somebody who's connected to military intelligence is potentially a big deal. It opens these things up again and if he can pressure Gates to give him even more information which it seems like that's what he's doing, that will open the question of was there collusion connections between Manafort and his various contacts.</s>HENDERSON: And obviously, there's Mueller investigation, there's congressional investigations as well. Here's what Trey Gowdy had to say about those congressional investigations.</s>REP. TREY GOWDY (R-SC), CHAIRMAN, OVERSIGHT & GOVERNMENT REFORM COMMITTEE: Congressional investigations leak like the gossip girls. They -- I mean, they're terrible and I would be telling you that if I were staying in Congress. They're just not serious. Serious investigations don't leak. Serious investigations don't make up their mind first and then go in search of the evidence to validate your previously held convictions.</s>HENDERSON: I appreciate the gossip girls reference there, Jackie. One of the things that Trey Gowdy also said that he is glad that Mueller is in the mix.</s>KUCINICH: Well, right. That's because -- I mean, you look at what happened with the House Intelligence Committee and what a mess that is and just how they botched -- from beginning to end, they really has been a problem. Now, the Senate's been better but they too have had their issues. So, the fact that the Mueller probe is there and that, you know, as Trey Gowdy said, hasn't really leaked anything, there is a sense that something's actually getting done and there, we might actually get to the bottom of all of this.</s>HENDERSON: Another story, Michael, that you're paper report was this report that there had been discussion about pardons, a Trump lawyer talked about pardoning Manafort and Flynn, Ty Cobb who is still on the legal team, Trump's legal team, here's what he had to say in response to the story in your paper. I've only been asked by pardons by the president and have routinely responded on the record that no pardons are under discussion or consideration at the White House. Why is this story a big deal?</s>SHEAR: So, this is really centers around the question of obstruction of justice and whether or not the president took actions that he hoped would stop or bring an end to the investigation that of him and his associates and the question -- so the question is, you know, is it possible that by raising the pardon issue with the lawyers to Gates -- I'm sorry, with Flynn and Manafort that somehow you were attempting to keep them from cooperating with the special counsel and thereby, you know, short circuit the investigation. Now, I think it was interesting if what you read the statement there from Ty Cobb, look at the word, it's are, it's present tense, there are no considerations of a pardon going on. He didn't really deny that there had been some in the past.</s>HENDERSON: That would have been John Dowd.</s>SHEAR: And that would have been John Dowd's lawyer, the lawyer who had been working on the Russia indication for the president outside of the White House who has now left. But, you know, so really the question is, is Bob Mueller looking at some of these actions that the president and his then lawyer took as he constructs an obstruction of justice case if that's where he's going to go?</s>HENDERSON: And, Margaret, as part of the discussion everybody's having about Russia, one of the criticism of this president and the administration more broadly is that they haven't been tough enough on Russia. We did see this week expelling 60 Russians. Do you see this as marking a different path in terms of Trump's relationship and rhetoric on Putin?</s>TALEV: Yes, I think you have to look at the rhetoric and the actions separately which is kind weird, but it's true, because the Congress forced the president to go forward with these other sanctions last year. He was angry about it but it happened and they have begun to follow through on those. Under H.R. McMaster's leadership and with Jim Mattis at the Pentagon, this administration has come out with tough language both in their defense strategies and their national security strategy about dealing with Russia. And then we saw the feeling on the part of the U.S. that there needed to be a response alongside the U.K. to that attack inside the U.K. that's been attributed now to the Russians. So, President Trump feels proud that he was able to kind of bring along other countries, maybe they would have come along any way, but there's now 20 countries that have responded, including the U.S. and to what happened in the U.K. and Russia's response was to some extent reciprocal, but to some extent pretty aggressive, because the consulate that the U.S. dealt with in Washington state is really different than a consulate in St. Petersburg. So, when you take 60 diplomats, you're making a strong stance. Russia responding in kind, no surprise to the U.S. Everyone in the U.S. knew that if the U.S. got tough on Russia, Russia was going to have to respond. We're now in increased diplomatic tensions heading into this new --</s>HENDERSON: And we'll see where this goes. Just ahead, Trump's Syria surprise. The impact of Trump saying the U.S. will be out of Syria very soon.