he s now a criminal defense attorney. and paul butler, familiar face here, a veteran of the justice department and animist nbc legal analyst who dmou teaches at georgetown law. thank you for being here. jack, i want to start with you. something i mentioned in the last block that we now have word that robert mueller s team has spoken to the white house communications director hope hicks. what does that mean to you? well, it means to me the special counsel is moving both deliberately and very efficiently past criticisms of other special counsels and independent counsels have been how slowly they moved and the amount of time they kept the country in suspense. that does not seem to be the case here. and it seems to be the special counsel and his staff are following a fairly traditional path of trying to build a caw dray of defends or both and
critically injured of those 11. one of the things we can tell you is that he got out of the pickup truck and there was cell phone video. you see him wandering around with a paint gun and pellet gun in his hands. and some people are surmising that he was hoping to engage a police officer, which did happen, and this is unusual in this case is that we have a surviving attacker. here s what a witness told savannah guthrie on the today show just this morning. take a look. i heard a crashing noise and i looked to my left and i saw a truck coming directly at me. hitting all kinds of things on the way. and just seemingly out of control, going really fast. and it was being chased by an undercover car. so i thought it was just a car chase. did you hear him say anything? everybody around me started screaming. so i couldn t really hear him say anything. and then people started running. reporter: obviously, the timing of this happening just around 3:00, a little past 3:00.
why these guys might represent a flight risk and need this kind of supervision. and the document is kind of a doozy. here s how the special counsel s office opens up this case. here s how they explain why they think manafort and gates are flight risks. quote, the defendants pose a risk of flight based on the serious nature of the charges, their history of deceptive and misleading conduct, the potentially significant sentences the defendants face, the strong evidence of guilt, their significant financial resources, and their foreign connections. okay. financial resources and foreign connections. the special counsel s office then lays out a whole bunch of new information that was not in the indictment against manafort and gates about their foreign advertise, about them having the financial means to flee the country, to evade this prosecution if they wanted to. a lot was made in the press yesterday, a lot was made by the white house yesterday about the fact there was no mention of russia
quicker and greater punishment, is he just talking about better enforcement of laws that currently currently exist? or extra judicial process and are you looking at doing executive order that would empower him? would he make something like that public? or would you consider doing a secret order? and very quickly i also want to ask you is he really serious about tiger the obamacare? very different questions. let me try to address the first part in terms of i believe he was voicing his frustration with the lengthy process that often comes about a case like this. so i think that was simply the point he was making. in terms of the mandate we are focused on pushing through tax cuts and tax reforms separately. obviously we have never made it a secret we would like to repel and replace obamacare. we would still like to do that. but we still think it s probably
battlefield all around the world. this individual apparently may have had some connection back there. we don t know yet. i would leave that as an open chapter quite yet, but also seemed to get here to try to fit in, something happened and all of those travels. and i m going to guess that somebody gave him permission to do what he did in a spiritual way that allowed him to continue on. we see this in case after case after case, even in lone wolves, it s a simple e-mail, it s a simple communication. that s what really investigators are going to need to find out. where was that spiritual guidance? where was that individual that said it s okay for you to do this and take those lives? that always happens in these cases. now we just have to find out where that happened in the united states. and candidly, if he had those moves around like that, he s a perfect profile for recruiting of somebody to push him into this radicalization phase. couldn t quite fit in. couldn t quite fit in. he s exact