Is as well. And cnn politics reporter to koppen. Former business partner, manafort, rick gates maybe called this week. He is considered a star witness. In exchange for his guilty plea. What is to be expected from him . Yes, thats right, fred. I mean, in many ways, this is sort of what everyone has been waiting for the trial to build up to. He was the man who is sort of on the inside so to speak on all of these different pieces of the puzzle that have been being put together by this testimony from, you know, from accountants, from the various sort of external factors in manaforts world. But this is the man who was, you know, supposedly according to prosecutors side by side with manafort as much as this went down and may be the one to testify, you know, exactly what he was thinking and doing and intending, which is so important when youre building this criminal case. You know, he also is sort of the connection to trump world. That we havent seen as much. And thats what has to be what peo
foreign autocrats. are we talking about the indictment of people surrounding donald trump in his orbit? well, that s arguably one of the most interesting things about this case. as a lot of the people that ended up with the trump campaign very early on are not the type of people who are usually on the sort of front lines of politics today. many of them had been doing things in washington for years that were sort of escaping notice. they sort of hitched their wagon to trump. and then he won. and all of a sudden there was a level of scrutiny on many of these people that they were perhaps not necessarily anticipating. it is calling into question how much of this is happening in washington more broadly. there s so much money that flows in washington. there s so many people who sort of manage one campaign successfully and then move on to other things, lose that scrutiny, and so there s a lot of people watching this trial intently to see, you know, are there going to be consequences that g