welcome to politicking on larry king on wednesday special counsel robert mueller filed new criminal charges against paul not afford the former manager of donald trump's twenty sixteen campaign but mr muller placed the charges under seal obscuring the nature and import of them leaving many to wonder what this development means we'll start there with richard. clarke university of minnesota he was the chief white house ethics lawyer during the administration of george w. bush and he's currently vice chair for citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington he joins us from minneapolis ok richard what do you make of this and why do you think it's sealed. well the number is a prosecutor would want a sale and indictment portions of an indictment and usually other reason is to not disclose to other potential subjects of the investigation of the information that the prosecutor know. and he is continuing to investigate a number of different things not just the money laundering with respect to the mastermind of fort mr gates but also the russian ferrous and the election whether they had anything

muller's team that was looking into suppose the pollution between trump and the problem prior to that the clinton e-mail investigation which went nowhere and then there's lisa page a lawyer for the department of justice who also worked for robert muller the couple came into prominence back in december when their private text conversations were released to congress girls hillary should win. i know. and maybe your man just the way you are because your man to protect the country from that manifest . thanks it's absolutely true that we're very very fortunate and of course i'll try and approach it that way these text messages proved that both struck and page were biased in favor of hillary and the messages even hint at some nefarious political activity so when they wanted to dig deeper it turned out the rest of their conversation had disappeared the f.b.i. ascribed the dates lost to misconfiguration issues related to rollouts provisioning and so for upgrades the conflicts with the f.b.i.'s collection capabilities but let's look at the time frame of these text messages december fourteenth t

muller. indicts well then. i argue in my book and i think most of the framers good agree with that and i think most constitutional scholars agree with that and judge kavanagh agrees that they should be able to indict a sitting president but if he does get indicted and he sends that over to the house and there is a plausible case for a crime then impeachment proceedings will go forward. when i don't like is that they're charging him with things like collusion with russia it would be a terrible thing if he could with russia but it's not a crime we're losing peers in the criminal statute books only in relation to business people colluding with each other to violate the and i trust us is not a crime for a political candidate to collude with russia look there are crimes that could be committed violations of the election laws but let's see the evidence the main thrust of my book is that you need to have a crime most scholars this or that so i'm out there pretty much by myself making your fiddle i w

muller on the eve of the summit of twelve russians alleged for election interference and dismissed the judgments of some current and former intelligence officials on the investigation while the two presidents seem determined to create a display of cordial and correct the paul nitze it's not clear where any good will the two leaders might develop could lead russia in the u.s. are backing different sides of the war in syria and russia still support the nuclear agreement with iran from which the u.s. has withdrawn from around the media we go to our she's on your part phil who joins us from helsinki on your thank you so much mr trump upset the europeans and the nato at the nato meeting and he upset the u.k. prime minister theresa may on friday ahead of the meeting with president putin mr trump set a pretty low bar what took place at the meeting and had to go over that bar. it seems to have gone at least better than those two previous meetings you just described president trump described or said his meeting in his lunch with president putin went very well and that it was quote deeply produc