One anonymous adviser close to the White House seemed exasperated that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III saw fit to spring the search warrant on Manafort. “If the FBI wanted the documents, they could just ask him and he would have turned them over,” the adviser told Leonnig. But Mueller’s team told a federal judge that they, for some reason, believed Manafort couldn’t be trusted to turn over the records it needed if subpoenaed.
.. What seems clear is that Manafort is looking like an increasingly major wild card in this whole investigation. After leaving the Trump campaign months before Trump was elected, he’s been lurking largely in the background of a series of revelations about possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Most notably, he attended that meeting Donald Trump Jr. organized with a Russian lawyer who had promised compromising information about Hillary Clinton and Democrats.
.. Manafort’s contemporaneous notes from that meeting, the existence of which The Post previously reported, seem to be one of the few windows we have into what exactly transpired. And given the shifting explanations from Trump Jr., they could be hugely significant to any questions about possible collusion emanating from it. (But, again, copies of these had already been turned over to Congress, and we don’t know if these notes are the reason for the search warrant.)
.. The suspected operatives relayed what they claimed were conversations with Manafort, encouraging help from the Russians.