Manafort, Gates Charged With Conspiracy in Mueller Investigation

Coming up on today’s show:

• Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election took a critical step forward today. Paul Manafort, the president’s former campaign chairman, and Rick Gates, Manafort’s business associate, surrendered to federal authorities on Monday morning. Ben Jacobs, political reporter with The Guardian, and Lanny Davis, former White House Special Counsel under President Bill Clinton, explain what you need to know. 

• On Saturday, white nationalists from across the nation gathered to rally in Shelbyville, Tennessee. The demonstrators were met by counter protesters and a large police presence. A second rally, planned for later in the day in nearby Murfreesboro, Tennessee, was canceled. Natalie Allison, breaking news reporter for The Tennessean, explains what happened this weekend. 

• Whitefish Energy was granted a $300 million contract to help restore Puerto Rico’s power infrastructure. Questions were immediately raised about the small company, which was from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s hometown, and the Whitefish’s contract with the island was cancelled this weekend.  Two million people are still without electricity in Puerto Rico. Nidhi Prakash, a reporter at BuzzFeed News, weighs in.

• During Hurricane Maria, public radio station WIPR in Puerto Rico was knocked off the air. The radio and television station serves about a third of the island. Dannie Raghunath, engineering manager for New York Public Radio, flew down to help rebuild the station’s transmitter. He made the trip alongside engineer Peter Polanko.  Raghunath says when they arrived and turned on the dial in the car, there was nothing but silence.  

• A 10 year old girl with cerebral palsy who has been in the United State for 10 years was detained after passing through a Border Patrol checkpoint on her way to a children’s hospital in order to receive emergency gallbladder surgery. Julian Aguilar, border and immigration reporter for The Texas Tribune, has the details.

• Daniel Rivero, an investigative reporter for Fusion’s “The Naked Truth,” obtained the call logs from a new ICE initiative called VOICE — a hotline which solicits calls to “provide proactive, timely, adequate, and professional services to victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” The call logs and the internal training records tell a different story, though. Callers most often use the hotline to alert ICE of minor infractions, or just a suspicion that someone in their community is undocumented. Rivero shares his reporting today on The Takeaway. 

• A trove of newly-declassified diplomatic cables reveals American involvement in a brutal anti-communist purge in Indonesia half-a-century ago. Brad Simpson, a professor at the University of Connecticut, is founder and director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, and author of the book “Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.-Indonesian Relations, 1960 to 1968.” Today on The Takeaway, Simpson outlines what he found in the documents. 

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich.