Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency in 2017.

I'm Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of The Spectator. I'm joined today by the BBC's Paul Wood, who is also a fellow of the New America Foundation,

and we're going to be discussing the first indictment of Robert Mueller's investigation

into Russian meddling with the American election last year.

Paul, with all the allegations this week about not only Trump's collusion with Russia, but now possibly

sort of historic collusion with Russia in the highest levels of American government going back

20 years where the blame is pinned on both Democrats and Republicans. Is it possible now that

this is becoming a problem for Washington on both parties, not just Donald Trump?

It has the potential to go there and that has to be worrying for a lot of Democrats in Washington.

Remember that the Mueller inquiry is not about the Trump campaign,

it is about political interference and coordination, possible coordination,

with political parties in the campaign.

So what we had on Tuesday was Tony Podesta, brother of John, campaign manager for Hillary or campaign chairman,

resigning from his work at his lobbying firm, which had been tangentially mentioned in the Manafort indictment.

A lot of money has been sloshing around Washington from all sorts of sources in the Eastern Bloc, including Ukraine, including Russia, and I think

inevitably some of that has stuck to Democrats as well. But with these special prosecutions

inside the White House, their remit is not limited, is it? I mean, Ken Starr or something like

that with the Clintons, it's, you know, the prosecution with the Clinton started on real estate and ended up with sexual allegations about Monica Lewinsky. So, I mean, these investigations can start sprawling all over the place, can't they? Well, Ken Starr was criticized for letting an initial investigation into a financial deal, Whitewater, turned into Monica Lewinsky's blue dress.

With this, I don't think Mueller has to go beyond his brief. He's already allowed to look at

possible collusion between American citizens and the Russians in the election campaign. That gives

him a very wide brief to look at anybody who talked to any Russian, any Ukrainian about anything

which could be traced

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