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If Robert Mueller's working on a 2016 election puzzle, a puzzle we occasionally get to catch

a glimpse of, we got to see him pop in some important pieces on Friday.

As got Paul Manafort's face on it, and the other has got Michael Cohen's.

So both of them have agreed to plea deals with the government. Andrew Prokop was working

late Friday night at Vox. Cohen is approaching sentencing. So what

happened with him is that both Mueller's team and prosecutors in New York filed their

recommendations for his sentencing and basically assessed whether he had been helpful to their

investigations. Manafort had agreed to cooperate with great fanfare as part of a plea

deal in September, but Mueller's team has accused him of lying to them in their questioning.

And so this was the memo where Mueller explained why he thinks Manafort lied and what he lied

about.

So what did all these revelations tell us about the president and the 2016 election?

I think you can think of what we learned in maybe three buckets.

One is the core question of Russian collusion.

Okay.

Two is whether the president tried to obstruct justice and interfere with investigations.

And third is this question of campaign finance violations related to payoffs to women

during the 2016 campaign.

Well, let's start with this collusion bucket.

...