For starters: Manafort offered him secret campaign briefings; met him secretly in NYC with a Russian intel officer; asked Russian contacts how he could use being Trump's campaign boss to get "whole" with Deripaska. A witness says she has Deripaska on tape discussing aiding Trump.
2/ Further, @stranahan, Deripaska now appears to have twice had advance knowledge of Trump's sanctions policy and is considered one of the 5 oligarchs closest to Putin, which makes Trump's campaign boss' outreach to him a deliberate attempt to backchannel Putin. But there's more.
3/ Trump would only *not* be a co-conspirator with Manafort—who *did* seek to conspire with Putin's man Deripaska—if Manafort lied to him about *everything*. But per NBC, Trump tells friends that Manafort can bring him down if he "flips." Doesn't sound like a man who was lied to.
4/ I know how comforting it is to believe that those of us with investigative and trial-advocacy experience who've been tracking media reports on Trump and Russia for almost a year and a half—daily—have no clue how strong the evidence could be against Trump, but that's a fantasy.
5/ So when I say Deripaska's a "likely"—meaning, "more likely than not," or at least 50.1% likely—"co-conspirator" with Trump, yes, I think that's the conclusion *any* investigator would draw from the *public* evidence. And Mueller may have exponentially more evidence than we do.
